I Remember...

This is a short and sporadic walk down my personal memory lane and is dedicated to two of my dearest friends ever.

Tell me, what do you remember?  Here are just a few things I remember...

I remember being very, very small and not being able to reach the hook and eye lock on the black painted screen door that led outside.  'Out there' were clear azure blue skies and verdant green grass and big leafy trees that caused the sunlight to dapple across our gray front porch.  I wanted so much to go 'out there'.  A year or so later I remember running through that soft, windblown grass in my bare feet and getting stung by one of the honeybees nosing among the abundant clover flowers and dandelions dotting our yard.  I remember picking bouquets of those same flowers and making ropes and necklaces and crowns out of them and pretending to be a princess. And dreaming of being a ballerina and twirling around and around until I got dizzy and fell in that soft, clean-scented grass where I lay and breathed in the summer day and looked at the brilliant white clouds that scudded across the sky above me.

Another time when I was very small, maybe three years old, I remember waking up to find a brilliant light shining in my eyes and being very cold and seeing the faces of my mother and of Doc Byrnes peering into my face.  I was laid out on the kitchen table.  I'd fallen out of bed during the night and cut my eyebrow open and had bled profusely but never woke up till that moment. My mother must have royally panicked and got the doctor to the house in the middle of the night. Those were the days (and nights) of house calls.  Doc Byrnes put me back together with a butterfly bandage and I still have the scar to this day.  Have to pluck one eyebrow to match the other one...

We didn't care back then that lawns didn't look like a perfect spread of astroturf.  Our fathers didn't waste time on the weekends fertilizing the yard and putting down weedkillers and digging up those dandelions.  On his days off, my coalminer father mowed the grass and worked in our vegetable garden.  Sometimes he puttered around in the driveway working on his truck or car (whatever he had at the time) while I hung around and fetched tools for him or ran in the house to get him a drink of water.  That's how I learned the differences between an allen wrench, a pipe wrench and a socket wrench.  Or sometimes he worked on things around the house.  He could fix anything that needed it, whether it was electrical or plumbing or if it was building something with wood and nails and hammer.  Sometimes he took me up town to Wilkie's Service Station with him where he liked to hang out some Saturday mornings...he'd get me a Chocola in a glass bottle out of the big old pop machine.  Saturday nights we always popped a big bowl of popcorn and drank RC Cola and watched Gunsmoke.  I told Dad he looked just like Marshall Dillon.

I remember the old kitchen with its ugly black-spotted linoleum floor that was chipped here and there so you could see the asbestos lining beneath it and the equally ugly kitchen table and chairs that were chrome-legged and covered with an olive green plaid-ish vinyl. I remember the steep wooden stairs that led from the kitchen down to the basement, a scary dank, dark place full of cobwebs and waterbugs. I remember falling down those stairs. I remember the wringer washer over in the kitchen corner under the window.  I remember the big old gas stove and especially remember how Mom stored her big cast iron skillets in the oven.  I remember preheating that oven to make some yeast rolls for my 4-H Fair project and forgetting to take those skillets out and then when I went to put those rolls in the oven I saw those pans there in my way.  I remember how I heedlessly reached in with my bare hand to pull them out and most of all I remember the searing pain and the weeping blisters those red hot skillets left in the palm of my hand for days and weeks afterward.

