Tag: legacy writing

April Photo A Day: Childhood

I once gave my mother an oddly shaped wooden box. I like wooden boxes myself, so I tend to give them as gifts. It’s fun to fill my own with little treasures. I often forget what’s in them and get to surprise myself from time to time by exploring their contents.

When Mother died and I opened her various tins and boxes, I realized she did the same. Now I get to explore them, too, and the particular wooden box I mentioned is among my favorites. It includes this little homemade bag of jacks with a ball. I don’t think they’re jacks from when David, Debby, and I were kids since they have too much paint on them. Because they look newer, and the ball is certainly a more contemporary version of those we used, I suspect she found them, bag and all, at a thrift store. I do seem to remember her once telling me she used them to help keep her hands agile. But I think she just liked playing jacks, much the same way, when skates were the craze in the 1970s, she put mine on one day and skated around the carport to show that she still could.

No matter how old we get, I think it’s important to respect the child within us.

I might have even played onesies after I shot this photo.

Prompt from FMS Photo A Day.

More fun with nostalgia


This is the terrific card Timmy and Paul sent me on my birthday (thanks!), and it reminded me of Colorforms. Which sent me on another of my periodic searches for the set of Colorforms I remember having as a kid. I still didn’t find it, but I did find this Pinterest board with a bunch of old games and toys on it that you might enjoy. When I was scrolling through it, I found a game I’d forgotten from my childhood.

©Christian Montone

I LOVED playing this! I even remember the TV show, though I’m not going to age myself by admitting which host I remember. I always thought the game was based on the show, but apparently it was the other way around. I still remember turning the Rolomatic Puzzle Changer™ for a new game. Did they make additional rebus scrolls to be sold separately?

What games–or TV game shows–were your favorites when you were a kid?

Label

For decades my mother had a full-length mirror that she hung on the back of one door or another everywhere she and Daddy–and later just she–lived. Somebody in the family also had a label maker, and one of her grandkids punched this one out for her and put it on the mirror.

Before we got rid of the mirror, either she or I snagged it and stuck it on this pack of labels, which I later absorbed into my own office supplies. My bet is that either Sarah or Gina made it. I thought they might like knowing she held on to it through all those years and moves.

All I ever wanted was to know that you were dreaming


I have a passion for home, but I long ago accepted that I have no passion for house cleaning. One of the things I don’t mind doing, especially if I have a window, is washing dishes. This is why I rarely used a dishwasher, even when I had one. Debby and I used to argue over who had to do the dishes–I think that’s a natural teenage sibling thing. I remember those arguments best from the house we lived in just before she was married and moved out. (David and my father rarely did the dishes. Different times…)

After I became the only kid left at home, dishwashing was left mainly to Mother and me. I remember lots of evenings staring out the kitchen window of the last house I lived in with my parents, watching the street, the main road through our little town, and smiling when my friends or boyfriend drove by and blew their horns.

Now both my sister and I are content to be in suds up to our elbows, as my mother always was (she also rarely used a dishwasher other than her kids). I do a lot of thinking at the kitchen sink, and looking at this photo, I realize why my thoughts so often turn to people I care about. Just the items on the shelf over the sink and on the fence seen through the window evoke reminiscences of Tom, Lynne, Lisa S, Timmy, Paul, James, Tim, Jeff, my parents, Debby, Jess, Laura, Lindsey, and Rhonda–and Margot and Guinness. It’s a place of friends and family, as homes should be.

Last year during this time, Aaron and I were trading texts about his coming to stay here a few days during spring break. Tom and I were so happy he wanted to spend time with us, Tim, and the dogs, and I wouldn’t trade those days for anything.

So many memories…

Today is Riley’s birthday. How I’d love to call him and wish him a happy one. He’s another of the people I think about and miss deeply. The year 1980 was one of the most significant in our long history of friendship. I can remember the house I was living in then, and all the time he spent there, and how Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” LP stayed on my turntable almost constantly. There are so many pieces of Stevie Nicks’s “Sara” that tell a story of Riley and me. I’m sure lots of people feel the same way about the song for many different reasons–true of all the best songs, I think.

For Riley…

February Photo A Day: Your Name


I received this from my parents as a ‘tween for my bicycle. Clearly I never left my bike out in the rain because the tag isn’t much weathered. From the time of my first bike (and I remember the training wheels!) when I was a youngster, my bikes meant freedom. I try to believe that in small towns or at least suburbs somewhere, children still fly out the door in the mornings and grab their bikes, only to come home if they’re hungry or when dusk sets in.

