Some Colvin childhood memories...

Nope, not done, but I wanted to share a few of these older memories as I wrote… Bluff View Road Era... The log home on Bluff View Road that I called home for the first eleven years of my life still holds a lot of memories. I drove by it the other day and got a little misty eyed just seeing it. Of course it has changed a lot since we sold it and moved, the new owners covered up, dug out, painted over, and cemented down a lot of what was part of our ‘home’ through the years, but it is now THEIR home so I can partially accept it. The girls bedroom upstairs is where that I spent a lot of my time when I was younger. I didn’t have a bed in there, just a fold up ugly green pallet that pulled out from under the lower bunk on the bunk beds-Hannah’s bed-each night. Sometimes I would crawl up under the Hannah’s bed on the floor in the nine or ten inch space there and sleep under the bed pretending that I was in a cave, and there were bats after me each time Missy or Hannah shifted on the above bunks. The ceiling above me when I slept under the bed consisted of a plywood graffiti board, which over time had more and more and more wrote or colored on it. Our bedroom closet actually had a door on it, which was something I took for granted until we moved to our other homes…I would crawl in the corner of it behind the hanging clothes, close the folding wood panel door and hide when Mom or Dad or one of the older kids would call me to do chores or ‘help’ cook in the kitchen [which I had learned young meant that I was there just to wash the dishes]. Our sheetrock walls were full of pushpin holes as our tack boards were always too full to hold all our latest drawings, paintings, pictures and cards. Dad would fuss at us about putting tacks or pushpins into the wall, and I remember when we were trying to sell the house that he came in and had to patch quite a few areas of sheetrock thanks to us not listening to him. I had this feeling of aversion each time I had to help clean the upstairs bathroom. The tall elongated toilet was a horror to me, and I never, ever, if I could help it used the upstairs bathroom when I had to perform my ablutions. I always took the long journey down the twenty two stairs to the smaller, daintier commode in the downstairs bathroom with its beautiful wooden cover and small round seat that fit my bottom just right. One night I woke up on my green pallet and felt like I was going to be sick so I headed downstairs as fast as I could. I knew I couldn’t, or wouldn’t stare right into the face of the horrible toilet upstairs. I didn’t make it all the way to the bathroom, and as soon as I got by the computer closet my stomach revolted. I promise I didn’t want to have to go wake Dad up at two in the morning to come clean up the mess that was on his beautiful hardwood floor, but hey, a girls got to do what a girls got to do. As he was down on his hands and knees with the Pine Sol and a bucket I tried to explain to him why I didn’t do my ‘business’ upstairs, but I’m afraid he didn’t understand. I finally got over my fear of that toilet, but it took a year or two. The ‘computer closet’ was a place of fun, games, tears and sorrows. When we started school we would always have schoolwork to do on the computer that was a lot of fun, then stuff that wasn’t so much fun, and then the worst favorite of all. For everyone it was different, I remember Missy absolutely loved her piano lessons that the computer gave her, and the little piano keyboard that hooked up to the computer always fascinated me. Hannah HATED typing class, and Mavis Beacon always stared down her nose at the end of each class, and with her computerized voice said ‘practice makes perfect, how about another try?’ I loved my math games that I got for Christmas one year from Auntie Coach, and each new level I gained was applauded greatly by the little brothers who always crowded around to watch. Matter of fact, any time when anyone was on the computer for any type of game or anything interesting there was ALWAYS a group watching, that is until Mom came into the room and they would all scatter back to their respective school areas. “The computer is NOT a spectators sport!“ she would say. When I first started learning how to read and how that vowels sounded with the rest of the alphabet I used the worn blue cards and they would spread around me in an endless sea of undiscovered letters and words. I would sigh and fuss and fight against learning anything, but once I did learn how to read I took off reading everything in sight and only than did the computer catch me with the reality of how much I could learn with it now that I could read. My older sister Hannah was handy to have around when I was searching out a new book to read in our library in the loft. “This is a good one,” she would say, and if I didn’t stop her than she would tell me the whole story from beginning to end and than say “now you read it” even though I already knew the plot. Hannah was a wonderful story teller, we would be in bed supposed to be going to sleep and she would whisper a fairy tale that she made up during the day to me down below her on my pallet. Missy would be in the top bunk and tell us to “shush” but eventually she would even listen, though she pretended not to. The beautiful girls, castles, battles and dungeons that she wove into her stories were the fruit of an imaginative mind. The ‘dungeon’ in our home was the basement. It was split into two sides with the steps from upstairs coming down right in the middle. One side was deemed Daddy’s side, with his tool benches, noisy air compressor and old furniture that he was always going to fix and never did crowding up against the block walls, and almost entirely covering the cement floor. Once in a while he would go on a neat streak and everything would be in its allotted place, but most of the time it was just piled hither and yon and messy as could be. The opposite side of the basement was Momma’s side except for the small room that was built in as Dad’s office where the tall brown humidifier stood guard over his stacks of papers. The big monster deep freezer was against the wall with coat racks hung up one side of it full of winter coats for all the family. Above it were slung the life jackets and swimming gear that we hardly ever used, but had ‘just in case’. Moms sewing tables were piled high with fabric, patterns, pins and needles, and many an unfinished garment. Against the back wall were the well used washer and dryer, laundry sink, and the piles of laundry to be washed. The old yellow folding table and ironing board were right beside the door that led out into the backyard. Adam and I played hide and go seek down in the basement a lot on rainy days or even when we were both hiding from chores. We were true partners in crime. The little hideaway under the steps was always left untouched until Adam and I found the little door and took the hearth broom down there and swept it free of the sawdust and trash that had accumulated since the last time anyone had cared to be in there. We were still small enough to crawl in there, and we would take our flashlights and play for hours in that little cubby. I remember when Mom determined that I was old enough to learn how to sew. I was either eight or nine, and she gave me a piece of paper with lines drawn on it, sat me down in front of the sewing machine in the basement and showed me how to follow the guide. Now to me the sewing machine had always been a scary thing, the flashing needle going so fast you couldn’t keep track, and Mom had told us a spooky story about how the needle went through her finger one time, all the way through! So I approached it with shaking fingers and biting my lip with concentration I sewed my paper lines with the threadless needle. The small holes that I poked with the quickly punching needle seemed to pass Moms inspection so next I had a maze with turns to make, than swerving curves and then I got a piece of cloth with a threaded needle and made my first REAL seam! After I learned how to sew with a machine, and to make a few wobbly stitches by hand I took off sewing my own creations. I astounded and shocked Mom one day by showing up in her bedroom doorway in my own ‘designer’ dress. My handiwork definitely had her in awe, but what kind of awe Im still not too sure of. The purple and white flowered cotton I had made into the bodice, with brown and cranberry checkered sleeves and a black seersucker skirt. I had lined the bodice, put some frilly lace around the sleeves, and even hemmed up the skirt and I was proud as proud could be. What Mom saw however, was something different. The black fabric was supposed to be blocks for a quilt for Adam, the hemming was six inches higher on one side than the other, one sleeve was skin tight and elbow length and the other was way too big and down past my fingers, and the neckline was scandalously low. But I WAS learning! Grammy came down a few times in my while we still lived on Bluff View Road to visit, and while she was there she would always give us girls some kind of sewing craft to do to teach us more about the craft of sewing. She was after all the owner of the Sew Crazy