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My Modelling Career Commences

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Word of the Day:  Posture (päs’ chər)  “The position or carriage of the body in standing or sitting, often with reference to the alignment of the back shoulders, and head.”

A professional photographer and his wife lived across the street from us on Willow Brook Road.  Their property was much swankier than ours with a fancy house, a studio, beautiful grounds, and a large in-ground swimming pool.  Apparently he had the contract for the Sears Catalogues.  Remember those old Sears Catalogues that came out a couple times a year?  Sears would ship him stacks and stacks of clothing for him to photograph, using live models.  Enter Lynn and Suzanne!  I really don’t know how it all came about, but a couple times a year we were enlisted to try on an assortment of beautiful new clothes and pose before the cameras.

I assume that some payment was involved in these camera forays, but I don’t think we ever saw any of it.  Someday, in the next life, I’ll have to ask my parents about that!  Of course, if it helped to meet expenses, I think we would have been fine with it, especially if it meant less pheasant for dinner.  The photographer, I think his name was Frank Randt, was a hard task master.  We learned to stand exactly right, with feet and hands in the precise positions he required, while still trying to look natural and unposed.  That was somewhat of an oxymoron, I think.

We both enjoyed the glamour shots, the new shorts and tops outfits, the Easter dresses, and the winter coats, but there was a downside to this modelling business.  We also had to do the underwear fashions. I hated that! At that point, I was as straight as a board as the saying goes.  Little slips, petticoats, undershirts, and even panties.  Who ever wore undershirts anyway?  What could be more mortifying for a cowgirl like me than to be caught in front of a camera in my underwear for all the world to see?  Our career phased out after a couple of years.  I suspect he either lost the Sears contract or we outgrew his criteria for being the right sizes.

There was, however, one amazing side benefit to our short-lived modeling careers. We were invited to use that glorious swimming pool as often as we wanted.  It was surrounded by a chain link fence and totally shielded from view by a number of large trees.  I don’t recall the size of the pool, but it was large enough to have a diving board in the deep end.  Sometimes my Mother, sister, and I went together.  Other times I was allowed to go by myself. At moments like that, I could revert to my Esther Williams persona or, my new favorite, Jane.  Now you are probably saying to yourself, “Who is Jane?”  She, of course, was Tarzan’s consort.  There was a weekly Saturday morning television show about Tarzan, Jane, and the chimpanzee.  They all three went swimming in deep rivers and swinging through the trees on long vines that miraculously never broke and always took them to the  exact right landing spot!  I wonder if Tarzan and Jane ever got married, or if she was a fallen woman?

As I recall those lazy days of swimming, I am somewhat surprised that I was routinely allowed to go unsupervised to a pool like this, but I loved it.  For those of us growing up in the fifties, our days were generally free and unstructured.  Often I left in the morning and didn’t return until hunger or fatigue brought me home again.  I don’t think our parents were any less caring or loving than today’s parents, but there was more of an underlying assumption that kids were basically safe and could take care of themselves.  I don’t think I would have ever let my boys swim alone at a neighbor’s pool as I was allowed to do.

Not too far behind our house there was an old gravel pit where we often rode our horses.  We went up and down the huge piles of sand and gravel and swam the horses across standing bodies of water.  Looking back, I can only shudder at what a dangerous spot this really was!  I am sure all children have tales that they have never shared with their parents, at least not until adulthood, but I never did tell my parents about the gravel pit escapades.

When I became a teenager, I had visions of becoming a fashion model, probably as an aftermath of those early days in front of a camera.  I posed incessantly and often walked around the house balancing a book on my head to ensure good posture.  My Dad never lost his military bearing, and my Mother was somewhat of the posture policia.  “Stand up straight.”  “Hold your shoulders back.”  “Don’t stand there sway-backed.”  I suppose all those admonitions took hold as I do have pretty good posture to this day.

Outside of a few brief stints in high school, my modelling career never quite materialized, and my interests quickly moved on to other visions of the future.  When I was around thirteen or fourteen, I did make my television début.  Unfortunately, it was as the Easter Bunny on some stupid children’s program on one of the Dallas television stations, but it was live television, even if I was totally concealed in my Easter Bunny outfit!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Time for a change of pace next week.  Join me for “Clowns, Cancer, and Clairvoyance.”

