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Almost 70 years ago Clyda and Veon were married. That union is why we are all here. This blog is created to capture our thoughts and help us get to know each other better. There will be a new question posted each Sunday until December. Please use contributors first names only. If you are posting anonymously please add your first name to the text. Enjoy!
Please read...
Attention everyone...Marilyn has a WEB PAGE !! You can check it out at www.marilynsmithartist.com!
Nicole, please publish the following disclaimer in a prominent place:
I hesitated to make long narratives with these posts, but Nicole said she might put the whole blog thing into a book form someday, and I could use this as a forum for writing for my kids and grandkids. I can’t pass up an opportunity like that. So rather than bore you, feel free to skip anything you’re not interested in or don’t want to be bothered to read. Sonja
Note from Nicole:
I am happy to do this for anybody that is interested. I am enjoying hearing from each of you and would love to hear from more. Thanks Sonja for taking the time to work on this and giving us an opportunity to get to know you better.
Kids from Lt to Rt:Marilyn, Barbara, Veon Jr., Gladys, Gerald, Evan. Clyda and Veon in the Middle.
Sonja
Ve's Wife
Nicole
Glady's Youngest
Marilyn
The Youngest Daughter
Evan
"The Baby"
Daphne
Glady's Oldest
Clyda
5 comments:
My father built a new bungalow when I was 7 years old and I had a room to myself. The house had 3 bedrooms upstairs and 2 downstairs. It had 1 bathroom, a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. It had a big L-shaped cement front porch on it. It was wood with field rock trim around the porch. There were a lot of pine trees in the north side yard.
It was a good neighborhood. We had people across the street and around us. There were just enough kids. It was a very small town so everybody was available.
Clyda
I had 2 childhood homes but both were in the same neighborhood. At my Grandma Marchant's house, I had a floor that slanted down. I used to love roller skating on it. At my parents', we had a big house built in the 1800's with a big walnut tree in the back and Liberty Park across the street. My bedroom looked out on the park.
The neighborhood was very diverse. We had a lot of older people as well as families with teenagers and young kids. There were people from all different cultures, especially Hispanic and Polynesian. I was a minority in my elementary and high schools. There were quite a few kids my age in the neighborhood and we had a great time together.
I lived with my Grandma M. until I was about 11. I had my own bedroom. It had two twin beds with a night stand between them. I always slept on the bed that had the heater by my feet. I loved to kick the covers up and let the heat toast my feet before I fell asleep.
The house was a old brick bungalow with a big front porch. It had a peace rose bush that was at least 6 feet tall. When we were playing on the porch we love to pick the buds off and tear each petal off of the bud. I think about that now when my kids kick a ball into my flowers or pick my buds when they are just showing some color and think that my Grandma must be smiling and saying "Paybacks".
The neighborhood was a little scary in retrospect. I went to school with a boy that was murdered by Gary Bishop. I was exposed to hard drugs at a very young age.
I did have some great friends that were (and are still) very strong people to spite their upbringing. I had friends and neighbors from every ethnic background and family unit. On one side of the house we watched a Tongan family dig a pit and roast a pig in a weekend. On the other side we had a single black man named Bip that had an ongoing joke with me about a man that lived in his glove box named Skuttelbug. In the back yard we shared a fence with a blended family that would humor us each night in the summer when the windows were open and we would yell "Good Night John Boy" and they would say "Good Night Mary Ellen".
We lives on the 7th floor of an apartment building. There were olive trees all over the grounds dowstairs and smashed olives all over the cars (they fell when they were overripe). When we first moves there (I was one years old) our complex consisted of three identical buildings parallel to each other. Across the street were only fields that gave place through the years to many other buildings. There were little shops all over the area, as is wont to be in France, and of course, the daily market, a winery where we took our bottles to get re-filled, a boulangerie-patisserie, boucherie-charcuterie, etc...
I was born at home, at what my family called "The Ritter Place." The doctor came to the house to assist. That house had no central heating, electricity or plumbing. Mother had to haul water up the hill from the spring behind the house. (Not for my birth, of course, but generally). I don’t remember much about the Ritter place because we moved from there when I was three. But my earliest memories are there. (That’s a whole other story).
We moved to a place Daddy built not far from there. It was just down the road from the two room elementary school - also called Ritter. It wasn’t much of a house. It had two large rooms and a big upstairs where my sisters and I slept. It was about the size of an average barn and had a roof like one. Daddy called it "The Mansionette" because it was "a little less than a mansion." I had my fourth birthday there, and got the big scar above my left knee there, from standing on bottled peaches that were cooling on the concrete floor beneath the front window.
