Adventures in Arkansas 2004

Alan and I had an unintended adventure one time on a trip to Arkansas to visit my grandmother. We were running later than planned and it was getting dark, so we decided to stay in a hotel overnight about 2 hours away from our destination. The first hotel we went to was in West Memphis, Arkansas. West Memphis is right across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. Unfortunately, the hotel had no vacancies. They told us there was some big convention in Memphis, so all the hotels in Memphis were booked up, and West Memphis got the overflow. They were very nice, though. They called another Holiday Inn in Forrest City, about 20 miles away, off our regular route, and got us a reservation for the night. 

On our way to Forrest City we ran into a traffic jam on a 2-lane country road. The line of cars was so long we couldn't see what was causing it. There was no traffic coming from the opposite direction, either. We figured it must be a car wreck that was blocking both lanes. 

We sat there for quite a while not moving. But every once in a while a pickup truck would go past us on the shoulder of the road. We thought they were probably just trying to get to the front of the line.

Finally, though, Alan decided to follow one of those trucks and see where they were going. So we pulled out behind the next truck that went by on the shoulder. 

We hadn't gone far when the truck made a sudden right turn into a field! We followed his tail lights, which wasn't easy since he was kicking up a cloud of dust on the little trail that snaked through the field -- and he was going fast! It was pitch dark -- so if we lost sight of his tail lights we would be totally lost. At one point we went flying over a rickety wooden 'bridge' (in the loosest sense of the word) that was just about wide enough for a car. I don't know why there was a bridge in the middle of a cotton field, but we were in no condition to wonder about that. (I don't know if it was a cotton field or some other kind of field, but it was huge.) We just tried to keep up with the cloud of dust and hope it would lead us eventually to wherever all those other trucks had gone. (I began to think the guy we were following might just be going to his house, and we would end up having to spend the night with him and wait for daylight to find our way back.)

Well, we did finally come to the end of the trail and back onto the road. We could see some flashing red and blue lights off to our left, and there was still no traffic moving in either direction. So we were past the obstruction and were able to continue on to our hotel, thankful that we lived to tell the tale! 

* * *

These are not pictures of the actual event, of course. They are just random photos I chose to illustrate the story.

Fishing

My dad used to take me fishing. We had little lakes everywhere in Michigan — that’s one of the great things about growing up there. We usually went to Van Auken Lake, which was about halfway between Hartford and Bangor. It was small and pretty shallow, so it was a good place to go swimming or fishing.

PHOTO: My dad

We had a rowboat. It might have been aluminum, but it seems like I remember that it was a good old-fashioned wooden rowboat. My dad taught me how to row a boat, which is something I don’t think many kids know how to do nowadays.

PHOTO: Me

We usually used cane fishing poles. I’m pretty sure my dad would bait the hook for me. I wasn’t afraid of worms, though. In fact, I had a little friend who used to come to my house after it rained and we would collect earthworms that came up out of the ground after the rain, to use as fishing bait. 

PHOTO: Ricky

One time when I was fishing with my dad, I caught something that wasn’t a fish — it was a rod & reel. Just a small one, in fact, just the right size for a kid like me to use. So that was my fishing pole from then on.

According to my baby book, I caught 10 fish the day these pictures were taken!

X-stitch

 I spent a few years in the 1980s doing counted cross-stitch. It was an inexpensive way to make nice gifts for special occasions. These are small segments cropped from larger photographs, so they are not very good resolution.

I made this one to hang in the boys' bedroom when they were learning their alphabet.

This one is the family tree -- starting with my grandma Burford and going back a few generations.

I gave this one to Mom and Dad. They hung it by the door in the living room of their house in Downey, California.

This was a gift for Grandma and Papa Burford for their 50th wedding anniversary.

This one was for my brother John when he married Billie Jo.

Also for John and Billie Jo.

This was for my parents' anniversary

I made this one for my dad because he loved hunting.

For my friend Dawn Willard. Our children grew up together.

These are two of many that I made during my "love/heart" period.

There are lots more, but I guess I'll stop here. 

I would love to start cross-stitching again, but I don't think my failing eyesight could take it.

Sewing

 Is that me sewing?

Why, yes it is. This would have been about 1973.

I learned to sew in Home Economics class in junior high school. In that class I made an apron:

You can't see it very well in this picture, but I'm wearing the apron I made in high school. The yellow part is the bib. It ties at the waist and the 'skirt' part is red. This picture was taken in 1986.

Sewing is one of the many skills that I had in the past and have since lost. 

This was 1969. I made this jumpsuit. I made another one just like it from purple fabric with a paisley print. They zipped up the front. As I recall they were actually pretty easy to make. This morning I would have sworn on my life that I had a good picture of me wearing it -- but I have spent all the livelong day trying to find it, and now I'm beginning to doubt my sanity because that photo is nowhere to be found. 

This blouse is one of the things I made. This picture was taken in 1971.

Before my first son was born in 1980 I bought some bed sheets and used them to make a bassinette cover -- without a pattern!

From that same fabric I also made curtains for the windows in the nursery and a diaper holder that hung on the wall. 

You can barely see it on the left, but that's the diaper holder.

These are the nursery curtains. Keith is teaching Christopher how to play the guitar.

This is my mother's Singer treadle sewing machine. It's the one I made the nursery stuff with. I like using a treadle machine much better than an electric machine.