More Tales from the White House

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Word of the day:  Sunflower (sun flou’ ər) “Any of a genus (Helianthus) of tall plants of the composite family, having large daisylike flowers with yellow, brown, purple, or almost black disks containing edible seeds”

I probably owe you an explanation of why the memoirs of my childhood are called Black Dirt and Sunflowers.  The farm house on Willow Brook Road was set on two acres of land.  It was a long skinny plot of land with the house and garage on one acre, and the pasture in the back.  Our neighbors didn’t have any livestock, so we also had access to their back acres as well, giving us a three acre pasture for the horses and those pesky chickens.  The soil was heavy black dirt, from some ancient  river bottom.  When it rained, the dirt acquired the consistency of heavy clay, sticking to the horses’ hooves like giant black dinner plates.  I don’t know how they even managed to slog around the pasture.  They also loved to roll in the black mud.  They ended up so caked in mud that they looked like some modern version of the terra cotta warriors!

In the summer, we plowed the pastures with Bess’ old International Harvester tractor and scattered rye and alfalfa seed all around.  I was entrusted with the tractor at a fairly young age, long before I could drive a car. We never seemed to grow a great  crop of pasture grass, but we grew sunflowers like crazy.  By August, the pastures were usually covered with six foot tall sunflower plants.  The horses made little meandering trails through them seeking out what little grass that had managed to grow.

We had two horse stalls, a feed and hay room, and the infamous chicken coop.  One of my weekly chores was scrubbing out the horse trough.  It stayed filled with a float valve, but with the well water, the hot weather, and horse slobber, it quickly grew a thick coating of disgusting green algae.  At least once a week, sometimes more often, it was my responsibility to scrub it out with a wire brush until it was once again gleamingly clean.  My Dad’s usual injunction was that it had to be clean enough for me to drink out of, so after thoroughly scrubbing and refilling the trough, I would typically stick my face in and take a few big gulps just to prove to the world that it was definitely clean enough!

My Dad, despite his tough guy exterior, was really an old softie.  In the winter when the cold, damp winds blew ruthlessly across the pasture, he would make up some sort of hot bran, oats, and molasses mash that he fed to the horses, some sort of a horsey oatmeal.  I am not sure what all went into the dish, but the two horses seemed to think it was pretty tasty and eagerly awaited his arrival with the goodies.  My Dad never ever rode either of the two horses, but he was quite fond of them and viewed them as some sort of giant lapdogs.  They reciprocated his affection and looked forward to a variety of treats that he typically carried for them, sugar cubes, carrots, apples, and the all time best treat ever, watermelon rinds.  Horses love watermelon and cantaloupe.  I can still see them happily munching with watermelon drool dripping out of their mouths, messy but tasty!

One morning as we ate breakfast, we heard the clippity clop of iron horseshoes on the gravel driveway.  Without looking up, my Dad said, “Some poor bastard’s horses got out.”  This was followed almost immediately by another loud expletive and “Those are my horses!”  The wayward escapees were quickly rounded up and returned to their pasture, while we all very carefully kept a straight face.  It would not have gone over well to have laughed at that exchange.

We also had a real playhouse, not some sort of little, snap-together plastic thing from Home Depot.  This one was about ten by twelve feet with electricity, screened windows, and a front porch. It had white siding and little red shutters.  Inside were a small table and chairs and a set of old bunkbeds, and the ceiling was tall enough for an adult to stand up in.  For a cowgirl, this was the bunkhouse, the real deal!  The wasps and the bees tended to build their nests under the eaves of the little front porch.  My friends and I learned to knock the nests down and then run like you-know-what out of the way of the angry inhabitants.  The playhouse was stiflingly hot in the summer and way too cold in the winter, but it was, nonetheless, our special place and sanctuary!

Daddy also built us a small above-the-ground swimming pool.  It was about ten feet by eight feet and about two and a half feet deep with poured concrete sides and bottom.  It wasn’t quite big enough to really swim in, but we still enjoyed it immensely on hot summer days.  Often we kids would be kicked out of the little pool, and our parents and their friends would hang out in the pool with a cooler of beer sitting right beside it.  Our flock of ducks, more about them in another blog, also loved the pool and thought Daddy had built it for them.  Of course, after the ducks were in for a while, the pool had to be drained and scrubbed before the human participants could use it again.  Luckily, cleaning the pool never made my chore list!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Join me next week for “My Modelling Career Commences.”