store in Boston! She knew her stuff! Dads side of the basement was Matthew’s favorite haunt in his younger days. I remember when he was eleven or twelve he boasted how he was going to build a robot! The rest of us children crowded around each time he went to work. His ‘body’ for the robot was going to be a round fish tank, and it was going to be powered by two tiny electric engines. Scattered pieces of wire from miscellaneous electronic discards were wired and cut, cut and wired. He swore up and down that it would walk, talk, pick up things and follow him around like a little dog. Though he never finished his ‘robot’ I had all faith in him that he would get it made one day, I mean big brothers can do ANYTHING they set their mind to, right? The one acre that our home sat on was never big enough to contain all eight of us children. We would always be out roaming the woods and creeks that bordered our property line. Off to the back of the chicken coop was a trail that we had worn out to our first big ‘camp’ back about a quarter of a mile through the ‘dense forests of the wasteland’ and our imaginations took us anywhere in the world that we wanted to go when we were deep in the unexplored. Mom took us back there the first time, we were studying Indians and the westward expansion in school. We had Indian costumes we had made out of upholstery material, and painted with fabric paints. Headdresses for the boys were covered with chicken feathers, and each of our unique names were printed on our headbands. Mom took us back through the woods to a place that was slightly cleared in a circle of trees. We found a large branch leaning down off a tree and built a lean-to, covered the upright branches with smaller branches, than armloads of leaves on that, and some smaller branches to hold the leaves on. When you went inside it smelled musty and woodsy, and you could not see on speck of sunshine through our master workmanship of the lean-to. The next time we went out there we went armed with cast iron skillets, dressed in our denim and prairie dresses. With a ring of rocks we built a fire circle and built a fire, Mom telling us all stories of how this was how they had to set up camp each night on the Oregon trail, and had to ‘rough it’ in the wilds. We felt close to the earth and very tough in those times, cooking our own venison steaks over the fire on a stick, and baking potatoes in foil in the hot ashes. These times were the beginning of our ‘release’ into the unknown of the woods, camp building and exploration. Mom taught us how to do it, but I’m sure by the time we were out there every day, a mile or two out from the house when she was calling us to do our chores and we couldn’t hear her, I’m sure she began to wish she hadn’t shown us how to ‘rough it’ as she put it. Maybe not, but it’s a possibility… ‘DaddyVille’ was right off the back of our little acre we called home. There were huge rocks that slid off down to a dainty little creek, mud holes, grapevine forests, huge trees with low limbs to climb on, and a variety of wonderland excitement for the group of southern Colvin kids. We LOVED it out there! I remember one time that Missy, Hannah and I were going to build a log cabin, just like they used to in the old times, right? So we snuck Daddy’s little saw out of the basement and for thee or four days strait cut down small saplings [all that we could handle were the small ones] and drug them down the creek line to a slightly cleared area where the water was calmer. After we had stock piled about thirty of them we decided to start building. Missy stripped down to here pantaloons and mixed mud to stick in-between the ‘logs’ while Hannah and I stacked them and tied them together at the corners with purple yarn-our do it all tool for everything. Yarn that is. We never did complete that project, but we sure did get muddy. Missy was the only smart one, her dress was pristine compared to ours. But we had a lot of fun together working on our ‘log cabin’. Occasionally ‘DaddyVille’ hosted circuses that consisted of Hannah’s ballet dancing, Adam’s ‘strong man act’, Missy’s flip upside down on the grapevines, my hula dance and Matthews ‘heap big chief sit on fire and put it out’ which was by FAR the best act! We ran an extension cord out with one of Mom’s little fake candle lights under a pile of sticks. Matthew would ‘sit’ on the fire while someone on the other end would pull the plug! Fascinating! We would charge twenty five or thirty cents to get in, and sometimes Missy would have an art booth set up, where for ten cents she would draw a portrait of the customer. Hannah would bake some sweets and sell them for a quarter and occasionally we would sell some beadwork or bookmarks that Hannah and I would make before the big occasion. ‘DaddyVille’ was discarded when us children got older, the huge rocks got smaller or we got bigger, but regardless it didn’t hold as much attraction as it did before. Adam and I found two huge trees of the side of our property that had large grapevines climbing up them, and we would scramble all over those trees for hours like little monkeys. We would hide far up in the leaves where no one could see us, we would draw plans for tree houses, and pool our money for the wood we would need to buy to build them. Then one day Adam found the extending grapevine that was like a seven foot wide trapeze. Missy had been allowed to come up into ‘our’ tree that day, and she and Adam went out on the ‘trapeze’ like little squirrels while I stood back on my good sturdy limb and watched them on the wobbly vine that was not really big enough for both of them. They called me to come out, and Adam flung his legs over the branch and hung upside down swinging back and forth waving his arms and saying ‘come on Hope, don’t be a scaredy cat!’ I wasn’t being a scaredy cat, but I wasn’t about to go out on that vine. Missy came back to my solid branch and dared me to do it, and I said no. Then they had to go and double dog dare me, so I HAD to do it not to look bad in their eyes! I mean, come on now, Adam was my LITTLE brother and HE had done it, so why couldn’t I? My accumulated nine years of wisdom told me that Id better do it, so out I went, and I flopped my legs over and hung upside down too, my bloomers shining the whole world, but I DID do it! I was so proud of myself! I went to swing myself back up on the vine and lost my leg power and fell about ten feet down to the ground below. Now if it had just been dirt, I may have not had to deal with the emergency room, and going to see a specialist in Chattanooga and wearing a sling for the next six months. But it was bedrock under about an inch of dirt and I landed on my left shoulder and felt something pop. Everybody swore I was ok, even though I cried my way into the house and screamed when Mom tried to move my arm. Finally Daddy loaded me up and took me to the dreaded Emergency Room. I had never before felt so important as I did when we finally made it back home about two o’clock in the morning with a sling and a strap holding my arm down, and being treated like an invalid for the next month and a half because ‘Hope has broken her arm’. I was the first Colvin kid to ever have broken a bone, and I felt like I had received the purple heart or something I got so much attention out of it. Hannah and I even won the Christmas ‘decorate your room’ contest with me dressed up as Mary with a sling, and Titus as ‘baby Jesus’. I had never heard of Mary wearing a sling before, but since we won I didn’t care! Christmas at the Colvin home was always an anticipated event. We had all kinds of neat projects to do that Mom came up with or that she pulled out of her endless files of home schooling crafts. We would do a play one Christmas, than next year we would memorize the complete Christmas story for Daddy’s Christmas gift to recite in perfect unison before being allowed to attack the gifts that were piled high under the tree. It was always something different we would do to lead up to Christmas, whether it was lots of Christmas baking, with each kid getting to pick a different recipe to bake, or the Twelve Days of Christmas that Mom came up with for each day that led up to Christmas. When it came time to find a Christmas tree there were a couple of years that Dad would put five dollars on the mantel and whoever could find the nicest pine, spruce or cedar for us to chop down and set up in the house they would be rewarded with a crisp five dollar bill-a lot of money to the Colvin kids! We would all bundle up and head out with the axe and the hatchet [for the smaller kids who couldn’t heft the axe] to the place where the tree was and each one of us would get a turn chopping away at the acidy smelling trunk of our Christmas tree. Once it was set up in the house in its bucket of rocks and water we would unpack the hundreds of little ornaments that we had accumulated over the years from gifts, Aunty Couch, and the ones that we had made ourselves, we would all get a chance to help dangle them from the lofty branches. Once the tree was finally set up in the house it was a completely different atmosphere, it was like Christmas was finally REALLY here, the tree helped bring some festivity