We were only there a few months when Daddy acquired a "lifetime" lease on "The Woods Place" (Which meant we could live there as long as we wanted to). It was named "Woods" not because it was in the woods - though it certainly was - but because Mr. Woods was the man who owned it. He didn’t want to live in it, but had to have it occupied to keep the property safe from developers.
This is what I think of as my childhood home. It seemed huge to me, but when I went back years later I realized it probably wasn’t much bigger than Ve’s childhood home on Judith street. It had long cement porches on two sides. I used to roller-skate around and around them (with skates I clamped on to my shoes with a skate key).
This house didn’t have central heating either. We had free-standing stoves in the bedrooms. Mother would heat rocks or bricks on top of the stove and wrap them in dishtowels to warm our feet when we went to bed. It had electricity, but one of the switches at the end of the hallway that connected the kitchen to the back bedroom, didn’t have a switch plate on it. The black insulation on the wires ended about a half inch from the end, and the wires were bent so you could hook them together to turn on the light. They spit blue sparks when they connected. (The house burned to the ground just four months after we left to move to Utah, when I was 12). We didn’t have hot water, but at least we had cold running water and an inside toilet.
On one side of the house was a small bedroom and a long living room with a fireplace at one end. The other half was a kitchen, a hallway with a bathroom off of it, and another small bedroom at the other end. Mother had a sink and wood-burning stove and a fridge in the kitchen. (For a long time we had an ice box . The ice man would come around every so often to replace the block of ice that kept it cold). The kitchen had a big round table with a pedestal and three large leaves that were added when the missionaries or other people from the Southwest Missouri District of the church would come for dinner. Mother sawed a hole in the top of the pedestal and dropped money inside when ever she could, to save a little for Christmas every year. No one ever knew about it until the table was turned on it’s side and rolled when we moved, and someone heard the money rolling around inside.
The house was outside the city limits, and seemed like a very long way from everything, but was really no more than 7 or 8 miles from church. (I guess that’s why Daddy could say that if we didn’t have a car we could take the S.E.& W. Which wasn’t a railroad, but stood for "Start Early and Walk"). The house was at the end of a long dirt driveway that wrapped around the house. The mailbox was out on the paved road, of course. The address was Box 1414, Rout 11. We always had to stop to open a gate to drive in and out, then close it behind us to keep the cows from getting out. Where our lane joined the paved road was on a hill. When we had ice storms in the winter, we would have to go the long way around to get to town and to church because the car couldn’t make it up the hill on the ice. We picked wild strawberries and goosberries that grew along this lane, and there was a big mud puddle where my cousin, Toni, and I would play from time to time, when we were very young.
We had a big lilac tree that was never pruned, so the big branches grew tall and hung down all around it, making a little "secret" room inside where I could play or read by myself. Behind the house was a long row of daffodils, and we had tons of blue and purple iris growing along the fence that divided our place from our neighbor’s pasture. We had a black walnut tree and a small birch tree in the yard. I could climb about halfway up and "ride" one branch back down to the ground, like Robert Frost’s "swinger of birches."
In days long past, the place had been what was referred to as a "Transient Camp." I don’t know if it was for homeless or mentally ill, or what, exactly. But there were foundations of two large buildings up on the hill, across the stream. And what we used for a barn had been perhaps an industrial sized kitchen or something. It had a second story on each side (which we called the barn loft) and a third story in the middle, high above the ground floor. We had a big wooden ladder propped up to get to the barn loft. I fell from the top step once, onto the concrete floor below, when Toni and I were playing dress-ups. I was unconscious long enough for Asenath and Toni’s sister, JoNell to carry me back to the front porch and lay me down on a blanket to wait for Mother or Daddy to get home. I woke up there, and didn’t seem the worse for wear.
The house was on 220 acres of woods, with a natural spring that joined the spring to the Ritter place, down stream. There was a dam on the far side of the lake, and a large open space where Daddy often built big bonfires for church parties and gatherings. My sister, Asenath, and I would catch crawdads and cut watercress from the stream.
There wasn’t much of a "neighborhood" really. The closest neighbors were two large pastures away. They didn’t have any children. And there were big scary bulls with horns, in the pasture closest to their house. I had to walk past them when I walked home from the school bus stop.
Sonja
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