Welcome 2017

Well, it's another new year, and I try again to be a regular blogger/journal writer. I taught the lesson in Relief Society today on goal setting, so I need to work on my own goals. My plan is to write to the family history prompts on Sundays and write my own thoughts about what I'm doing, reading, and learning on Wednesdays. As I say, I will try.

(short pause to make the type font on my computer bigger....I am becoming a fan of only reading from my Kindle because I can make the print large enough to read with ease...and I love that I can make fonts on my computer bigger as well)

So, I have this jar with prompts in it to help write a personal/family history. I'm going to just pull out a prompt every week and we'll see what happens.

Today's prompt: Between the ages of 5 and 10, what were some favorite activities?

Hmmm....

We lived in Abilene, Texas during those years, at a trailer park, first in a small trailer where Karen and I shared the only bedroom and mom and dad slept on a fold-out sofa. When I was in 1st or 2nd grade (I can't quite remember), we bought a much bigger trailer and I had my own bedroom. Looking back, I realize that it was about the size of most walk-in closets, but it was mine and I loved it.

What did I like to do? The trailer park was filled with kids and we had adventures. We rode our bicycles all over the park and played and played. I liked pretending we were in a school or an office, and we created our own "telephones" and "typewriters" by drawing "dials" or "keys" on pieces of wood, then "typing" or "dialing." We also did a lot of running and jumping--jumping off the roof of the shed was especially exciting. After we got the bigger trailer, we had the biggest yard and the corner lot. It was great for chasing and running and playing. Our trailer park also had a giant swings to play on, and a swimming pool. During the summer we swam every day.

I remember Aunt Gloria coming to visit and her and mom helping me learn to swim when I was bout 5 or 6. I loved being in the water.  But once, I was playing in the pool and wearing an inflatable tube around my waist. I tried to dive and managed to get myself upside down with my feet in the air and my head under water. Because of the tube, I could not flip back upright, and I panicked too much to think of just sliding out of the tube. I guess my little legs were frantically kicking in the air, because my mom, who was nursing a bad cut on her knee and should not have been in the pool, had to jump in to save me. I still remember the horror of being unable to breathe...

At some point in those years, one of my friends got a horse, and since there was a field beside the trailer park, we went riding a few times. I enjoyed it, but I was never very good at it, and I quit the day the horse headed straight for a low-hanging limb and tried to knock me off. I jumped and avoided a collision with the tree, but that was the end of my equestrian efforts.

The summer I turned 10, we moved to Arlington, Texas. The new trailer park was not nearly as nice, and had no pool, but we soon became friends with the von Bose family, and adventures on their 10-acres in Dalworthington Gardens began. They had a trampoline! It was so exciting. They also had woods filled with trails, and a pond, and a cliff, and so many wondrous places for kids to explore and run and play. It was paradise, and we spent many, many happy times there. My mom soon became best friends with Pat von Bose, and their entire family took us under their wing. My dad was not active in the church, but we had the von Bose's as our mentors. Pat seemed to know absolutely everything about the scriptures and the gospel. I remember mom reading books Pat loaned her and talking with Pat and her husband, Bob, for hours.

Their daughter, Kathleen, became my dearest friend. I remember the first time I went to their house, she showed me around, and explained that her oldest brother, Joe, was on his mission, and the house seemed lonely without him. I was dumbfounded. They had NINE children. How could their home every seem lonely?! To me their house was a gigantic place. Bob was building it himself, so it was not finished out, but the basics were present--and every child had his or her own bedroom. The whole concept amazed and impressed me. They also had a balcony (but no rail yet) and Kathleen's older brothers would jump off the balcony onto the trampoline. I never, ever had the guts to do such a thing, but it was impressive to watch.

My other favorite place was the Farm in Fairfield where Nannie and Papa lived. Most of my best memories were made there. Nannie and Papa were the most wonderful grandparents--I always knew that they absolutely loved me and thought I was wonderful. And there was so much to do on the farm with my cousins!! We built thousands of sand castles (and probably lost hundreds of Nannie's spoons that we used as shovels). We hiked the sand bed roads to the Henderson Place. We rode in the back Papa's pickup to feed the cows...then there was the time that David Dean thought the calf sleeping in the field was alone, and needed to be petted. So, David approached the lonely little thing....In a flash, Mama cow wheeled around and headed toward her baby at top speed. We were just sure David was done for...and screamed from the back of the pickup, "Run, David, Run!!!" Thankfully he made it, but we all learned that calves are always in their mother's vision, and walking toward them is dangerous.

Sleeping at the farm was always an adventure. Little girls slept on pallets on the floor. There were sometimes six or eight of us lined up. When we got older, we slept in the beds in the back room (if they weren't taken by adults), or on couches. The back room had two beds, one dubbed "the pit" because it sank in the middle and no matter how hard you tried to stay on your side, sometime in the night, everyone rolled to the center. The other mattress had two troughs and a high middle, and if you had to sleep three to the bed, the center person was always rolling off that high spot. If you slept on a couch, you were in the living room, next to Nannie and Papa's room, and the spot where early-rising Papa would come first thing in the morning. Once he was up, your sleep was probably over. If you stayed perfectly still, he might (might) be sort of quiet. But if you moved, he assumed that you were awake, and would begin talking--loudly. In the winter, he loaded up the cast-iron stove/heater with wood first thing in the morning, and no one could sleep through that--the banging of the cast iron doors and the thumping of wood being thrown in and moved around made further slumber.
impossible.

I don't describe all this as a complaint of any kind; looking back, it was all pretty hilarious. We loved Papa and he loved us and we all loved spending time with each other at the farm. The greatest game was hide-n-go-seek chase--at night--in the total darkness. We would divide up into teams and one group hid while the others counted, then gave chase. You can hide very well in the darkness of night in the countryside. We would often just lay down in the pasture and wait for the searchers, then jump up, scare them half to death, and run like crazy for home base. There are only a couple of problems with laying in a cow pasture, the grass itches, and you have to be very careful of cow pies...I remember the time when Darrell and Ricky were the last ones out and no one could find them. Then suddenly they jumped out at us and we all shrieked. They had crawled in a ditch to get near the rest of us and then basically terrify us.

Another favorite activity at the farm was climbing the hackberry tree that grew next to the house. A gigantic wisteria vine had grown up all through the tree and it provided us an way to get into the tree. The tree itself was much too tall for us to even have a hope of reaching a branch, but the vine changed all that. I was enormous and strong. We climbed all over that tree. I remember David and Barry using it to drop onto the farmhouse roof, and almost all of us used one of the vines as a Tarzan rope to swing out of the tree, yelling at the top of our lungs. I was not a brave child, but I was certainly impressed with my cousins' derring-do.

Of course the stories from the farm are probably endless, but these are a few of the things I loved as a child. I was and am blessed with wonderful relatives--especially with the world's greatest Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and cousins.