into the home. From the loft above at nighttime we would watch the little colored lights glisten off of its shiny ornaments and count off another day until Christmas. The loft was not really a loft, but since it only covered a half of the upstairs, and the rest was open for a tall cathedral ceiling from the downstairs we had always called it the loft. The rail that ran from the end of the loft to the top of the stairs had spaces just big enough to dangle your legs through and ‘spy’ on people below. I remember when the Herald Newspaper reporter came to interview Momma and Daddy that we were all told strictly to stay upstairs in our bedrooms. Well, I spied through the railing upstairs in the loft, and was rewarded with the reporters wave after she noticed me up there. I still remember the picture that she picked to go with her article in the paper just HAD to be the one that I had my fingers stuck up behind Adam’s head. Ahh me…I never will grow up I suppose… One day a week or so before Easter Sunday Mom had sat down to sew, and she had said that she was going to hopefully finish our Easter dresses. We three girls were excited as could be and watched from behind her and popped in and out all day to watch her work her magic to make us some dainty dresses for the holiday. She had the same print for all of us, just in different colors. Mine was a dark cranberry, Missy’s was a pastel blue and Hannah’s was a bright red and all three had a dainty white flower print on the colored background. She had planned to put ruffled lace around each of our collars, and at the waist of all three dresses a white belt band, and the hem was going to be graced with a full white ruffle. We couldn’t wait for our dresses! Well, the day went by faster than she thought and she didn’t get them done, so we went to bed that night disappointed that the dresses were not done, but looking forward to their completion tomorrow. The next day came with an explosion. Mom came upstairs angrily with a pretty little collar scrunched up in her hand and my breath caught when I saw that it was MY color! The hour didn’t end until Dad had ALL of us kids lined up downstairs in the basement by the ironing board and sewing table. Exhibition A consisted of my poor lil collar, with a big bleached out spot. The interrogation of all of us brought no culprit to light, and my frustrated tears ran unheeded when my argument ‘why would I do it! It was MY dress’s collar’ went unbelieved by my parents. No one ever stepped forward as the one who had ruined the collar, and Mom had to make a new one for my Easter dress. They were just as pretty as we could have imagined, but ever time I smoothed my collar out, the injustice of whoever had ruined the first one caught me tight in its bitter grip. I outgrew the dress eventually, but I have never forgotten that memory. The first garden I remember was the long narrow raised beds that Dad built for Mom. The tall row of peas on the back of one of them were my chore, to pick every ripe pod before it got too big. The next year Momma let me have about a four foot by two and a half foot space that I outlined with small rocks and made my own ‘garden’ in. It consisted of some straggly zinnia plants which were my favorite flower, two sunflowers and four bean plants. I LOVED taking care of my OWN garden, but when the next year came around and I got to work in the ‘big’ garden, I learned to despise it. I was in charge of one of the endless fifty foot rows of beans. I loved it when we planted them, dropping the red coated seed into the hungry furrows that Dad marked out with his hoe. I loved covering the seeds up and tamping it solid with my little bare toes. I loved watching the little seed heads pop out of the dark earth after a spring rain and grow into a strong little plant. Then came the weeds. And I hated it. Then came the beans. And I hated picking them. Every two days they had to be picked. Adam had the next row one over assigned to him, and each time we went to pick the rows we would be complaining back and forth to each other. Little did we know the enormous gardens we would be facing in less than four years, and how we would look back on that little garden we had picked beans in and laugh at how our attitudes had been. That garden was only the beginning. One year we moved the chickens wire fence over to the shiny new red chicken coop that Daddy built, and when the grass began to grow back where the chickens had been so did a lot of vegetables! Mom called it ‘God’s Garden’ since it came up on its own without us planting any seeds, and it grew gigantic with the good chicken fertilizer. We had juicy tomatoes and some beans, a lot of corn and a pea plant or two in there, thanks to the chickens. Or thanks to God, as Mom put it. The chicken coop was a stinky place once the chickens had lived in it long, and it was a nasty job to have to clean it out. Matthew would scoop filthy straw out into the wheelbarrow with his face screwed into the must awful look, but we knew why! It STANK! Every couple of months when the jobs rotated kids I would get the job of gathering eggs. The hens boxes were right at the front of the coop, and Daddy had made a sliding door to get into the nests. One day when I slid it the opposite direction to see if there were any eggs on the far end I came eye to eye with a HUGE snake curled up in one of the nests! I didn’t know what kind it was, all I knew was that it was a SNAKE and it was BIG! I screamed and my egg basket and the eggs went flying to one end of the coop while I went flying out the door at the other end. Matt came to the rescue, he was going to be a big hero and kill the snake with a hoe, but by the time he got his act together and went in there, the snake was gone. Dad said later that he was probably eating the eggs, and my little eyes grew large when I heard that the snakes could swallow the eggs whole! I was sure careful after that whenever I went to gather the eggs. The Colvin’s didn’t go swimming much. Mom liked us to be able to swim somewhere private where folks could retain a little privacy, AND she liked it when there wasn’t a lot of folks swimming around us exposing themselves. So when we DID go swimming it was usually at what we called ’God’s Pond’, a little swimming hole that we had fallen in love with. Dad had discovered it at one time in the past when he was on one of his back road adventures. We loved to go swimming, and since we didn’t do it much whenever we DID go, we went ALL day! I remember one summer day in August, it was a VERY hot Friday afternoon. Missy, Hannah and I got together and made a plan. Dad got home from work and settled into his La-Z-Boy recliner as usual to look over the mail and Mom plopped down next to him for a few minutes to catch him up on our day and he vise versa. Then in come we three girls. We had donned our one piece swim suits and shorts, I had an inflated donut around my waist, and Missy and Hannah had strike signs they had drawn up and taped to the vacuum extensions and were waving over their heads as we marched around Mom and Dad chanting ’We want to swim! We want to swim!’ The signs said something about how God’s Pond was calling, and tomorrow was a good day for it…We got our point across, but it ended up by Mom calling all three of us down and telling us that we had not been very ‘meek and quiet’ about how we did that. But we rejoiced the next day, for it had worked! And I think Mom kind of smiled behind her hand as to how we worked that out! At the Colvin household through the years there were many dogs. So many that I cant remember their names or even the order in which we had them. I remember when I was very young that there were two or three chocolate brown dogs that almost ALWAYS were on the porch, and I would chase them around on my little plastic bike with the big front wheel. Then there was Matt’s dog that we saw got hit with a truck in the road, and broke all of our hearts as Matt wept over the lifeless form of his pup laying in the road. The man that hit the dog was overcome by Matt’s grief, and did all he could to help, carrying the dog off the road and even offering to dig the grave. Then there was the dog that always had Caleb by his side. Caleb even ate the dog food along with the mutt! Then there was Freedom, the dog was so wild I could NEVER forget her name. The psycho Dalmatian that was always tearing at the end of her chain to get loose, but never could. That dog was beautiful, but a terror to my little heart as she NEVER stopped moving at ALL, pawing the air and barking and growling. In my younger days I much preferred Missy’s parakeets to the monstrous growling terrors chained up in the backyard. I liked watching their delicate feet climbing on the edges of the domed cage like it was a jungle jim. Their blue, yellow and green feathers melded together like a living breathing rainbow and I would sit on the edge of Missy’s bed and watch them for hours. Occasionally when she got them out of the cage to trim one wing so they couldn’t fly I would get to hold one, its claws would clamp around my little finger and it would chirp in my face like it didn’t have a care in the world. Bluff View Road ran a little longer than a mile and