Of course, back then, there were no helmets and lots of wrecks and crashes. In our family, my brother’s bike catastrophe was breaking his arm. I remember I was too young to be allowed in the hospital to see him when he had to stay overnight, but because I was a worrier, my mother let me stand on the grass outside and pointed out the window where he stood, waving his casted arm at me. My sister’s catastrophe: wrecking her bike on a hill. She and the bike slid down together, its pedal stabbing her in her leg, which had to be stitched. My mother said the resident putting in her sutures had shaking hands and wasn’t doing a great job. She was worried what kind of scar it would leave and gave the attending physician an anxious look. He tactfully asked the resident if he wasn’t long overdue for a break and offered to finish. Once the resident was gone, he removed the stitches and started over, making a tidy job of it.

There are only a few of my own accidents that I remember. My training wheel slipped off the sidewalk once and I was thrown into a ditch. I remember screaming all the way home and sitting on the kitchen counter, feet in the sink, while my mother washed my wounds and applied iodine (that hurt worse than the wreck). One time I found an iron rod, probably a piece of rebar, and was dragging it behind me as I rode. I stupidly let it get ahead of me and pole vaulted myself over the handlebars, landing in the middle of the street on my back and, as they say, getting the wind knocked out of me. The only witness was a woman standing in her kitchen window. She ran out to make sure I was okay and helped me and the bike to the curb. After a few minutes, I was on my way. She kept the rebar. Another time my foot slipped off the pedal and I scraped the top of it on the asphalt (it was the South; I was barefooted). For years, I had four little circular scars at the base of my toes, but those are long gone.

Then there was the time my bike and its tag betrayed me. It was probably ninth grade, and my boyfriend (Tim) wasn’t delighted when I spent lots of time with just Riley. But Riley had taught himself new songs on the guitar and begged me to come over after school one afternoon to listen. Riley lived several blocks from me, but right around the corner from Lynne, so I told Tim I was going to Lynne’s that afternoon, then pedaled straight to Riley’s. We were in the basement–where his drums, piano, and guitars were–when the doorbell rang. Riley went to answer it, and I heard Tim’s voice ask, “Is Becky here?”

“No,” Riley lied.

“Her bike’s outside.”

“Oh, yeah. She and Lynne went somewhere and asked if they could leave it in my yard. If you want to hang out here, you can probably catch her when she comes by to get it.”

By that time, I was out the garage door, grabbing my bike and hauling butt to Lynne’s. When Tim drove by later, Lynne and I were innocently sitting in her front yard, my bike next to us, making dandelion chains. Was he fooled? Who knows. But it gave Riley a favorite story to tell on me long after Tim and I were a distant memory.

Prompt from FMS Photo A Day.

February Photo A Day: Fork

This month I’ll attempt to do each day’s challenge as provided on the FMS Photo A Day site. Today I chose the fork from my parents’ cutlery set, another of the things (besides me!) they brought back from Germany. We still use it. Tim usually says, “This knife is dull,” then I say, “But it’s pretty,” which now that I think about it, makes it like a few people I know.

Here, from Christmas when I was elevenish, Daddy is using the fork and knife to carve the turkey.

I see that because Mother set the table for our feast with her finest china, she removed the humble Tupperware salt and pepper shakers to shoot the photo. Yet there they sit, nestled among the plants in the corner, undercutting her fancy intentions.

If you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes

Our weather has been so crazy in Houston lately. There’ve been days when I wake up and turn up the heat because the house is so cold. By mid afternoon, I have to switch to air conditioning because it’s hot. That night, a cold front will move in behind rain, and it’s back to the heater. Houston has multiple weather personality disorder.

Friday morning was gorgeous, but I’d checked my weather app and knew it was predicted to cloud up later and possibly rain. Since I wanted to grill burgers for Craft Night, I did it early in the day.

As I was coming through the back door, plate of burgers and spatula in hand, I flashed back to the March when my mother was in New Jersey with Debby for Josh’s birth. My pal Rhonda F–the one who pierced my ears during that same time (something my mother had forbidden, mwahaha)–was over at our house. Daddy was grilling burgers. Whenever he manned the grill, we had to keep an eye on him because he tended to burn things. But on this day, he took the burgers off at just the right time. As he was coming through the back door, the plate tilted, burgers slid from it to the floor, and he blasted, “Shit. SHIT. SHIT!” Since Rhonda knew him best as her assistant principal, this was very shocking to her. Not to me, though. I just whipped those things back onto the plate after giving them a cursory inspection, knowing that my mother LITERALLY had a kitchen floor so clean you could eat off of it.

That would not have been true in my house had that happened to me on Friday; I’m not the housekeeper Dorothy was. But don’t worry, Tom, Tim, Current Day Rhonda, and Lindsey. Your burgers suffered no mishaps at any step along the way.

