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."  

Watch the Tree Eater

I mentioned in a blog a few days ago that my watch no longer worked and I was shopping for a new one. 
I have looked in several stores and couldn’t find one that suited me. Yesterday I was rummaging through a dresser drawer for something, and imagine my surprise when I found a box and when I opened it, it had  four perfectly good watches in it. They need  new batteries. I sold watches on Ebay at one time. The bottom fell out of that business venture and I had these watches left over so I stuck them in a drawer. Isn’t that what drawers are for? I took one over to Shopko and got a new battery and it works fine. I have a lifetime supply of watches on hand. If you considered my age, that wouldn’t  be much of a fabulous happening, but I won’t go into that. 


I also told you and showed pictures of the tree that fell on the neighbors house. I have updated pictures.  Life is getting dull here in blog land. This is also cutting into my valuable nap time.  

This is my new watch. This one is Freestyle Tabu. I still  had the picture of it.
And if I wear something that doesn't go with blue, do you think I care?

Not much damage if any. My tree is looking pathetic.  

The men are feeding the tree to the hungry tree eater.