dead ended right on the bluff. The view at the end of the road was gorgeous, especially at some spots. ‘Memaw’ was a sweet elderly woman that we had adopted sometime through the years, and her house sat right down at the edge of the bluff. There were mounds of rocks and cliffs that led out to a deep ravine. Once you climbed up the opposite side of that deep gully you would be standing on a large flat rocky surface that stretched out to a drop off into the deep valley below with its gorgeous breath taking beauty going on for seemingly endless miles off to the horizon. Sometimes in the deep summer heat there would be blueberries and blackberries ripe and juicy in the rocky clefts of those ledges. ‘Mr. Norman’ lived next door to Memaw, and he had long coops full of pigeons that were constantly coming in, circling, making their landings or taking off once again. There constant cooing and chirping was fascinating to us kids, and Adam and I would ride our bikes down to Memaw’s just for a chance to hopefully see Mr. Norman working with his pigeons and get invited over to get a closer look. Sometimes he would let us hold a pigeon and explain about the small metal band that was clipped around its left leg. There were miniature chickens kept under the pigeon coops-they would clean up after the pigeons, and sometimes there were chicks that followed their miniature mother hen around. The pigeons had their own special places that they were kept in. There were the racing ones, that flew hundreds of miles just to find their way back to Mr. Norman’s home; then there were the mothers sitting on their nests of small brown spotted cream eggs; then there was the place for the younger pigeons to be raised and trained. Mr. Norman’s yard was the best place to see the view of the bluff-his back yard stretched out in an even carpet of perfect green grass all the way to the rocky plunge to the valley below. There were weird rock gardens spotted here and there in the back yard full of interestingly shaped cacti with their groups of prickly pink and purple fruit. Sometimes Mr. Norman’s wife would invite us in for a little Debbie cake or a glass of lemonade. Adam and I got in more trouble for riding our bikes down to the end of the road than ANYTHING else. It would have been fine for us to go IF we asked permission, but there were many times we went without it and got in trouble once we returned. One time we rode down to Memaw’s house-it was at the time she was teaching me how to knit, the complicated twists and turns of the needles and the beautiful pattern that followed the end of each seam always fascinated me. It was afternoon when we left to go see her, and by the time we headed back home it was beginning to get dark. We knew we were in for it, and when we got back there was supper on the table and everybody else eating already. I wish I could say I never went back to Memaw’s or Mr. Normans again without first asking permission, but that just wasn’t so. But our backsides felt what disobedience repaid for the next two or three days. A year or so before we moved away from our home on Bluff View Road Adam decided that he wanted to grow strawberries. He and Dad diligently searched out the best price, the best type to raise in our area and the best place in the yard to set out a spot to put them in. When the much anticipated box arrived in the mail with its ventilation holes in all sides and the smell of earth coming from within Adam’s excitement knew no bounds. It seemed like such a small bundle of roots to be planting in such a big spot that Daddy had tilled up just for those strawberries, but by the time we had planted about half of them I had changed my mind and began to hate those strawberries. There were so MANY plants! But over the next year or two when they began to bring in their sweet luscious fruits I saw that it was worth it. The first freezer box of jam made of those berries was prized and eaten in small portions and fairly worshiped by Adam. When we moved was right when the plants had really got large enough to start bearing and Adam mourned the loss of his strawberry patch. Our clothing constantly changed in the first five or six years of my life. When I was three and four all of us girls wore pants, and tumbled around in the yard with our jeans and shorts on. When I was about six or so I remember Mom starting to wear more dresses and skirts, and making us our first few dresses apiece. Eventually all the pants and shorts were out of us girls closets and dresser drawers and dainty frocks and sturdy denim dresses took their place. Modesty had found its way into the Colvin family. Styles kept changing though, as the skirts found way to dresses, and some questions even arose in my parents minds on head coverings. We had some friends who wore them, and for a very short period we did as well. Dad decided after some diligent searching and study that they were not biblical, although there was nothing wrong with wearing them it was NOT necessary. So, thankfully, that did not last long. Moms sewing abilities got better and better on our little dresses and we began to look forward to each new creation fresh from the sewing machine that she had made just for us! People often would come up to us and ask us ‘are you Amish?’ or ‘are you Mormons?’ because of the way we dressed, ‘No, no,’ Daddy would reply, ‘we are Christians’. Modesty was high on the Colvin’s list of convictions by the time I was eight or nine. Those dresses that Missy had worn, or Hannah had worn, were usually passed down to me. Nothing like a good hand-me-down, right? Wrong! I hope I never voiced what I felt each time Mom went in the fall or early spring to pull out the clothes for us girls for the next season. Usually Missy and Hannah got newer clothes, and I got the old denim jumper that Missy had worn a couple of years previous and worn the knees out in already. Or the dress that I had envied Hannah for because of its beautiful bright colors and vivid flowers on it, that over the use thereof had become quite faded, and by the time I got it there were holes in the pockets and half of the sash had been ripped off one time in a sibling fight. Occasionally there were new clothes, like at Christmas when Grandma Colvin would ALWAYS give each of the girls a new turtleneck two or three sizes too big. Or when Aunt Alice would send us girls some pretty little knit tops that had beautiful roses worked onto the front with silver beads that we were not allowed to wear because it drew too much attention so it was not considered modest. So hand-me-downs were what I was stuck with, although now, looking back, they really were not all that bad. It just gave me more of a desire to learn how to sew so that I could make my OWN clothes one day, the way that I liked them! Y2K came lurking around the corner and everyone in the whole wide world seemed scared silly that the world was going to end, all the computers were going to crash and the world would NEVER be the same again. My heart always seemed to thump out of my chest when I heard people going on and on about how bad it was going to be. Mom took every precaution she could and we canned and canned and canned….we canned EVERYTHING! I remember slicing sausage up and frying it a little, than putting several pieces together in a jar, and canning it! Then kielbasa links too were shoved into the jars and packed together on shelves downstairs that were ‘reserved’ for the awful times that Y2K would bring when no one would EVER be able to get any fresh meat or ANYTHING. Daddy and Matt cut wood all over the place and had it stacked as tall as me back seven or eight stacks on the back of our little acre that we lived on. Then came the years end right after we moved, and we all sat Indian style in front of the TV on the worn carpet in the hunting cabin watching breathless as they dropped the ball in times square and waiting for the electricity to bounce off and every computer in the country to crash. We waited. But it never happened. Everything returned to normal and our plans to have to ‘rough it’ never had to be unfolded. The sausage that we canned sat on the shelves in the pantry for years before we disposed of it. The irony of the whole situation was hilarious back then, and even MORE funny now to look back on. One day Daddy went grocery shopping after work before he came back home. When he pulled into the driveway our eyes popped out of our heads at all the bags he had in the vehicle with him! And they were ALL full of CARROTS! He had found a steal of a deal and had bought the store out. Needless to say the next three days were spent peeling, chopping and canning the monstrous supplies of tuberous carrots. Our long table was filled with one section for me and Adam-we were the peelers; then Hannah, Missy, Matt and Dad got the next section with chopping the carrots up; and Mom was washing them and stuffing them into the hot sterilized canning jars as fast as she could. Our gardens would bring in horrific amounts of cucumbers that we would also spend the day slicing and canning in the hot vinegar and dill weed. Bread and butter pickles were my favorite though-we would get to cut up mounds of onions to go in with the crisp cucumber