Tag: memories

Legacy Writing 365:279

Sometimes I find things I’ve forgotten I own. I was moving stuff around the other day, including an interesting wooden box on little wheels, and I wondered what might be inside it. Among other things, I found a bag of rune stones and the book that goes with them. Once I saw them, I remembered that I used to enjoy the stones, but they’ve long been out of sight, out of mind.

The stone I pulled out for this photo has the symbol for strength on it. The stone is called Uruz and suggests endings and beginnings. Sometimes there’s a period of darkness and loss before a new opportunity presents itself.

The reason I pulled it was because my late friend John wore that symbol on a necklace until he died. I think James kept the pendant afterward and wore it for a time, too, not only in memory of John, but to remind him that out of deep loss can come new perspective and strength. That can be a hard lesson, but it’s something positive we can take forward.

October 5 is John’s birthday. I still smile when I think of him–he was full of mischief and sometimes got me into trouble, almost like a bratty little brother. I miss him and feel so fortunate to have known him for the time I did.


John on his birthday in 1993. Maybe out of sight now–but never out of mind.

Legacy Writing 365:278

Another Christmas, and a few thoughts come to mind with this photo.

I like the way Mother wrapped the coffee table like a Christmas present. I still miss that angel and wish she’d given it to me instead of throwing it away. The angel was a Christmas tradition for many years after this photo was taken, but I wonder if this might have been her first Christmas with us.

My sister has a sort of glazed look in her eyes that I know well. It’s a common malady among Cochranes and means, “Could I please just continue to read without all these interruptions?”

I’m displaying one of those LifeSavers books that holds several varieties of the candy. LifeSavers are a hundred years old this year, and that’s about how old this photo is, too. đŸ˜‰ But I still remember getting that book of all those different flavors, and I probably still wouldn’t like the pineapple LifeSaver.


A tin I’ve had for several years. More than forty additional flavors have been created since Clarence Crane came up with his original Pep-O-Mint® candy.

Legacy Writing 365:277

One December, Mother, Daniel, and I drove to Kentucky to spend a few days with Debby, her kids, and her roommate, Kathy. A couple of things I remember about that trip: My mother told me I never put enough mayonnaise in my tuna salad, potato salad, or pimento cheese. Now you’ve been warned if you ever ask me to make you stuff with mayo in it. I may use Hellmann’s, but NOT ENOUGH.

Also, that was the trip when I met Mandy.


Mandy was Kathy’s dog, and she had two unusual skills. She could blow out the flame on a Bic, and she could bark, “Go Big Blue!” Pretty impressive, right?

My dogs: gold-medalist nappers.

Legacy Writing 365:276

One of the main reasons I scanned in this photo was so I could look at it enlarged to see if I could figure out what gift Daddy was opening one Christmas morning. And that reminded me…

Do they still make Aqua Velva? Because once again, impressionable me can remember the commercial jingle from my young years–the power of advertising!

I don’t know how many bottles of Aqua Velva I bought my father for his birthday, Father’s Day, and Christmas. Until a year when I was all grown up and we were sitting around the table making plans for the holidays and he said, “I need to ask you something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Please don’t buy me another bottle of Aqua Velva.”

“You don’t like it anymore?” I asked.

“I never did,” he admitted.

“Me, either!”

I still don’t know what that is in the photo; I kind of wish it was Aqua Velva.

Legacy Writing 365:275

While I was in graduate school and throughout my twenties, I had a lot of different jobs, sometimes two or three at a time, to pay the bills, keep food on the table, and pay for books and tuition. There was a point when my income was so low that I was even on food stamps for a brief time–because, you know, I’m in that forty-seven percent of people always looking for a handout.

Shockingly, working at a convenience store wasn’t the worst job I ever had, though it was certainly a low-paying one. I did it all one summer, and in spite of the fact that in a one-week period, (1) my apartment was broken into and I lost most of my jewelry and an old stereo, among other things; (2) the guy I was dating who was also employed by that store for the summer was robbed at work at gunpoint; and (3) my purse containing both his and my paychecks and income tax refund checks was stolen when I was on my way to the bank to make a deposit, the customers made that job a constant source of entertainment. The regulars gave me plenty of stories to share with my friends and later to weave into fictitious plots and characters. In fact, even when summer was over and I was back in school, I kept working the early Sunday morning shift for several months because I wanted to.

I missed my regulars when I left. I still remember a lot of them fondly, especially the elderly lady with the white poodle who always reminded me a little of the lonely woman Jimmy Stewart watched in Rear Window. I hope my replacement took good care of her.

Legacy Writing 365:274 and Button Sunday

I’m betting this button came to me via my sister.

I may as well get this out of the way, because I know it’ll be shocking to some of you. I wasn’t a Scooby-Doo fan. I watched it if I’d spent the night with Lynne, because she watched it, but it was not a must-see for me. I hope this doesn’t disappoint anyone; I liked plenty of other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including the Flintstones and Yogi Bear, also featured on the button. But in the great realm of television cartoons, I was more of a Looney Tunes fan (Daffy Duck being my favorite of all TV cartoon characters).

Still, I definitely tuned in to The Jetsons and The Flintstones. Although even as a little tot, one thing always drove me crazy on The Flintstones. In the closing credits, when Fred put Baby Puss, the saber-toothed cat, out at night, Baby Puss jumped back in through the window, put Fred out, and locked the door. Fred then banged on the door and hollered for Wilma. Why didn’t Fred go through the window, too? I guess I was a hard-sell on that gag.