I remember every Friday night was hair-washing night.  We washed our hair once a week, 'whether it needed it or not'.  I hated getting my hair washed.  I'd have to stand on a chair so I was tall enough to bend my head over into the kitchen sink while Mom scrubbed the life out of my scalp with Joy dish soap and yelled at me for complaining that my back ached.  I never even heard of shampoo till years later.  After the hair washing came the vinegar rinse which every Friday night my mother joyfully proclaimed would "make your hair shine like satin!"  It did...my sister and I had seriously glossy hair...it also always faintly reeked of vinegar.  Now it's "natural" and "organic" and therefore trendy to rinse your hair with vinegar....it's come to this after the debut of Tame Hair Rinse and the countless rich conditioners developed over the last 4 decades to do the same function as a simple vinegar rinse!  We didn't blow dry our hair or style it like we do today....there was no such thing as a blow dryer till well over a decade later.  The only hair dryers were at the Beauty Parlor and they looked like giant space helmets and you sat under them in a chair. No, we air-dried our hair back then...after we curled it up in curlers.  My sister, eight years older than I, could curl her own hair up in sophisticated brush rollers all by herself, securing them with bobby pins or those pink plastic picks.  I, on the other hand, was still a little girl and my mother's will was firmly imposed on how my hair was worn.  Mom would roll my hair up tightly...and painfully...in rags.  What this means is exactly how it sounds...after she jerked the knots out of my long wet hair with a hard comb, she sectioned it all around my head and wound the hair around strips of cloth cut especially for the purpose.  After the hair was wound tightly around each rag, the ends were tied tightly together against my head. My head was left in this condition until my hair was dry...overnight.  I'd sleep with those hard rag knots all over my head.  When I complained of the discomfort, Mom merrily admonished me, "It's painful to be beautiful!" Then it was almost as time-consuming in the morning to have to untie all those rag curlers and free my poor sore scalp from the previous 12 hours of ultimate torture.  The result was a luxuriant head of sausage-shaped ringlets cascading down my back a la Shirley Temple, and topped off with a huge satin bow that might have been borrowed from Minnie Mouse.

When Mom didn't feel like rag-curler torture, she'd braid my hair.  I loved having my hair in braids.  My favorite way was when Mom would wind the braided pigtails around my head like a crown.  My child-self felt so elegant and grown-up when Mom did my hair up in braids. Then disaster struck.
I took piano lessons every Saturday morning at 9 a.m. from Mrs McKinney, an old lady who lived halfway across town.  I got up one Saturday morning but Mom couldn't get out of bed, I don't remember why.  I remember her yelling at me from the bed that I better get a move on and get on up to Mrs. McKinney's before I was late.  What to do?  Mom always fixed my hair...I was too inept to do it myself.  Here I was nearly 10 years old but had never done more than rake a brush through my hair...when it was down....but it was up in those braids...and I didn't know how to fix those braids...and hair and bobby pins were escaping everywhere.  In desperation, I found the biggest headscarf in the drawer and tied it over my head, jumped on my bike and tore off to Mrs. McKinney's.  Fifteen minutes later, I arrived, parked my bike and went up her front steps with my head hanging.  She welcomed me as usual and we sat at the piano.  We started the exercise and then she asked why I didn't take off my scarf. I shook my head and burst into tears of shame and told her why I was wearing a big old headscarf in the middle of summer.  I'd always been kind of afraid of Mrs. McKinney.  She brooked no nonsense from her piano pupils.  She was quite stern and boy howdy that woman could bang your fingers on the piano keys really hard if you didn't hit the notes right. But that morning, she tenderly pulled the scarf from my head, kissed my head and caressed my hair, got her hairbrush from the bathroom and gently redid my braids.  The whole while she kept telling me what beautiful hair I had and that everything was all right.  Then we got on with the lesson and I deeply loved Mrs. McKinney from that day forward.