slices. The smell of the bread and butter brine always made me hungry for pickles. I was always a pickle lover. Daddy even bought me gallon jars of the whole kosher dill pickles for my birthday several years! One of the men that Daddy worked with at La-Z-Boy told him he had some groceries for him one day. So Daddy said ‘well thank you! I will get them tonight after I get off work’. When he came home once again there were stacks and stacks of boxes. But the main thing I remember him bringing home that day were seemingly HUNDREDS of boxes of Captain Crunch breakfast cereal! All of us kids hurrahed for a new breakfast cereal, but after about two months of nonstop Captain Crunch we got downright SICK of the stuff! It was amazing at the quantities that were in the pantry, or on the shelves downstairs! Would there never be an end?! Eventually we ate, or gave away most of the Captain Crunch that had invaded our home, but even today, if I ever see a box of that certain type of breakfast cereal than I will feel slightly ill. Mom always prided herself in her healthy cooking-and rightly so! So few families eat nutritionally and her family was NOT going to be one of those ‘whatever comes from the fast food restaurant’ family’s! I remember being very, very young when I heard the first sounds of a wheat mill grinding flour for homemade bread. We kids grew to LOVE the wonderfulness of a fresh heel cut off a hot loaf of bread fresh from the oven. Mom would drizzle honey over the soft wheat bread and we would devour loaf after loaf. She also made our own breakfast cereal called Granola, with its loads of flax seeds, oatmeal, 7 grain, coconut, chow mien noodles and honey. We would have ‘breakfast cookies’ when we woke up sometimes that were full of good oatmeal and peanut butter and an occasional chocolate chip. Vegetables were highly rated at the Colvin table, and if you didn’t eat your veggies they were packed up tight for you to stare at the next meal. All of us girls learned to cook young-I remember packing pasta shells full of a yummy mixture of spinach and cottage cheese and dribbling it with cheese sauce when I was nine or ten years old! Hannah was an ace in the kitchen, and the cakes and creations that came from her were rightly worshipped by all of us younger minions in the kitchen. Missy was a good cook too, and her cookies and brownies were a treat for us. Once a year the local 4H had a show, where they would auction off chickens that the 4H children had raised and have a judging of the contestants craft entries. Mom would help each of us kids come up with five or six things each to enter-canned goods, dresses we had sewn, hand work, embroidery, knitting, baking….whatever we entered was hand picked and made to look its best before we pinned the little white tag on it in whatever category it was entered in. We would all usually get one or two ribbons of some sort, but one year I got Best of Class in canning! I was ecstatic! I had a huge red, yellow and blue ribbon with my name on the back of it that hung on my tack board for years afterwards. Mr. Keith was a friend of Mom and Dads that always was Matt’s hero. He had row after row after row of neat white beehives and Matt caught the ‘fever’ of wanting to raise some bees and harvest the honey from Mr. Keith. One day about a quarter of a mile up Bluff View Road from our house Matt discovered a big bundle of bees clinging to a branch while he was riding his bike. He raced back to the house and excitedly told Mom about it who promptly called Mr. Keith and let him know. Mr. Keith showed up shortly thereafter and told Matt that this was called a ‘swarm’ of bees, and that they were all covering up the queen bee in the middle of the bundle of bees on the small branch, and protecting her until they found a tree or somewhere else to build their hive. Matt watched in awe as Mr. Keith donned his long white tunic and mesh faced mask and cut the limb down into the wire and wooden box he had prepared for this kind of thing. Over the next couple of years Matt got his own bee hives and raised bees for a couple of years, and even helped Mr. Keith in his exhibitions at ‘the Farm Day’ that Dayton hosted. Eventually, when we moved, his bee addiction faded out, but we all learned a lot about bees and honey in the time he was very involved in them. The first time we went to Dayton’s ‘Farm Day’ we went because Matt had volunteered to help Mr. Keith sell honey and do his bee exhibition. The long rows of huge farm equipment backed the field that the ‘Farm Day’ was set up in. There were smaller booths here and there with baked goods, honey and bees, worm farms, seed exhibits and so forth. There was a kiddy area for the toddlers to go through a maze that taught about how worms lived, and an arena set up with three small horses that you could ride five minutes for a dollar. It was interesting at first, but got boring after just a few minutes for my young brain so I would always end back up at the arena, watching the horses making their ceaseless rounds with different batches of youngsters astride their wide backs. Uncle John’s horse farm was always a favorite place for us children to go-especially Hannah and I. Aunt Glenn was the sweetest old lady on the mountain, she was really our Great Aunt, being Daddy’s Daddy’s sister-in-law, but we always just simply called her ‘Aunt Glenn‘, or ‘Nanny‘. Uncle John died when we were all quite young, I still remember coming home from church one Sunday morning and hearing the news…Hannah had been very close with him, she would go over to their house and read to him for hours and help Aunt Glenn with whatever needed done, so her grief was long and hard. Aunt Glenn was a strong woman who was always doing something, and we loved the trips we took over to her house. In the fall we would go and pick apples from her trees surrounding her house, to be made into apple cider and applesauce for the winter. And in the springtime we would go over and cut rhubarb stalks from her long row of rhubarb plants, and she told us how to fix it into strawberry rhubarb pies and rhubarb sauce. Aunt Glenn always had a gallon jug of strawberry tea in her refrigerator and it was a special treat on our visits over to her house to get a small cup of the luscious nectar. Her hallway was lined with long bookshelves full of Amish novels and all kinds of interesting titles. We would write down what books we took home, and when we came back, ‘check them in’ with her and pick out some new ones to take home. The back ‘storage’ room was another one of Hannah’s and my favorite haunts. There was a special smell in that room, and the chests full of flowered cotton, shelves full of unique curios and strange looking pictures on the wall were interesting to us. When we went home we would always carry that special ‘storage room smell’ with us for a few hours. In the fall Aunt Glenn’s apple trees would droop low to the ground with their burden of juicy fruits, and we would pick them by the bucketful to bring home and make cider, applesauce and canned apples with. Sometimes she would bring out jar after jar of unnamed jellies and jams for us to bring home to eat since ‘nobody else was gonna eat it’ as she said. We would open one to find some really awesome plum jelly, and another to find some kind of nasty tomato sauce. It was always an adventure! Grandma and Grandpa lived just a little piece up the road, and we would go up there at least once a week to visit them. I only remember eating there twice and both times were when I was quite young. Mom told us a few times that it was because Grandma was getting older and couldn’t deal with cooking for all of us, or the mess made, or the noise that WE made. But regardless, she always had some soft ginger cookies or sweet chocolate candy sitting in the cookie jar and candy dish whenever we would come to visit. Grandpa would sit in his recliner working his word search puzzles, or, occasionally he would have his card table set up in front of his recliner with a 5,000 piece puzzle that he was working on. Any of the cousins or aunts or uncles that showed up were allowed to help work his puzzles, but if a piece was missing at the end it was usually one of Steve’s kids fault. Or at least it should have been! Grandma drove the school bus up and down our area every day, and had for years. Missy would get up early enough each morning to flash her light, or wave as Grandmas bus, number fifty-five, would pass by the corner of our house on Bluff View Road. Sometimes when we would visit Grandma she would let us get in the bus and she would show us how the door opened and shut and the horn and other things. I got to ride the bus when she ran her route once, and it will be one of those precious memories of Grandma that I will always remember. Grandpa had four or five HUGE blueberry bushes out back on the corner of the field. When they would come in ripe we would walk out there with our buckets cut out of milk jugs to pick the large fruity berries. Tip, Grandma and Grandpas large collie dog, would yip and yap from inside his fenced in parcel of ground until we would go over and pet him.... [more to come later on...or in a year or two...whenever I get the time.]