I made these two Christmas stockings from a baby quilt. This would have been about 1986 or 1987. (The dresser was an heirloom that belonged to my great-aunt Effie.)

I made the window curtain on the right in this picture of my mom and dad. I made it from a pillowcase. This was 1986.

I made these two quilts. They are not really quilts. They are tacked coverlets -- a blanket between two sheets, and tacked at intervals with yarn. I got the idea from a quilt we got as a wedding gift from my great aunt Helen.

The yellow one is the one Aunt Helen made.

I used to be able to do a lot of things that I can't do now.

Three Mile Lake

When I was in junior high school we rented a vacation cottage on Three Mile Lake in Paw Paw, Michigan. It seems like we stayed there two weeks, but it might have just been a week. We did that two summers in a row. Since it was near where we lived, Dad still went to work on weekdays. The cabins were small but clean. There was one bedroom, and another bed in the main room, and there was a 'kitchenette' with a sink, stove, and fridge. And a screened-in front porch. I think there were just about 6 or 8 cottages altogether. 

I remember one family we met there had a little boy named Dominic -- they called him "Dommo" -- who was younger than me. All I remember about him was that he had dark brown hair and I thought he was cute. He was the only person I had ever met with the name Dominic, and for some reason that just stuck in my head all these years.

PHOTO: Me and Dad and Rick

PHOTO: Me, Mom, Rick, Aunt Jackie, cousins Mark and Lori.

PHOTO: John, Mom, and our dog Lady. 

That dress she's wearing was made from large bath towels (or beach towels?) One towel crossways made the top and sleeves, and two towels back and front made the body of the dress. Seems like Mom made several of those for herself and for me.

PHOTO: Raeann Waite, uncle Ron, Mom. 

Ron was dating Raeann at the time, I think. She worked at the same company where my dad worked, Du-Wel. They made die cast metal products.

PHOTO: Me, Mom, John, and Rick.

That's our station wagon behind us. I wish they still made station wagons instead of SUVs. Same purpose, and much less obnoxious.

PHOTO: The lakeshore and the cottages where we stayed.

We have some great home movies from when we stayed at this place, but the quality is not so good because they were projected from an 8mm projector onto a wall, and that projection was recorded on a camcorder while Mom and Dad and John watched and commented. At some point one of the cassettes from the camcorder was converted to a DVD. The other cassette will no longer play.

There was a trampoline behind the cottages and we have some footage of us playing on that -- Dad, me, Jim Harmon (my boyfriend at the time), Uncle Ron and Aunt Maxine. There was also a raft on the lake, and we have some good footage of Dad and Rick and me diving off it. 

Those are all good memories.

Dance Lessons

Dance Lessons

At some point in time I decided I wanted to be a ballerina. So my mother enrolled me in dance lessons. The local dance teacher was Vi Shafer. Her policy was that you had to take a year of acrobatics and a year of tap dancing before you could start ballet lessons. I thought that was a scam -- and I still think so -- so she could make a lot of money off of you for two years before you actually got to learn the kind of dance that you really wanted. Well, anyway. I took the acrobatics and tap, but I don't think I ever did get to the ballet stage of the game. 

There are a few things I remember about dance lessons. First -- I was embarrassed because I didn't have a leotard. I had tights, which I wore with a regular shirt or blouse. Honestly, I'm not sure why my mother never bought me a leotard, but she never did. Then when I took tap, I never got regular tap dancing shoes -- and I REALLY wanted some! According to my mother, we couldn't afford them. So I had taps put on my regular patent leather Mary Jane shoes. I hated that. (In fact, even after I was grown I still craved a pair of tap shoes -- and I actually bought some shoes that were very much like them.)

You can't tell much from this picture, but those shoes are black patent leather and they have ribbons for shoelaces. They look very much like the regular tap dancing shoes I wanted when I was 7 years old.

* * *

These pictures are from the dance recital. I am the one in the center. 

The main thing I remember about this recital is that when our costumes arrived, mine did not have a hat. It was supposed to have a white sort of bonnet like the others. So my teacher decided I would wear a 'special' hat -- some black thing with feathers -- and I would be in the center of the line so it might look like I was the leader, or some such nonsense as that. If she thought she was making me feel better about it, she was dead wrong. So once again I was embarrassed.

I never did get to take ballet lessons. 

The End

Wathada's 23rd birthday

My mother used to sing while she was doing any kind of housework. She had a really nice voice and she knew just about every song in the world. When I was three or four years old she taught me to sing a ‘round.’ (A round is where two people sing the same song, starting at different times, so the melody creates harmony for itself.) The song she taught me was Catch a Falling Star. I think it was recorded by Perry Como, a popular singer at the time. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family sang all the time. Any time any of us got together we usually ended up singing before it was all over. 

We took a lot of pictures in our family. That may be because my great-grandfather was a professional photographer. One of the things we would do for fun pretty often was to sit down with a box full of pictures (sometimes a photo album, but more often a box) and look at them, to make sure they had the subject matter written on the back of them, and just to enjoy looking at them and talking about them. One of my favorite photographs from my childhood is my mother and me sitting on the couch going through the picture box. I was 4 years old. 

My mom was just 18 when I was born, and she says she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t have me. As for me, I’m pretty sure I thought she and I were the same age.

PHOTO: Dad looking through the picture box

These pictures were taken on my mother's 23d birthday. My uncle Ron took the pictures.

PHOTO: Ron Burford, age 15