The Whole Fam Damily

This is an old draft of a post that I don't think I ever published. Today, Thursday April 18th, 2019, just happens to be the same day of the week and my life sounds identical to this. Polly mowed the grass and I sat in the rocker all day.

 It's just a lonely Thursday afternoon and feels like Sunday, but Polly, my neighbor, is mowing the lawn so I know it's Thursday afternoon.  I keep looking at old pictures lately. Mainly of my family. The family I missed so much when I was young and dumb and left home to marry the love of my life. 

At one point it was eight years between trips home. I never stopped missing them. and I find that since I am now a bonafide, over-the-hill has-been, I relive a lot of my past in my mind. I think if I had been a little older or more mature I would have done things a little differently. We all gradually grew older. One by one I lose another family member. 

Now there are only four of us left. One little brother followed me out here.

Just in case someone that doesn't know, my family lives in or around Glencoe, OK and I live in Yakima, WA.

Here are a few photos. 

This is Bennie and Carol, my siblings. I don't think I ever visited when they lived in that house. 

A five generation picture. Left to right is Ione Potter,
Levi Reddout. Cecil Wilson, Letha Lockwood
Baby is Maxine. Maxine was adopted by an aunt and uncle and we have lost all contact with her. 

Cecil, Ray, Lorrene, Bennie, Hollis, Gene, Carol

Bud and I and his brothers and spouses and Sister and her spouse. 

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."