My Wedding Day...

Our wedding day dawned crisp and clear, I had planned to sleep well and get up refreshed and ready for a long day that I KNEW would be quite an ordeal to get through. Well, instead I got up at six, finished packing up my few things and drove the Montana over to help Bryan finish up smoking the bbq and make a few tomato cages in the garden. We had rehearsal at eleven, so we needed to finish up a few things first. We gave up on the tomato cages and walked away from the garden exasperated since the wire wasn’t strong enough, even though it had cost plenty. The smoking got done fast, there wasn’t too much work to that, just put it on, pull it off, dump it, cover it, taaaaa-daaaa! Then we pulled the truck around and hosed out the back of it, sprayed it down with cleaner, and hosed that down…it was a mess, and we wanted it clean for out honeymoon trip. As soon as that was done, and relatively dry, we packed out bags and hanging clothes into it, and finally sat down for a minute on the sofa downstairs. Whew. I was already tired! He had thought I was going to take a shower at his place, but I had left everything for that over at the Gidden’s, so I drove back over there at about ten-thirty to take a fast and furious scrub all over, I even shaved my legs pretty good in about four minutes! Now THAT takes talent!

At about five til eleven I emerged from the apartment downstairs, lugging my last two bags behind me, and my wedding dress over my shoulder, ready to RUSH to the church that is about five minutes down the road. Pastor Tim was working on his Suburban with Aaron and Sarah, and Sarah rushed upstairs to get some shoes on so that she could come on ahead with me. As I stashed my toiletry bag in the back seat of the van, and draped my wedding dress over one of the front seats, I turned and looked at the place that had been home for almost two and a half months. All I could see of my Pastor was his legs sticking out the door of the vehicle he was working on. Wow. What a lot I owed to that man. My mind traveled back over the last few months, memory after memory, tear after tear, change after change filling my mind, but….I jerked back to the present and jumped into the van, tearing down the driveway at breakneck speed, I only had a few minutes to get there to be on time! As I swerved around the curves by the water I caught a glimpse of Sarah’s white face in the passenger seat, oops! Some law abiding citizen I was! I slowed down enough to give the poor girl another hope of life, and we soon arrived at the church.