The White House on Willow Brook Road

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Word of the Day:  “Chigger (chig’ er) the tiny, red larva of a family  (Trombiculidae) of mites, whose bite causes severe itching.”

“The White House on Willow Brook Road”–sounds like the title of a children’s book, doesn’t it?   When my family moved to the old white house on Willow Brook Road, it proved to be the best place ever to grow up.  Looking back, I realize that it probably wasn’t quite as glamorous as I thought at the time.  We didn’t have a furnace; the house was heated in the winter by open gas heaters with no outside venting.  I suspect that sort of heat wouldn’t be allowed today.  Even as a kid, I learned how to strike a match carefully and light the heaters.  In fact, I still have a slight scar on my right leg as a reminder of a close encounter with one of those hot devices.   As a safety measure, the heaters in the bedrooms would be turned off at night, but the one in the bathroom was left on.  I can still remember running into the bathroom on cold mornings and feeling the wonderful heat from that glowing heater!

Summers weren’t much better! We had no air conditioning in the hot, sticky Dallas heat, but we had a huge attic fan.  Sleeping with that fan running was somewhat like lying under a jet engine during take off.  It practically sucked the sheets off of the bed, but it certainly provided air movement.  One wonderful summer, we got one small window unit air conditioner.  My Dad installed it in the room we called the family room.  I think in the original design of the house it was the dining room, but we had no dining room furniture so it became the family room.  Ah, delicious coolness!  We kept the doors to the rest of the house shut and watched television in the wonderful cool air.  At night the air conditioner was turned off, and the mighty attic fan was turned on. I wonder why it never occurred to us to sleep on the floor in the family room?

Television in the family room was our main source of at-home entertainment.  Saturday morning were replete with Sky King, Rama of the Jungle, Rin Tin Tin, Mighty Mouse, and who recalls what else.  Our old farm-house was also a repository for bugs of all sorts.  Now, I hate bugs, and I think it stems from my lying on the floor in that family room watching television when a scorpion goes strolling past, right next to my foot.   Of all possible bugs, scorpions were the worst!  Worse than wasps, bees, mosquitos, and even the nuisance chiggers.  I was petrified of the scorpions, although I was never unfortunate enough to actually get stung by that frightening tail.

On one particularly horrifying night, I was reading in bed, and all of a sudden I saw a scorpion walking across the top of my book.  I let out a blood-curdling shriek and hurled the book across the room.  Loud footsteps down the hallway quickly brought my Mother, Father, and little sister, all of whom were probably expecting to see an intruder accosting me or at the very least Bigfoot!  The positively scary part was that we never found the nocturnal little creature.  The thought that it had climbed up on my bed and onto my book without my seeing it was what really upset me the most. For a long time, I never went to bed without doing a complete check of the covers, pulling back the sheets and looking under the bed.  To this day, I never let my arm or leg hang out over the side of the bed.  You just can’t be too careful; they might have tracked me down after all these years.

I think my Dad contributed to my hatred of scorpions with his tales of the scorpions in North Africa.  A Captain in World War II, he served in the North African campaign, the invasion of Italy, and the horrific battle of Anzio.  Although he seldom talked about his war-time experiences, he would tell us frightening stories of the scorpions in Africa, six inches long and pasty white.  He said the soldiers never put their boots on in the morning without carefully dumping them out just in case they had an unwelcome visitor in them.  I suspect that I would have found the stories of the actual battles less upsetting than those sneaky scorpions!  When the war ended, returning soldiers were expected to tough it out and get back into civilian life.  There was no such diagnosis as PTSD in those days, but the nightmares my Dad suffered from up until the time of his death may have been the aftermath of the awful realities of that war.  We three, my Mother, my sister, and I,  all quickly learned that when my Dad was sleeping and we needed to wake him up, we gave a quick shake or poke and then ducked.  He always came up with fists flying and arms flailing

Although scorpions warranted my greatest fear, chiggers probably caused me much more misery.  For those of you not familiar with these little creatures, they are some sort of little red mite, almost microscopic, that burrows under the skin, causing hundreds of red welts and itching like crazy.  Not much helped to shorten their obnoxious little life span beneath the skin.  People tried calamine lotion, mercurochrome, and even clear fingernail polish, apparently on the theory that the polish would suffocate the little monsters.  Prevention was somewhat found in dusting your feet, ankles, and groin area with sulfur powder.  My Mother had little cloth pouches of sulfur which we applied generously, turning our socks and clothes a bright yellow color.  I don’t know if she made them or bought them ready-made.  It does make you wonder if the prevention might have been more dangerous to our health than the creatures themselves!