I’ll never forget how excited I was when my mother drove us to the Sinclair station so I could get my inflatable Dino for our little backyard swimming pool. Somehow my brain thought Sinclair’s mascot Dino and the Flintstones’ dogasaurus were the same creature. I blame black and white television: Who knew Dino was a purplish color?

When Dino got punctured, I was heartbroken, and Mother actually bought me a replacement Dino, which was rare. Usually, if you broke something, that was it. Dino 2 definitely lasted through the end of summer, and by the next year, we’d moved, the pool was no more, and Dino was forgotten. That’s the kind of memory that makes Toy Story 3 heart-wrenching for adults, isn’t it?

Legacy Writing 365:273

Whenever I see this photo of Lynne’s mom in their kitchen, I think of a Sunday I called over there when Lynne and I were still junior high age. Elnora answered the phone, and I asked for Lynne.

“Dammit, Becky, I can’t talk to you right now! The house is on fire!”

Then she hung up. Meanwhile, Liz was driving Lynne back from their aunt’s house when a firetruck raced past them. They wondered where the fire might be, only to arrive home to say, “It’s HERE!”

Apparently, the homebuilder hadn’t vented the exhaust fan above the stove. Elnora was frying chicken with the fan running, and when a small grease fire broke out, the flames were sucked right through the fan and ignited some insulation covering the opening where the vent should have been. Fortunately, the firefighters were able to contain the flames to the roof over the kitchen.

From my perspective, the story was all in her mother shrieking on the phone and hanging up, which somehow eventually became very funny to me. Of course, I didn’t have to live with the smoke damage, the hole in the roof, or the annoyance of home repairs.

Rob E spoke of “The September Song” in a post on his blog, and I mentioned how that and “Try To Remember” are both beautiful songs about September. They were originally from two different Broadway shows decades apart, and they share a wistful sadness. Lynne’s mother died in September of 1978, and for a couple of reasons, “Try To Remember” will always be linked to that sad occasion for me. But most of the stories that make me think of Elnora are full of laughter. She was my second mother, and she taught me so many things (including how to make buttonholes on my Home Ec project!).

She was also the first working mom I really knew in an era when that was uncommon.

I learned a lot from her example in how she conducted herself as a career woman, supported organizations of women in the building industry, and maintained great professional and personal relationships with other working women. I wish we’d had more time with her. I especially wish she could have known her grandson and great-granddaughter, and they could have known her.


…it’s nice to remember, although you know the snow will follow…it’s nice to remember, without a hurt the heart is hollow…

Photos from Lynne’s collection.

Legacy Writing 365:272

Tom and I were recalling one of the houses we rented in Houston that had glass panes the full length of one side of the front door. I think there was a curtain there when we moved in, but we didn’t like the curtain and took it down. That meant anyone who walked up to our front door could see inside the house, and we didn’t like that, either. Finally, in my crafty way, I used one of Tom’s mother’s stained glass pattern books to create the Poor Chick’s Stained Glass. I cut and painted heavy plastic panels to stick on those windows. Of course, there was glitter.

The odd thing was, they didn’t look too bad when the sunlight shone through them. And they did give us the privacy we wanted.

The odder thing is, I just found them in the bottom of a drawer. I don’t know why I kept them: sentimental reasons, I guess.

Legacy Writing 365:271

When I cook, I tend to wash all the food prep dishes, pots, and pans as I go along so that after we eat, there are just plates, our utensils, any serving dishes, and glasses left to wash. My mother SAID she did this, too, and I suppose she did. However, my sister and I also figured out that when it was Debby’s turn or mine to do the dishes after dinner, That Old Woman NEVER washed up as she went along. Here you see proof of how she turned me into a scullery maid at a tender age.

Sort of related, my mother, like me, had a keen sense of smell, and one time she vowed that she could smell a dead mouse in the kitchen. She took everything out of all the cabinets, searched behind every appliance, and continued to complain even though my father swore he couldn’t smell a thing.

See that amber glass pitcher to my left in the photo? Mother took it out one night to use it for tea and found a tiny mouse skeleton in it. “SEE?!?” she demanded of my father, her victory complete.

Then she threw the pitcher away, thank goodness.

Legacy Writing 365:270

Since I mentioned the Renaissance Festival in Tuesday’s post about “dragon eggs,” I thought I’d share another memory of a different year when we went to the Renaissance Festival. We’ve gone with Lynne several times. One year Tom and I went and tried to meet up with Amy and Richard, but we never seemed to be in the same place at the same time. Then in 2008, when Debby was here on a visit in late fall–after a hard year emotionally for all of us–we decided the Renaissance Festival would be a fun diversion. So Tom, Debby, Lindsey, Rhonda, and I took off on a gorgeous, sunny Sunday to enjoy the costumes, the jousting, the corn on the cob, and lots of people watching and crystal shopping.

It was exactly the kind of relaxing day we hoped for, and I remember at one point, when everyone was winding down, that I hurried up a hill to see what new event was about to start. And it struck me that I was moving pain free. For an entire year, I’d struggled with nerve and muscle pain caused by a herniated disc and two fractured vertebrae. I’d gone to physical therapy, learned a lot of new ways to move and to develop core strength, and taken lots of medication. The pain had been such a constant that I had to stop letting it dominate my life. I guess the improvement was so gradual that I didn’t know it was really gone until I realized that while everyone else was thinking it was time to leave, my body was all, LET’S GO HAVE MORE FUN!

Four years later, when I get an occasional backache, I’m grateful all over again for the cessation of that pain. Chronic pain can make you CRAZY. And I remember that with all the help from friends and family, the compassion, and the medical care I received, it was Jeff F who took the time to give me good information and advice about how to stop the pain from making me live a life of fear. I will always be grateful to him for that.

So that was a great day. Also: FOX!