I remember berry-picking with my Aunt Sarah.  That lady loved her berries! Strawberries, blackberries...didn't matter.  Summer blackberry-picking with my Aunt Sarah was a yearly event.  She'd show up at the crack of dawn, wake me up and tell me we were going after blackberries and to put on some long pants and a long-sleeved shirt and get a bucket.  Up I'd jump out of bed and throw on my clothes and find the berry bucket.  This particular summer (I must have been around 12 or 13) Saturday morning, my Aunt Mary and Old Mrs. Crecelius were waiting in the car when we came out.  My Aunt Mary was "an old maid" (though she really wasn't even old yet) and lived in the big city (Indianapolis) and was a career woman! (She was a secretary back when it was still ok to be called a secretary.)  She always dressed up...at least I don't remember ever seeing her in anything but a nice blouse and skirt, hose and high-heeled wedge sandals.  And that's what she wore berry-picking that morning.  Old Mrs. Crecelius (which is what everyone called her) was the grandmother of one of my best childhood friends, Elizabeth (whom I would dearly love to locate and see what she's been doing for the last 45 years).  Old Mrs. Crecelius wore an old-fashioned farm dress and apron and a big poke bonnet.  Off we went to someone's farm; someone my Aunt Sarah knew, who'd told her to come out and get some berries sometime.  The berry bushes were out in a cow pasture.  These were great, ancient blackberry bushes that grew in enormous clumps all over this pasture.  Some of these clumps were 10 or 12 feet in diameter and 6 or 8 feet tall.  You could see the paths that the cows trod all around these bushes.  We all picked out a giant bush of our own to harvest. The four of us scattered all around the pasture and though we were together, we were alone---separated by those monster bushes.  I liked times like this; it was hot and humid in the early quiet southern Indiana July mornings. The mosquitoes would be fierce, hence the need for long sleeves and pants.  We filled our buckets with huge, juicy ripe berries an inch long and of course, I'd eat nearly as many as I put in the bucket.  I could pick berries and my mind would be miles and miles away daydreaming and I'd breathe in the warm fragrant summer morning air and life was so, so good.  I was with people I dearly loved and who loved me.  Bliss...
Suddenly....."Gaawwd-DAMMIT!" roared my lady-like Aunt Mary from the opposite side of the bush I was picking from.  I crept around to see what was going on.  There was my poor aunt scraping manure from her high-heeled wedgie sandal with some leaves.  She had stepped right into a nice, fresh pile of cow flop!  Covering my mouth with my hand and shaking with silent laughter, I quickly sneaked back around to where I had been and added another bush in between us for good measure.  I didn't want poor Mary to know I'd been witness to her mishap, for I knew she would be embarrassed mightily if she thought anyone had seen what had happened.  I would preserve her great dignity. But, Lordy! How I laughed and laughed!
Soon my Aunt Sarah corralled us together for the trip back to town and home. I sat in the back seat with my Aunt Mary and sniffed the air for any telltale whiffs of her errant step and stared at her shoes for any subtle signs of cow poop.  Sarah drove up to the gate we had entered two hours previously but now our exit was blocked by The.Most.Enormous.Hog I'd ever seen in my life. Its back came nearly up to the bottom of the car windows. It was 400 pounds if it was an ounce...that's a lot of bacon! It stared at us malevolently with its tiny piggy eyes...and did not budge.  My aunt rolled down her window and shouted "Git! Git! .......Mooove!"  The hog stared at us and seemed to anchor its feet even further into the dirt of the road.  The next thing we knew, tiny Old Mrs. Crecelius leaped out of the car with an alacrity that completely belied her age.  She ripped off that pink poke bonnet and rushed at the hog flapping her hat at it and bellowing like a foghorn.  The hog calmly turned its back on her and ambled off like it had an appointment somewhere. Old Mrs. Crecelius straightened her dress, tied her bonnet back on and calmly got back in the front seat.  Off we went.

I remember when I started high school and how scared I was to have to ride the bus every day from our town to another tiny southern Indiana town in our county where the high school was.  My little group of girlfriends had rudely and coldly abandoned me over the summer for some silly imagined insult and weren't speaking to me any longer.  So I started this terrifying and important phase of my life alone and without best friends.  I gradually settled in.  One day in home-room, I noticed a girl who smiled at me whenever I happened to glance in her direction. She had the most beautiful clothes!    I smiled back. One day I said, "My name's Leslie..."  She said, "I'm Lesa..."  She invited me to come to her house one Friday night for a sleepover....and a lifelong friendship was born. On another day, I was in freshman gym class and found myself sitting next to a friendly, curly haired girl, who was also in my homeroom class.  She made me laugh and I made her laugh.  She had the most beautiful bright brown twinkling eyes that were always full of merriment.  We sought each other out every chance we could after that.  Another lifelong friendship was born.  All three of us spent a lot of time together over the next four or five years and we had a lot of fun together!

Today, forty-six years later, after motherhood and now grandmother-hood...with our collectively graying hair and all the other signs of aging we sport, I love these two women just as I loved those fourteen year old girls. I miss them but am glad we are still in touch.They treat me the same way now as they did then. With kindness and affection and acceptance.  I hope they look back and remember the many sweet and bittersweet moments of their lives...and the birth of our forever friendship....with fondness, just as I do.

Love you Lesa and Cindy.



Till next time,



“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway."
Mother Teresa