The other prevention was in having a lawn of St.Augustine grass, that lovely viney grass found so often in Texas and the South.  St. Augustine turns brown in the winter and a deep green in the summers.  For some reason,  chiggers don’t like it, and neither do the awful goatshead stickers that I managed to step on so many times!  Unfortunately, our lawn in that old rental house did not have the cool, green St. Augustine.  We had a bit of Bermuda grass augmented by a wide variety of weeds and stickers, just waiting to pounce upon the unspecting bare foot.  And the chiggers loved it!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Join me next Friday for “More Tales from the White House!”

 

Pet Peeves

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Word of the day:  Grammar (Gram’-er)  “the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed, esp. the study of morphology and syntax.”

One of the nice things about doing my own blog is that I can write about whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment. Today I have to hit upon a few of my pet peeves about proper English usage. I certainly accept and have no problem with an idiomatic and colloquial style of writing. I can happily end a sentence with a preposition if it avoids a more convoluted sentence structure, but there are a few things that just grate on my nerves, somewhat like the proverbial old chalk on a blackboard. Screech! Screech!

My top prize has to be a draw between the correct use of  its and it’s and the proper use of the first person pronoun. I am not sure which makes me crazier, but let’s just start with it and it’s. This one is so very easy to fix that no one should ever make this mistake again. The possessive form of the third person pronoun is its with no apostrophe. In the same manner, the possessive form of her is hers, also with no apostrophe. If you use it’s; it is a contraction, a shortening of two words into one with the use of an apostrophe. An easy way to tell if you are using it’s correctly is to use both words, it is. If your sentence doesn’t make sense with it is, you should probably be using its without the apostrophe, e.g., The dog was chasing its tail versus it’s a beautiful day!

My other contender for top honors is the use of I, me, and myself.  Most people seem to do fairly well with I. It seems to be me and myself that give many people fits.  Myself is a reflexive pronoun; it is used when you do something to or for yourself: I treated myself to a hot fudge sundae, or I accidentally hit myself with the hammer when I was trying to hang the picture. If you are the object, use me. The dog bit me. The prize was awarded to John and me, not John and myself. Susan and I conducted the training session, not Susan and myself conducted the training session. I’m not sure where the excessive use of myself has come from, but I suspect a false sense of modesty and a hesitancy to use me?

OK, Lynn, off of your soapbox for now! For some future blog, I may hit upon the past participle (ate and eaten, saw and seen, among others) or the use of the possessive with a gerund, but that may be too high-tech for today. If you really want to check yourself out on contemporary usage, a great resource is Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians.   I also suspect the use of the autocomplete function on our many electronic devices and the numerous inherent errors in the spellcheck and grammar functions in our software contribute to many unwitting mistakes for all of us. Sometimes our fingers just take on a life of their own on the keyboard and type the wrong word when we do indeed know better.  I find I make oh, so many more errors on my iPad than I do on my PC with a conventional keyboard.

The other classic reference for grammar is The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. I’m so weird that I actually requested the leather-bound 50th anniversary edition for a Christmas gift several years ago! Now I realize that everyone may not be this far out in their reading interests, but it is a great resource for improving both your written and spoken English usage. In today’s competitive business world, your proper use of language may make or break an opportunity for you. I hope this little monologue helps you to condition yourself to the importance of using the English language in its best form, and if I offended you, I do apologize in advance.

©2015, Eclectic Grandma

Check in next week for “The White House on Willow Brook Road” with scorpions, chiggers, and World War II!

 

Lily Dale: A Village of Psychics and Mediums

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Word of the day: Medium (me’-de-əm) “a person through whom the spirits of the dead are alleged to be able to contact the living.”

