Juicy bits?
Well, let's see...
Yeah, I got some of those, but I don't think you can hear them.
I think squinney is a great name.
And is that pup not the cutest thing? Smiling at us!!
No, not
that!
Let's hear a nice biography of Sqinney. Enquiring minds want to know!
Here we go.....
"There once was a woman named squinney..."
There once was a woman named Squinney
Was yours for a buck and a penny
Well, I mean I really didn't start off as a woman.
I was born in a hospital. (That's a big building with a lot of rooms, but that's not important right now. )
Anyway, it was a small town hospital in a small town now known for its republican bent. I was the third child born to a cowboy and very young woman that had been lasso'd in by his quick wit, charm and sly smile. The cowboy promised to take her places. He had a smooth voice and played guitar. He took her to the hospital three times in three years.
Then she left him.
Yes, more, more!
In limerick form or not.
So, being as I wasn't a woman yet, I went with Mom, my brother and sister, back to her folks in Missouri. There, she met a fella about 14 years older than herself that had just gotten outta the service. They started dating.
We was livin' with grandma and grandpa on their cow farm, and some of my most vivid memories include my grandmother missing a thumb. Said it was caught in one of those wash tubs with the crank wringer over it when shw was a girl. Just snapped the whole thing off. I had a really hard time thinking about that, but I thought she was really brave.
Grandpa was gruff. He smoked too much and grumbled a lot. I didn't go around him very much because of that but my sister thought he was very funny and would sit on his lap to watch tv after dinner.
The farm house was a musty two story with very narrow stairs to the second floor bedrooms. My sister and I shared a room upstairs across from my brother. He had white mice for pets. I never went in his room.
One morning my grandma came upstairs really early. She was movin' faster than I had ever seen even when she was tryin to catch a hen for dinner. She was all flustered and tryin' to tell us to get downstairs.
I could tell I should run. I thought the mice had gotten outta their cage.
But, no. A tornado had just come through and blown away the whole GD (that's what grandpa said) the whole GD barn he'd just finished building a few days earlier. It was a beautiful barn for the cows. I thought for the longest time that the cows had been blown away right along with it, but Mom says they were okay.
And there was a huge oak tree on the house that had about come right through the roof and into my bed. I cried about the cows. And, I slept on the stairs for a while cause I was still afraid the mice would get out if another tornado came.
My grandparents kept foster kids. I don't know why. One of them, Andy, they adopted. He shot my sister with a BB gun in the butt and she still has a scare.
My great grandparents, Grammy and Grampa on my Moms side, lived just a hundred yards down the country road, but on the other side. They had a dairy farm that to this day is something like the oldest working dairy farm in continous service or something, 'cept now it's run by Moms brother, Uncle Bud.
To get to Grammy's we had to cross a cattle walk at the beginning of the driveway that consisted of pipes laid across the ditch so the cows couldn't cross and get out onto the road. Everyone else ran right across without hesitating. I had to really concentrate and wait and worry and think about how to do it without falling between the pipes. Everybody else got their treats from Grammy first because of that. Sometimes that made me cry. But, I always felt so proud of myself when I finally got across without falling into that dark abyss.
Great story. Waiting to read more.
You are so on a roll. Have you already written this all out, you're just copying and pasting? This is great stuff, truly.
(More!)
Agree. Not to jinx you or anything...
Grammy had a pond at the front of the farm that was full of peacocks, geese, ducks and all sorts of waterfowl. I thought the peacocks were beautiful, and liked when I found feathers that I could keep. Grammy said I could keep what I found, so I did. But, I had to be careful about the geese. They would chase me, and a lot of times I was just in my underwear and whatever dirt I had picked up that day.
My Mom married that guy from the service and we moved to Texas. We lived in an apartment for a while. It smelled like cat pee, but that was okay cause it was close to a little shopping center that we could walk to if we were careful gettin' through the barbed wire fence and the grass had been cut.
One of the stores at the shopping center would let you get things if you had enough green stamps. I loved sitting at the kitchen table licking the stamps and carefully matching them to the squares in the booklets. Finsihing filling a whole book felt really good.
One day Mom said I could pick out something just for me and we would pay for it with the stamps I had been licking. After my brother and sister left for school I held her hand and we crossed the field. I had been thinking so hard on what to get and now I was going to have to decide. We walked in silence.
I got a great big box of pretend plastic china. It had the plates, cups, saucers and a little teapot. It was white with a little blue flower design. As soon as I got home I set it all up on the concrete walk in front of our apartment and had a teaparty all afternoon with my dolls. The sun was just right that day.
Another day my Mom fixed three bean salad. I do not like three bean salad, but I don't think she knew that yet. My new Dad said I had to clean my plate in order to leave the table but the beans made me gag so I couldn't. I sat there all day.
My brother liked doing bad things. One day he did something really bad and my new Dad drove us out by a river and made us all pick our own switches so that if we ever did anything wrong he would spank us with the switch we had picked out ourselves.
sozobe wrote:You are so on a roll. Have you already written this all out, you're just copying and pasting? This is great stuff, truly.
(More!)
No. Not cutting or pasting or checking my spelling. Sorry 'bout that. Obviously my sister still has a scar... not a scare.