Little mysteries


Cousins Alan and Elenore with Papa. I don’t know the date of this badly damaged photo, but research on the style and width of Alan’s tie tells me that it, at least, is probably from the 1950s. (It would look at home again in the 1970s, I think.) Elenore’s dress reminds me of this 1954 pattern:

In comments to my previous post about My Ideal Bookshelf, Steve B mentioned author Paul Gallico. This reminded me that I have an old copy of The Snow Goose that was a gift to Mother from Daddy, as noted in an inscription:

But I have another Paul Gallico book given to my parents from Elenore.

I have no idea what her inscription means, but guesses are part of the fun. I’m wondering if that was the third time he and Mother lived in Alabama, and Elenore was hoping it meant they’d stay. They didn’t, though they were living there again when he died.

Legacy Writing 365:365


“The Family Detectives,” from Austin Kleon‘s book Newspaper Blackout. Copyright Austin Kleon, 2010.

Look at the title of my post. I made it! I committed to doing this for 2012, and I finished it. I had no idea what I was taking on when I chose to delve into my own and my mother’s (and sometimes Lynne’s and other family members’) photo archives and write the memories the pictures inspired. Mostly, I wanted to prove to myself that I could write every day, because I haven’t written anything substantive since finishing A Coventry Wedding just after my mother died in 2008.

I did not write every day, though I did end up with a legacy writing post for every day.

First, I could never have imagined as the year began the blow that would strike my family in April with Aaron’s death. Aaron had always been fascinated by our family’s history–from the mysteries that he, his father before him, and my mother before them, could find by exploring genealogy–a study that is also a part of his Mormon roots. When Aaron visited The Compound in March, we talked about so many things. He persuaded me to sign up at ancestry.com so we could share information. I made him register for selective service, since I’d had no idea up until then that every male is supposed to when he turns eighteen, even though there’s no draft. That whole process cracked us up, and in a comment he left on some later post in this blog, he promised not to tell his mom I made him join the Army. (I didn’t, Lisa!)

Aaron also loved to listen to our family stories, even if he’d heard them before. So when I decided to do the legacy writing, I acknowledged that it was with hope that one day these stories and memories might mean something to my nephews and nieces, and to their children. I wasn’t worried that I might violate anyone’s privacy: I’ve long walked the line in this blog between talking about the people and events in my life and revealing too much. In some ways, that came back to bite me when some readers told me they couldn’t relate to my family because their own experiences were much sadder and seemed less worthy of recounting. My family and friends have never been exempt from pain and loss, but I don’t exploit those things here to get readers or attention. I try to provide a whole picture, and despite deaths and disappointments, I’m not an unhappy person. Even when I write about sad things, sad times, I feel so fortunate for the amazing journey this life has been and for the people who’ve been on that journey with me.

What to do, then, when catastrophe strikes, when a loss is as shocking and as painful as Aaron’s? My first impulse was to shut down this blog completely. I didn’t want to look back. I didn’t want to talk about my family. I wanted to be with my family. I wanted us to gather in a circle and fend off all comers and hurt and heal together. But for me, writing is how I cope. The love I share with my family and my friends is the source of much of my strength. These two things together–art and love–have always been part of how I heal and move forward.

After a few days to breathe, I began to write my way back. I tried very hard not to share anything that would cause any more grief to those who love and lost Aaron. And I continue(d) to try every day to celebrate him, and the wonderful people I know, both in my daily life and in the words I write.

Among the gifts that keep me balanced are the dogs, and Rex always, always made me laugh. His loss and how it would impact us all is another thing I never dreamed would be part of 2012. We also lost the friendship of someone we loved and valued, and that continues to be one of the challenges the year brought us.

But those griefs are not all of our year. We still have friends. We still have family. We still have dogs. There are still children laughing in our lives–and more children to come. There are weddings to be planned, birthdays to celebrate, anniversaries to recognize. There are jobs that make us grateful, our health to cherish. There are books left to edit and write and read. There will be more art.

Another thing that made the legacy writing project difficult is that any writing takes energy. Sometimes it was the act of writing. Sometimes it was looking at photos and just planning what to write. There were times when memories caused me such a sense of loss that I’d put my head on my desk and cry for the people I missed. I don’t live in the past–I never have–so a year of looking back could be draining. I’d skip a day or two and then catch up. It was also frustrating when writing the past seemed to steal my ability to talk about the here and now, which is where my mind and heart and soul actually do live.

I haven’t formulated a project for the coming year. I’m going to try to live as much in the moment as possible, and share whatever those moments compel me to write in my blog. I’ve received a lot of gifts and shared a lot of conversations that I believe will give me plenty to think and talk about. I hope you’ll stick around. I thank you very much for being with me for the past year.

Happy new year to you all. I hope you receive all good things in abundance.

ETA 2022: There was a video I made here to recap the year in photos, but unfortunately, the host site deleted it and the computer it was on died. So sorry.