This photo shows a few of my favorite things:
Mom
Books
Thanksgiving Dinner
My Brother (Whitey)
Little House on State Road 26
I can't remember how old I was here, but I'm guessing that it was shortly after we moved there when I was in 6th grade. Maybe when I was in junior high. Normally, we didn't have Thanksgiving alone (my dad took the photo) but for some reason that year none of our extended family was there. We celebrated, anyway.
My Mom and Dad are gone from this life. I had to sell the house for their estate as the executor. The books are either destroyed or mostly gone (I still have Gone with the Wind but the cover is torn off.) I didn't even get the china in this photo because the woman my dad married a year before he died took it all. (She threw all the books away without asking me if I wanted them.) She's dead now, too.
The house has changed quite a lot. The young family who bought it have done amazing things to it, including adding on a second story and more room on the ground floor. It was completely built of Indiana limestone on top of concrete blocks! It was a sweet little house, operative word being on LITTLE. You could barely turn around in the only bathroom.
I listened to the people who posted comments on what they liked to do in the Dark Months of the Year. I got out my Mom's recipe files. Looked up recipes that she saved. She was a farm girl, so the kinds of foods she fixed were just good, wholesome homecooking type foods. But while I don't remember what we ate that much (or special dishes she made,) I DO remember the feast of books she bestowed on me!
Do you remember books from your youth? What were your favorites? Tomorrow I will list the books I remember and loved from the time in this photo. My favorite thing to do in the summer was to take a book, pull the California red cedar lounge chair under the willow by the creek and read all afternoon. And really? If I had my chores done, my Mom didn't care. She loved to read, too!
In the winter I was busy with school, but I did curl up in my bed on Saturdays to read and to sketch (I did a lot of drawing back then.)
So, maybe that will work right now. And maybe I'll write about those days, too.
4 comments:
As a kid, more often than not you could find me with my nose stuck in a book. Some of my favorites were: Little Women, the Little House on the Prairie series, Anne of Green Gables, and the Cherry Ames series.
I dreamed of having a room with floor to ceiling shelves filled with books. Instead my parents purchased a headboard with a bookcase to hold my treasured volumes.
Today, I'm a bit closer to the dream with my own office. Several bookcases provide a home for my collection. Unfortunately, I no longer have the books from my childhood.
I always had my nose stuck in a book, too.
The ones which are most vivid in my memory are the Wizard of Oz series, Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn, a book from a book club with four stories about cats and Miss Osbourne the Mop. I found Miss Osbourne on alibris.com a couple of years ago and it was as wonderful as I remember it!
When I was a little older I loved Harriet the Spy, Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators and Trixie Belden.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings dominated my high school years and I've read them several times.
Ahhhh, to be finished with chores and be able to sit and read. There is nothing better!
Books were my life growing up. Little House, Corrie ten Boom, Little Women, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and on and on. I even read some adult spy thrillers that I should never have had access to at my age.:-(
Feast of books. Such an appropriate term. My mother decided one year that she wanted to get my brother and sister to read more. My dad suggested paying us to read. But they decided they'd go into the poor house if they paid us all the same. So they offered me a nickel for every book I read, my brother a dime, and my sister a quarter. I don't think either of them ever made over a dollar, but I remember getting $5 a couple of times that year!
Great post.
I love these memories, girls. Writers almost always were readers as kids, I think. (Not always, but a lot of times.)
What a crack up, Tracy, about getting paid to read. Man, I would have made the big bucks reading back then! But I make a little bit of money now to read--and funny thing is (don't tell!!) I would probably do it for nothing or just pay me in books! ha!
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