Not everyone was there for the rehearsal, so I went into the sanctuary with my daisies and tulle to do a bit of decorating. I didn’t want a whole lot of floof and poof everywhere, but I did want a little up at the front, soooo….I arranged this and that and the other, but nothing really looked right until Kathy came and suggested we move the altar. Then it all fell in place. When we were done there was a cloud of tulle and daises right in front of the pulpit, graceful silver candlesticks with white candles, and daises in the windows. Simple and perfect. Just what I had wanted. Bryan came in the church right then, and we both plopped down on the front pew to await the rest of the wedding party, and to rest some. I remember thinking that my hair was a frizzy mess, my face was blotchy and red since I had been sun burnt the day before and hadn’t put any make-up on, my skirt was wrinkled, my back hurt, my toenails were not painted very well….but then Bryan leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You look very pretty.” Hmm, I felt a little better.

Soon everyone was there, and it was time to begin, so as Pop and Ma started down the aisle I gave Krystal my 1 gigabyte memory card for her to take pictures on for me, and as Momma Lisa and Daddy Gerald walked down I finally settled in to prepare myself for the actual ceremony. Jonathan didn’t have his little bridesmaid with him since she would arrive late, so he went down the aisle pretty uncertainly, not sure that he was doing it al right. Laughter and teasing followed the next couple down the aisle as Kelsey held onto Sebastian’s arm, both of them red faced as could be, but obviously enjoying it. Tiffany glided down the aisle alone, perfectly stepping along slow and elegant. The doors shut on me and Daddy Gerald, and as I took his arm I looked up at him and told him once again thanks for being willing to do this, and thanked him profusely for all that he and Mom Lisa had done for me in the past several months…There was no-one I would rather walk me down the aisle except my own father, and Daddy Gerald knew that, but felt honored to stand in that place since Dad wouldn’t. The doors slowly opened and we walked down the aisle, dum dum da dum, to the front where Preacher Larry took Bryan and I through everything that we were gonna do, ring exchanging, vows, how to hold hands, and all that fun stuff. Then came the exit, and as we turned around to face the ‘congregation’ [which consisted of seven Blake kids and Momma Lisa] and Preacher Larry said we could now go, Bryan took him at his word. Gripping my hand even tighter than before he said, “lets go!” Lord help, if I had known what he meant, I would have slipped my flip-flops off first cause off he took! We RAN to the back of the church, me trying to keep my feet in my flops, and laughing my head off at the same time.

Kathy got all the females of the wedding party together and told us that she wanted pictures before the ceremony and to go get ready. Now, listen. It was already one o’clock. The wedding was supposed to be at TWO. You’ve got three bridesmaids and a bride to get ready in half an hour? For pictures? Before a ceremony??? Hmm…We were not sure that would work, but we hurried out to the fellowship hall and began to get ready. I think we all started with make-up, I put my base on, and Tiffany did eye-shadow while Momma Lisa did blush, while I put my hair in hot stix. We had a TIME getting electricity in the bathroom, we had hot stix and rollers to heat up, but none of the plugs were shooting juice, so we ended up getting Preacher Larry in the girls bathroom [yes, the girls bathroom] to fix them. He got them working somehow, and we got our hair stuff blisteringly hot. That all took a half hour, so we knew that no pictures would be made before the ceremony, but we still tried to hurry. Tiffany put make-up on Kelsey and then herself, and I pulled the rollers out of my hair and shook it out the way I wanted it. After checking out my make-up in the mirror close up, and adding some mascara, I headed to the toilet stall to change into my dress…as the folds of white fabric fell around my shoulders down to the floor I felt a calm come over me…I was ready for this to be over, but I was looking forward to enjoying every single moment of it as it came. This was my day. I called Tiffany in to button up the top eight buttons that I couldn’t reach, and as I stepped out, in my silver high heels and white satin everyone in the ladies room went on and on about how beautiful my dress was, and Momma Lisa started to cry and said “Oh Hope you are such a beautiful bride!” She helped pin my veil on as I clasped on the pearl necklace that Matt had given me, and hooked in my ears the new silver pearl drop earrings I had bought just for today.

As I looked into the mirror I gasped at how well everything fit together…the smiling faces of my bridesmaids were looking back at me on either side of the mirror too, with their mothers in the background dripping tears and smiles. Tiffany, Kelsey and I all had gone shoe shopping together, so we all had the same shoes on, and before we left the ladies room we got a foot picture. They looked so good in their green skirts and white shirts and Tiffany had done an AWESOME job on applying the make-up, they were beautiful! I’m sure we all felt special as we left the bathroom and headed over to the church, Kathy holding my train up free from the grass as we went.

It was about fifteen minutes until the ceremony was supposed to start, so my bridesmaids and I went into the ladies room in the church to await the rest of the visitors to get seated and it was time to begin. Sara had showed up and got into her green skirt as well, and Anna was an adorable flower girl in a vintage creamy lace dress. They had got their hair put up professionally and they looked absolutely adorable. I was proud of my soon-to-be nieces.

Missy and Grandma showed up, and Missy told me that Hana was going to be coming but that she would be a few minutes late, so Bryan talked to Pastor Larry and they held the service off fifteen minutes so that Hana could be there for it. I had hoped that she would come because she was my favorite sister and I wanted her to be there so I was glad to hear it, and more than willing to hold off a few minutes. A quick hug was exchanged as she arrived and as soon as everyone was seated Mommy and Daddy Blake went down the aisle with my soon to be in-laws coming right behind them. I peeked around the corner of the door and saw Pastor Larry and the men taking their places in the front of the church as Lavern started tinkling the soft beginnings of the wedding march. Sebastian and Kelsey took off down the aisle, and then Sara and Jonathan behind them. Tiffany gracefully drifted down the aisle next, and tears sprang to my eyes as I thought of all that we had been through together over the past several months, and before that, the past several years. She truly was an honorable friend, and I was so glad that she was my maid-of-honor…Kathy’s granddaughters rolled the filmy aisle runner down between the pews all the way to the altar as Anna got her basket of rose petals ready and started down the runner dropping handfuls of flowers as she went with a sweet shy smile on her face. The doors closed behind her as she went into the sanctuary and Daddy Gerald and I took our places behind them. I tucked my hand in the crook of his arm and looked up at him again and thanked him…words couldn’t get across to him what I wanted to say, so all I could say was ‘thank you’. My sweet crazy adopted father, boy was he a mess, but I sure did appreciate all he and Momma Lisa had done for me…I was blessed that he was willing to walk me down the aisle.

The cue came, dum dum da dummmmm, and the doors swung open wide and we started our slow walk down towards the front of the sanctuary, towards my Bryan, my love, my soon to be husband, the one that I had dreamt about in my younger days and now was there, at the end of the aisle, ready to bind his heart with mine for the rest of our days together. The people on either side of us rose to their feet as we walked forward, people I loved, friends through the years, family by blood, Bryans friends that I didn’t even know, but still stood in honor of me as I walked towards him…none else mattered now, as we neared the front, no one else was in my scope but him…Pastor Larry started out ‘we are gathered together this day…’ and prayed. Then Daddy Gerald put my hand into Bryan’s and we said our vows, ‘til death do we part’…’in sickness, in health, for rich, for poorer…’ At the time I didn’t know that within two weeks Bryan would be deathly ill, and almost die. I didn’t know that we would struggle financially almost every step of the way. But regardless I vowed that I would stand by him through it all, and he did the same to me.

