Doing Office Time

Years ago when I was employed, I worked in an office. Part of the work in the olden days was to take the mail to the big blue mailbox on the street. It was my turn to take the mail to the box. On this day as I returned to our backdoor, a client had parked his pickup in our parking lot with five or six dogs in the back of it. We always called our client’s ‘consumers’ instead of customers or clients because they consumed so much of our time. When the dogs saw me they began to bark as loud as possible. It didn’t take long to stumble through the door.  Jean asked, “What did you do to those dogs?” I said, “I didn’t do anything to them, I just smiled at them.”  Jean started laughing, “You smile at dogs? Heh heh ha ha.” I answered,“I was running for my life, I wasn’t smiling, it was just an expression.” Jean laughed, “Heh hee heh ha ha, an expression! ” I had to defend myself so I said, “You have never had a pack of wild dogs nipping at your heels, have you?” “No, I would just smile at them” she said. 
Anything to kill time at the office.  

My Roots

This old house was built  in about 1889 and my father was born here in 1900.  His father and brothers built it so they could move out of the dug-out they had been living in.  Grandpa had homesteaded the property.  My parents moved into it when I was about 4 years old.  We lived there until I was 14, except for a couple years we lived in Colorado.  This house was an oven in the summer months of Oklahoma. We did not have that air conditioner shown in the photo. It was a freezer in the winter months.  One of the trees in the front  is a mulberry tree and the other is a walnut tree.  I remember because we enjoyed the walnuts and mulberries. The back room was a screened in porch. The cedar tree in back was there, but it also grew up. The lower limb was just the right height to use for a bar to chin ourselves. We climbed all the trees. I had two older brothers, and what they did, I did. My mothers protests didn't deter me.  I had to wear a dress because I was a girl and I was constantly tearing my dress.  Once in a great while Mom would let me wear a pair of my brothers overalls, but I think it was a sin for a girl to wear boy clothes so it didn't happen very often.  

Time moves on and so did we.  We moved to Stillwater, Ok into a house with a  real  bathroom  inside and  running water. I was in high school by now and made new friends.  This picture is me on the left and my friend, Ruth Ann.  We were the best friends and found all the fun things to do. She came from a very poor family and I loaned her clothes because she didn't have hardly any clothes. I remember the clothes she has on in this picture were mine.  Her Dad was an alcoholic and it seems her poor mother was always sick in bed, and having another baby. When my oldest brother came home from the war the two of them met and married soon after and they moved to California. I missed her so much I thought I would die. It was the last time I ever saw her. A couple years later they divorced and we lost all contact with each other. Just two or three years ago my daughter  found her name in some records on the computer. She sent the link to me and It was definitely her, she had just passed away a couple years before. She had married again and had three boys and a girl. She named her daughter after me. The tears came when I read that. She must have missed me as I had missed her. I told Karen I wished I had named her Ruth Ann. She said, "That's okay, Mom."  

The Wild West

Everything is running rather smoothly here in the wild West. We haven’t had a shoot-um-up lately; however our VFW club was robbed at gun point at 7AM when an employee came to work. 
Why don’t the thieves just get a job, they have to get up early anyway. Or they stay up all night so they can sneak around. We have a new high school being built and the hard working thieves sneaked in and stole tools and copper one night. 
That is about all that is happening around here. 
Just to have something to Blog about I will tell you about my brother, Ray. Ray can make a sound like a train whistle in the distance and he is good at it, very good. He once told me he was going someplace with a friend and the friend was driving so he turned his head so the friend wouldn’t notice and made his train whistle sound. The friend said, “did you hear that train whistle?“  Ray said, “Yeah, I heard it.” So I asked, “ did you tell him that it was you making the sound?“  Ray said, “no, but the train kept whistling until he caught on.“  I think of Ray everytime I hear a train whistle. 
Well, that’s it here in the blog world.