Have you ever heard of, or been to, the little village of Lily Dale, New York? It is about an hour southwest of Buffalo. I have been there three times and would love to visit again. Lily Dale dates back to the 1870’s and was founded as a summer retreat location for members of the Spiritualist Church, which was quite prominent in the US in the late 19th century.   There are around 150 quaint Victorian cottages and homes, plus two hotels, a couple of restaurants, a meeting hall, a museum, and, of course, the obligatory gift shop.

Blor Pictures-Lily dale

Everyone who lives there is a practicing medium or psychic. The entire village is owned by the Lily Dale Assembly which grants long-term leases to carefully screened residents. Just think, when you and I purchase a house, we have to worry about our income, our debts, and the all important credit score. If you want to live and work in Lily Dale, you also have to worry about your “psychic score” and passing the admission test.

When we lived in Buffalo in the mid-90’s, several of my friends and work colleagues had told me about Lily Dale. They knew of my long abiding interest in all things metaphysical. My first trip to Lily Dale was pretty mundane. I have long been a fan of the books of Dr. Wayne Dyer, and I had signed up for a seminar he was presenting there. It was a beautiful early fall day, and the seminar was great. During the lunch break, I wandered around the little village, but I can’t say that I felt any particularly strong psychic vibes. I especially enjoyed seeing the interesting little houses, each with a shingle hanging outside proclaiming the offerings of that particular medium or psychic.

Blog pictures-Lily dale Inspiration StumpI spent several very tranquil minutes sitting by the famous Inspiration Stump and the Pet Cemetery. That Cemetery in a little clearing in the woods is such a loving tribute to so many animal friends who had passed on.

My next visit to Lily Dale came in the late spring the following year. My Mother was visiting us, and we decided that a day trip to Lily Dale would be a fun way to spend the day. As I had done previously, we wandered around the little village together. We had already decided we would try a reading, but the problem was, which one to select? We finally selected one little cottage and paid the resident medium for a reading. I have to admit to a high degree of skepticism about some of these things. Obviously, it was quite apparent that we were mother and daughter, so when my father’s spirit came through, I wasn’t sure there was anything I could really validate. I certainly couldn’t disprove it, but at the same time, I wasn’t totally jumping on the bandwagon of belief either.

Blog Pictures- Lily Dale HouseThen the medium looked at me and said there was another spirit present who wanted to communicate with me. My grandfather? My deceased uncle? No, it was the spirit of my husband’s step-father, who had passed away the previous December. We had always gotten along quite well, but when he passed right before Christmas, my husband, Bill, and I had decided that I would stay home as our sons were flying in, and that he would go back to Texas alone to the funeral. This spirit, presumably my late father-in-law, said that he didn’t get to tell me goodbye and wanted to now. He also said that he didn’t yet have a tombstone and wanted one in pink granite in a rounded shape. At this point the medium moved her hands in the air to show me the shape of the tombstone.

My husband and I had no idea that my husband’s brother had not yet ordered a headstone for the grave. We didn’t mention my strange message to anyone in the family other than to inquire if the headstone was in place yet, which it was not. On our next trip to Texas a year or so later, we did pay a visit to the gravesite.   There was the headstone in a grey granite with pinkish flecks in it in the exact same shape the medium had drawn in the air with her hands! You can imagine my shock at seeing that headstone.  Was this a valid message from the spirit side?  I don’t know. I guess we each have to accept or reject this sort of thing based upon our own belief systems.

I made one last visit to Lily Dale that summer, shortly before we moved back to Colorado. I didn’t visit any of the mediums then, just wandered around the picturesque streets and woods and enjoyed the peace and tranquility of the setting. If your travels should take you to the vicinity, I would definitely encourage you to take the time for an excursion to the enchanting little village.

©2015, Home Again, A Spiritual Journey

If you liked this, please take a minutes to like and share on Facebook or Twitter.  Stay tuned next week for “Pet Peeves.”  I have to warn you that every now and then I get into the language thing!

 

 

Spring at Last!

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Word of the Day:  Vernal (vur’ nəl)  “pertaining to, appearing in, or occurring in the spring.”

