I remember the age when a child could sit in the front seat, and do so without a belt or harness. The December of my first-grade was one such time. On this particular day, the presence of snow clouds threw a steel grey over the late afternoon, and I welcomed staying in the warm car while my mom joined other …
I grew up in the Swinging Sixties on a suspended wooden seat, pumping hard to kick the sky. While adults talked of riots, assassinations, and a war in Vietnam, I thought of playgrounds, Schwinn bikes, and Charles Schultz. I watched black and white episodes of Bonanza, Andy Griffith, and The Lucy Show at home despite major television companies producing them …
She’d welcomed me before I could get out of my driver’s seat — this beautiful woman whom I had not seen for almost fifty years. We’d once spent an entire year together, she and I. She as teacher — I as her student. Oh the memories of that second grade year. Hippo Holes. Tutti’s Panties. The Snow White play. …
It’s one of those pages of history that a gentler woman wouldn’t relate, but because I’ve always liked a good story better than being genteel, I’m telling it anyway. After all, my mother is no longer beside me telling me to “shush” and the rest of the family has learned to put up with me. You could say that …
Some would say I was isolated, growing-up as I did without siblings at the end of a dusty, dirt road. I suppose we did live off the beaten path. Twenty miles from the local grocer, a thirty-minute walk to our closest neighbor, and surrounded with cotton fields on every side. But this was the typical life of a farm …
Our small town newspaper may have been the last of its kind. A main stay in the community, they not only circulated a weekly, rural chronicle, but their front office also sold Big Chief tablets, mod stationery, and mimeograph paper to the local populace. More than a mere publishing company, the Crosbyton Review was a reflection of our region’s three-thousand-residents …
It was the mid-60s and I was miles away from home underneath my own kitchen table. Twice a year, I took this childhood journey of imagination whenever the new Sears and Roebuck catalog arrived. Not because of the wonder of go-go boots and dropped waists, but because the old catalog now belonged to me. The glamour lay not in the glossy, …
Growing up on the endless, wide spaces of a rural back road, I understood how to sing without knowing a tune, dance without knowing a step, and run without winning a prize. I took for granted the loamy smell of the barnyard floor, the pinkish cast of a dusty salmon sunset and the rugged feel of a jagged horned toad in a …
It was a glorious book cover. Nothing like the paper ones of purple ink and purposive advertising provided by Crosbyton Elementary. Mine was of yellow muslin, heavy enough to take a beating, yet delicate enough to take a stitch. Like a personalized badge of honor, my mother made it for a small girl who resolved not to learn …
Ruth Griffin’s sweet tea always made me wanna shout. Not that I was raised the shoutin’ kind, but mixing seemingly equal amounts of Imperial Cane with pekoe leaves was the nearest I ever got to eating dessert first. When you are five, it’s almost enough to go pentecostal. The Griffin’s had a history with our family long before I …