‘I hold in my hands these beautiful rings’ Pastor Larry started. Bryan chuckled and I almost cracked up, we had already spoken to each other about how corny that sounded, but as we slid the rings on each others hands as a representation of the vows that we had just made and the love that we held for each other it didn’t matter. It was beautiful. As we bowed our heads for the closing prayer Bryan softly prayed in my ear for us, our lives together while Pastor Larry prayed over us. It seemed as if it were just me and him, holding hands and praying to the heavenly Father over our future. As Pastor Larry ended his prayer with a fervent ‘Amen’ he looked down at Bryan and said, ‘you may now kiss the bride!’ ‘May I now present to you Mr and Mrs Bryan Biggs!‘ As the recessional music played and we stepped freely towards the back of the church with our friends and family clapping and congratulating us I looked up at the face of my new husband and anticipated the days to come, living and working with this man whom I had come to love…

Yes the reception was beautiful, the cake was GORGEOUS, Kathy did a wonderful job. Yes, I did spill my punch, and NO, I did not smear cake all over my new hubby’s face, there was an agreement we had made before our wedding day! And as we took off in our painted up ranger that was plastered with banners and signs and tin cans I was glad to be through with it all…it was beautiful…it was perfect…it was my wedding day…

Gardens...

As far back as I can remember we have always had a garden. And where I couldn’t remember us having one, my older siblings do remember. At first, the biggest garden I remember us having was a bout fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. HUGE. I mean, GIANT! I was seven, and that was a BIG place, especially when I had to weed one whole fifty foot long row of green beans. Then once they started bearing, I had to pick them too! All throughout my life I had those long dirt rows staring me in the face, starting out furrows, waiting eagerly for the hands that would drop the seeds, one by one, into the small furrow. Once the dirt enveloped the seed the easiest part of the gardening was done. It was after the small shoots began to pop out of the dirt that we had the battle begin. Weed after weed was pulled, clod after clod of dirt was broken up because Mom never allowed a clump in her garden; bucket upon bucket of water was hauled from the pond by hand up the hill to the never ending rows.
The largest garden that I ever worked in with my family was the three acre one that we planted in 2007. We had corn in two of the acres, and the rest was potatoes, maters, beans, squash, melons, peas, peppers, strawberries, asparagus and a bunch of different herbs.
I remember the day that we planted that two acres of corn. No, its not a lot of corn, compared to what the old timers used to plant each year, or the mountain folks would put in the ground just as a matter of course, but to me, as I stood there barefooted surrounded by empty dirt, watching Adam cut row after row after row out with the tractor and plow, I felt small. Very small. As we gathered up buckets filled with the powdery red seed in it, and started hauling wheelbarrow loads of mushroom compost up to the first row, I realized that this was gonna take a WHILE.
Seven hours later. Halfway through. Burnt as red as a overripe mater. Worn out. And just halfway, get that? HALFWAY through? The sun was out in full force that day, I remember shading my eyes with my hand to look up at the sky and not seeing ONE cloud.
There were seven of us working out there. Once an hour Noah would take a break to run down to the house and bring up a bucket full of fresh cool water and a dipper to drink it with. After a few hours had gone by there was more water being poured on our heads then there was going down our thirsty throats.
Then we were finished. We all stood back with our hands on our hips at the edge of the field, where the green met brown. Nasty filthy sweat rags were hanging out of the boys limp overall pockets, and my skirt was full of dust and filth. But looking over that field, at the two acres of corn there was such a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done, that we could look at each other and say, ‘it was worth it’. There’s nothing like putting in a good hard day of labor to accomplish something big like that.

A Stitch in Time...

I remember when I first began to learn to sew. When I was six I asked Mom if I could help her while she
was sewing on the multitudes of heaps of mending and sewing that she attacked each day in the basement. Surrounded by heating pipes, winter clothes storage, shelves full of row upon row of home canned goods and the never ceasing washing machine and dryer, I made my first few stitches on a piece of rough canvas. Soon Mom had me embroidering and cross stitching, which I enjoyed doing since I had always loved drawing and painting, this was just another way of expressing the creative imagination by needlepoint. My first masterpiece was in cross-stitching, with wobbly black lettering that read “home is where the heart is”. I hung that with pride on the end of my bed, which just so happened to be the bottom bunk, and pointed it out to anyone and everyone who passed by. But soon, after a few of these creations, I began to want to make something useful.
Then I remember when I was around nine, sitting on the stool that Dad had made for one of the older kids when they were a baby, my knees to my chin, watching Mom work with the sewing machine. The flying needle, the oily smell, the row after row of tight neat stitches and the finished garment all made me want to be as able as her to make something neat and pretty, but in my own way. The dresses and pinafores she made for me were nice, and they were clothes, I was always sternly told to be ‘thankful for having clothes at all, some little girls don’t have anything but rags to cover their birthday suit’. And I was thankful. I was thankful for my mother sitting there for hours on that hard folding chair sewing the bloomers and skirts that I wore each day of my childhood. Yet…I wanted to pick out my own kind of fabric, not only printed cotton, my own pattern, my own style and my own designs. I wanted to create something of my own FOR my own that would express who I was.
So. One day I took my embroidery needle, and a cone of the smooth white thread that always hung on the wall next to the sewing table, along with every other color of the rainbow, and headed to the privacy of my room. I closed and locked the door, and took stock of what I needed. Hana read, undisturbed on the bunk above mine, as always her mind was in another place, and in another time. Very rarely did I ever break through her time traveling among the pages of a book. I grabbed my box of fabric scraps and set to work on my own masterpiece. My silver scissors snipped and cut, and my little envelope full of yellow headed pins were stuck every which away in the purple, pink and blue fabric.
When I walked into the living room in my creation and pivoted in front of Mom, pride oozing from every pore of my nine year old body, she definitely stood in awe of what I had done. The purple and white flowered cotton had been made into the bodice, with brown and cranberry checkered sleeves and a black seersucker skirt. I had lined the bodice, put some frilly lace around the sleeves, and even hemmed up the skirt and I was proud as proud could be. What Mom saw however, was something different. The black fabric was supposed to be blocks for a quilt for Adam, the hemming was six inches higher on one side than the other, one sleeve was skin tight and elbow length and the other was way too big and down to my wrist, and the neckline was scandalously low.
I suppose after that day I didn’t use any more of her fabric without asking her first, and that dress was only used for dress-up when I was playing in my room. But it was a beginning! Even from that first dress until now, I still don’t use a pattern when I’m cutting out most of my creations. But now, after years of sewing hundreds of dresses, poking thousands of pins and pulling out what seems like millions of stitches, I don’t have to worry about the process-just have to concentrate on finishing. The outcome is worth it all…