Last week I chatted about our big April snowstorm.  Since then we’ve only had a couple more inches a few days ago.  Patches of earth are starting to peek out from beneath the snow.  The dogs are roaming the yard more extensively now and getting out of the poop loop which sufficed them for a few days.  This afternoon I finally received the official message that spring is here; a hummingbird dive-bombed me while I was standing on the deck.  Demanding little creature!  Hastily, I ran back into the house to cook up the first sugar syrup of the year.  We go through very little sugar at our house; that is until hummingbird season starts.  Then we go through pounds and pounds of sugar until cold weather returns in the fall, and they hitch a ride south with the Canadian geese.

I am reminded of one summer day several years ago.  Chris, Sonja, and the grandsons were at our family cabin about nine miles from our house.  They called to ask about  the proportions of water and sugar for the solution for the hummingbird feeders.  I told them I usually did a 3:1 or a 4:1 water to sugar ratio. Later that day I got another call from them stating that the hummingbirds weren’t eating from the feeders.  I asked them, “You did let it cool enough after you boiled it, didn’t you?”  There was a moment of silence, followed by “Boiled it?” Ah yes, it has to be boiled into a simple syrup!

The first hummingbirds to arrive are the Western Broad Tailed Hummingbirds.  People often refer to them as Ruby Throats, but we don’t actually get the true Ruby Throats here in Colorado.  They are only found on the east coast.  To be such tiny little creatures, they are surprisingly feisty.  In late July the Rufous hummers arrive for a few weeks on their annual journey from their breeding grounds in Alaska back to their winter habitat in Mexico. They are a bright orange color with a dark throat band and are even more feisty than the others.  This commences what we call the Hummingbird Wars, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Wars of the Roses in English history.  The males of the two species spend  entire days driving one another off from the feeders.  The two types of females can’t be worried with this show of male dominance and will share the feeders with one another.  I wonder if this has applications for the human species as well?

Those of you who know me know that I am an amateur bird-watcher.  I have counted well over twenty different species of birds hanging about on our deck at various times.  We feed and water them year round, and they reciprocate by serenading us morning and night and sometime pooping on the deck railing.  Having  a heated  birdbath gives them much needed water during the winter.  Yesterday a red-tailed hawk stopped by for a visit on the railing.  All of the little birds and squirrels quickly vanished.  Somehow I think the hawk was looking for a live snack and not my sunflower seed!

It is sort of ironic that we now live so close to the cabin and property my parents purchased over fifty years ago.  For many years it was our go-to place.  Now that we live so close, we don’t go as often, especially since I can sit on my own deck and gaze at the Indian Peaks and the Continental Divide.  Some days we ask ourselves how much longer we can cope with the snow and the inconvenience, but then I look at the white-capped peaks, the bright blue sky, and the vivid green pines and know this is home!

©, 2015, The Eclectic Grandma

Be sure to check in on Friday for my visit to the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York!

 

Let Them Eat Pheasant!

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Word of the day: Peripatetic  (per’ i pə tet’ ik)  “Walking or moving about; not staying in one place; itinerant.”

I love the word peripatetic! It sums up so much of my life. I was born in Philadelphia from a long line of ancestors born in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In fact, my ancestors were in what is now Philadelphia long before the late-comer William Penn ever showed up. To this day almost all of my relatives still live in this region. My parents were the black sheep of both families because they were the first to ever move away. After the War ended, my Dad was still in the Army, and we briefly relocated to Ft. Hood, Texas. Outside of some old photographs, I have no memories whatsoever of this brief interlude.

After the Army, my Dad went into sales and we moved a great deal.  We lived in Denver, Colorado; Memphis, Tennessee; and Glen Head, Long Island, New York before the move to Texas that I told you about a couple of blogs ago. My little sister, Suzanne, was born in New York, which technically made her more of a Yankee than me, or so I thought.  As an adult, my husband and I have carried on the itinerant family tradition. We have lived in Fort Worth, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Greeley, Colorado; Bangor, Maine; Buffalo, New York; and back to Colorado. This doesn’t even count our moves within each state.  My Mother used to say she needed one address book just for us to keep writing in our new addresses.

