Depression Lesson

When I was a kid of ten, I was a brat. We were poor, like most everyone else in town, but Mom and Dad provided well for us in the matter of food, clothing,and entertainment, within their means. It was not their fault that as the middle child I sometimes felt things were unfair.

At about that time my grandmother (mom's mother) became ill, so Mom brought her to live with us temporarily--to "build her up." (Grandpa was not up to it.) She settled in, in the big bedroom downstairs, and we all loved having her. To help in her nourishment, Mom bought a jar of Ovaltine, a little beyond our food budget.

I discovered how delicious it was, and before long I was helping myself to it a little too often for Mom's budget. She took me to task.

"Ella Ruth! That's for Grandma. No more!"

Of course I wasn't thinking of budgets. It was tantrum time. I began to whine, cry, and complain--"Frank always gets the first bike, he gets to go to camp, Johnny gets to eat first--and what do I get? I get to wash dishes!!" It went on until I got out of breath and paused for the inevitable sermon. Instead, Mom just quietly looked at me, then said,, "Ella Ruth, can you hear yourself?"

I had been too busy hollering to listen to what I'd said. As I thought about it, I realized what I had sounded like. It was an epiphany. As Dr. Phil would say, "It was a life-changing moment in my life." That was my last tantrum!

Strawberries!!!

In the early Thirties, summers in Mars Hill were magic. We had no TV, no computers, and no incentive to stay indoors. We went barefooted, rain or shine, and clothes were on the edge of naked, just a little 3-cornered halter left our backs bare to the sun. When I heard the strawberries were ripe on the hill, I couldn't wait. With tuna sandwiches, a bottle of cherry Koolaid, and my friend Tillie in tow, we took off for a strawberry "picking". Two large coffee cans on strings were an optimistic addition to our equipment.

Through the gravel pit behind Mrs. Hallett's house, up over the hill toward Davenport's house, and we were there--a little meadow near the swamp. It was strawberry heaven--tiny red berries hanging in clumps, so juicy and tart they gave you goosepimples. When the cans were half full, we stopped picking, lay on the thick grass, wolfing down the tuna sandwiches and Koolaid, with berries for dessert.

Carefully swinging our cans of berries we headed back over the hill and down into the gravel pit. Something new had been added: a truck driver was digging into one bank of the pit. As we approached, he yelled out, "Hey, look what I found!" Of course we had to see, too.

It was bones! As he dug farther, more and more bones, huge ones, appeared. We were so excited we rushed home to tell mom and dad about the great find, sure something prehistoric was about to make our neighborhood famous. We were soon disappointed to learn it was merely a dead horse, buried by an early farmer.

The strawberries made a much greater hit with our families!

Fun in the Fifties

In our early married years, when our two daughters were in their young teens, Sunday was family day, and the afternoon was reserved for family fun. Immediately after we returned from church we would head out for lunch: sometimes out in the car to Leicester, where we could buy 6 hotdogs for a dollar at "Hot Dog Annie's" (she was the foul-mouthed proprietor of a little shack on a country road, and we would snicker and cover our mouths when she would utter one of her frequent obscenities) but the hot dogs were delicious as well as cheap. Another choice was Kimball's Dairy for banana splits--so large we needed nothing else for lunch. A third choice (in the Fall): we would stop at Clarkson's corn stand, buy freshly picked corn, rush home and plunge it in boiling water for our lunch.

Lunch over, Dad piled us all in the car--Carol in the back left seat, and Elaine in the back right seat, so no arguing!--and he would drive around the back country roads, with the radio blasting out programs like "The Lone Ranger", "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons," and best of all, "The Shadow Knows."

Today, Sunday, August 17th, 2008, we (Doug, Erica, Evan and I), went to Kimball's Dairy for ice cream. What used to be a small ice cream stand, has expanded to many buildings and acres, but the banana splits are even larger. The memory is still good, but I couldn't handle one of those banana splits!

Great Grandma Returns to the Blogk

It's been three months -- my mind went blank when I fell and hit my head! But you can't keep a good 85-year-old down when she has something to say. And it's this! If you are newly married and considering not having children-- Picture yourself retired, living in Florida alone, and all of your friends from the north have died or moved to a retirement home somewhere else. Life is good, until you fall and break a hip. You are trapped--can't drive, go for groceries, and you are lonesome for family. Don't be crazy! Have all the little babies you can possibly afford. They are like gold coins in the piggy bank of life. You see, it happened to me, and my children, and they are my angels now. Without them I would be scared and alone in a strange place, at the mercy of less-than-caring strangers. Family are the most important thing in the world, and most people don't realize how important they are until you need them. Best of all, children keep you younger, longer--and most childless couples I've known were "dullsville".