Life in sales was not always so good, and my Dad rotated among various companies, selling carpet, well parts, and even Stetson hats. During some of the lean times, there was often not enough money to pay the rent on the drafty old farmhouse on Willow Brook Road. Our landlady was a delightful woman, who was also named Bess, the same as my horse.  She actually lived down the street from us and raised game birds for local restaurants. I used to love to spend long afternoons at her house and help feed all the beautiful fowl.  During one of the dry spells for my Dad, Bess, the landlady, not the horse, kept us supplied with an endless stash of frozen pheasant. I am not sure I appreciated her generosity at the time though.

We had fried pheasant, grilled pheasant, baked pheasant, pheasant fricassee, pheasant salad, pheasant and dumplings, and the ever-famous pheasant noodle soup.  My usual question of “What’s for dinner, Mom?” was met with the usual answer, “Pheasant.” I thought I was going to start growing pin feathers!  My Mother was a wonderful woman, but she never quite made the ranks of Gourmet or Bon Appetit.  A few of her other more famous dishes were Doggie Stew (No, not real dogs–a boiled up concoction of sliced hot dogs and diced boiled potatoes, which turned a ghastly orangey color from all the coloring in the hotdogs), Spanish Dish (A casserole of hamburger, macaroni, and tomato sauce), and the all time family favorite of the ’50’s, baked Spam and beans.

Despite what were no doubt tough times, my parents always managed to keep my sister and me protected from how bad things actually were. It wasn’t until I looked back at my childhood with the far more realistic eyes of adulthood, that I really appreciated my parents’ selfless love and Bess’ incredible generosity. However, I don’t think I have ever ordered pheasant on any restaurant menu to this day no matter how elegant the entrée, and no hot dog or Spam has crossed my lips in many a year!

Somewhere around this time my Mother also started raising chickens to sell the eggs.  My parents bought the fertilized eggs and hatched them in chicken incubators.  I loved seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks emerging.  They rapidly grew into pullets, a fancy word for young chickens.  The pullets quickly grew into mature laying hens, and the poor roosters probably joined their distant relatives, the  pheasants, in the deep freezer.  We had quite a flock of White Leghorns; at least I think that was the breed.  At any rate they were white and laid eggs.  They had free roaming around the fenced in horse pasture and busily worked their way around the pasture eating who-knows-what.  I preferred not to think too much on that, given the ample quantity of horse droppings all over.

One of my daily chores was gathering the eggs from the long rows of boxes in the chicken coop.  I didn’t really mind too much; there is something satisfying about gathering warm, fresh eggs.  You must put them very carefully into the bucket so as not to crack the shells.  Then we washed them and put them into egg cartons, and my Mother delivered them to her growing list of customers.  Gathering eggs was one of the those somewhat mindless tasks that allowed plenty of time for daydreaming while you were doing it.  That is, daydreaming until the day I reached into the hen box and came back not with a nice, fresh egg but with a chicken snake! From then on I always took a cautious peek into the box before reaching for the egg.

Now you may recall,  I had my horse, my red cowboy boots, my tooled leather belt, and my cap guns, but I didn’t have any cattle to herd.   So, what’s a cowgirl to do?  Herd chickens of course!  It wasn’t quite like a real cattle drive, but a couple hundred white chickens squawking, flapping their wings, and running around the pasture with a black horse and Dale Evans in full pursuit was a pretty satisfying experience.  Unfortunately, the stupid chickens stopped laying eggs when they got really upset, and my chicken herding career soon came to an abrupt halt.

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

I warned you I might get a little woo-woo from time to time, so check in next Friday for “Lily Dale:  A Village of Psychics and Mediums.”

Another Move!

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Word of the day:  Arabian (ar-a’-be-en) “Any of a breed of horses raised originally in Arabia and noted for their intelligence, grace, and speed” Last week I chatted about our move to Texas. I had quickly settled in to the … Continue reading →

We move to Texas

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Word of the day:  Yankee (yang’-ke)  “a native or inhabitant of a northern state”

I found out I was a Yankee when my family moved from Long Island, New York to Texas midway  in my second grade year.  What in the world is a Yankee I must have wondered?  Little did I know I had just moved to one of those areas where the North-South designation was still alive and well! Dallas in the early fifties was not the cosmopolitan city of today.

Long Island when I lived there was a collection of sleepy little towns and villages, not the habitat of the wealthy and famous that it has become some fifty plus years later.  We lived in Glen Head, close to Glen Cove.  Today Glen Head is supposedly the wealthiest zip code in the United States.  It certainly wasn’t that way when we lived there!  Some people have extensive memories of their past in a completely linear fashion.  I find that my childhood memories of Glen Head are more like a series of old photos all mixed up in a box.  We lived in the top floor of a two-story duplex right across the street from my elementary school.  I always have a chuckle when internet security questions want you to answer, “What was the name of your first grade teacher?”  Excuse me, but I really don’t have a clue.  My most vivid memory of being in the Glen Head Elementary School was drinking an orange soda and throwing up at some school function.  To this day I detest orange soda!

My other outstanding memory of living on Long Island was making a trip into the “City” to Madison Square Garden to see Gene Autry and his horse Champion.  This was definitely one of the highlights of my young life!   I remember the name of the horse but not my first grade teacher; that tells you something about my priorities at age six.  My Dad even bought me a chameleon lizard to take home with me after the show.  Ahhhh, life was good!

Texas, on the other hand, was the land of the wild west, cowboys and Indians, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.  Maybe this move was not going to be so bad after all!  Alas, there was to be no ranch, no horses, and not even a glimpse of Roy Rogers.  We moved to a little house on another quiet little street in University Park, the poor little stepsister to the wealthier Highland Park.  I was quickly enrolled into the local elementary school.  What could be more traumatic for a seven-year old than to change schools mid year.  This school had a cafeteria where you actually went through the line and ordered your own lunch.  Being totally petrified of this new experience, I think I subsisted on a diet of canned corn and a slice of white bread for the first several weeks.   Apparently, I must have gotten tired of this limited diet after a few weeks as I gradually melded into the new environment, ordered a better lunch,  and made some new friends.

By the end of the school year,  I had settled in to my new life in Texas.  I no longer felt like the complete outcast of six months ago.  I had a new bicycle,  complete with training wheels.  It wasn’t quite the same as a horse, but then I had a totally vivid imagination, so it worked for me.  I also had a holster with two silver cap pistols and a seemingly endless stash of caps.  I can still recall the wonderful gun powdery smell of those caps.  I was Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, and occasionally Pocahontas on a rotating basis.

Summer stretched out into long glorious days of firing cap guns, swimming, and roaming the neighborhood.  In the early ’50’s the United States was in a state of post-war euphoria.  The economy was growing; the troops were home.  Parents had not yet become the helicopter parents of today.  We grew up with no organized sports, no lessons on everything from piano to skating to martial arts, and no checking in on a regular basis. We entertained ourselves all day long, settled our disputes with fists, rocks, or sometimes tears.

In the summer we headed off to the local swimming pool daily.  We had little metal tags that our Mothers sewed on to our swim suits.  These were our daily admission to the pool.  I can’t remember not knowing how to swim. Luckily for me, both of my parents were good swimmers, and I learned at a very young age.  During those long days at the pool with no parental supervision, I swam to my heart’s content and often put on my Esther Williams persona.  Besides saving all of University Park from a wide range of outlaws and ne’er-do-well’s, I was also the queen of synchronized swimming!  So many accomplishments at my young age.

On Saturdays  I often walked by myself or with friends to the local movie theater for the Saturday afternoon matinée, two shiny quarters clicking together in my pockets.  I loved all the movies but a good western was definitely the best of all.  There were so many heroes to delight me–Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, and, of course, my all-time favorite, Roy Rogers!  There was always a cartoon, a newsreel, a serial, and the feature movie of the day.  Those two little quarters got me into the movie, plus a Coke, a box of Milk Duds, and possibly a box of Junior Mints or popcorn.

I even had a tooled leather belt with my name embossed into the leather that I wore to the movies on Saturdays.  If I were to be struck speechless upon encountering one of my heroes, I could at least point to my name on the belt so they would know who I was.  After my Mother’s death, I actually  found that old belt among her things.  It gave me a feeling of fond remembrance, like meeting an old friend after many years, but  it must have shrunk over the years. It didn’t quite fit these days!

The scared little Yankee was quickly becoming a Texan.

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

The Great American Novel

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Word of the day:  Memoir (mem’-war) “a record of events based on the writers’ personal observation” I’ve always been an avid reader.  From the second or third grade on, I always had a book in my hand.  Like most young … Continue reading →