I'm way overdue for posting and I know I missed last week's memory challenge. I'm still in adjustment mode. But there's still a bit of Tuesday left so let's see what we can come up with for stepping inside the way back machine of our childhoods. I'm still working on the yard and I'm still dealing with one person in the neighborhood who is less than thrilled with what we are doing in the yard. So that makes me think about people in my neighborhoods growing up.
For the first ten years or so I lived in my grandmother's house. Ginny was an old lady, older than my grandmother, who lived next door. She made these amazing rot-your-teeth Congo bar cookies that were sort of like a chocolate chip cookie bar. I wore out a hole in the privet hedge between our houses running over to see her after school. After she died or moved the Tuey family moved in. They owned the local Chinese restaurant. Mr. and Mrs Tuey were busy all the time. Grandma took care of baby Timmy. Linda was a few year younger than I was but we played together a lot.The grandmother used to wash vegetables for the restaurant and hang them on the clothesline, sheets of cabbage and kale and who knows what else right in-between baby Timmy's diapers.
On the other side, I only remember the Truitt family. The house had a mother-in-law house behind it but we were never supposed to go into the backyard and bother the person living there. The Truitt's had a lot of kids. Two older boys who were crazy about baseball. Jan, my age, and at least one little brother. Jan and I were sorta best friends for a while until she punched me in the face for no reason I ever understood and then lied about it. Mrs. Truitt used to make American Beauty Cake for our birthdays. She used to put a penny, a nickle, a dime, and a quarter into the batter. I suppose we should have worried about breaking a tooth but we were always just anxious to see who got what money.
Across the street was Grandma Stotts and Gilbert and Hazel Hills. Hazel had some disability and used crutches all the time. She gave piano lessons. Next to them was the deBenedetti family. Lisa deBenedetti was one of my grandmother's best friends. They had a hedge of olives around their front yard and the steepest stairs ever to get up to the front door.
There was a house directly across the street from my grandmother. A duplex with close to the front and another one at the end of the long driveway. The house was white. There wasn't much lawn but there was tree in center of the dirt. I remember Elvira Dorris living there about the time I was in Junior High and we had crushes on Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy.
But that's not what I remember most about that house.
I remember my mother telling me that for a few months my birth father lived in that house. That house across the street from my grandmother.
Every time I went into Elvira's bedroom to play dress-up and let's get married I would wonder, was this my dad's old room?
Your turn. Who were the people in your neighborhood?
Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
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carriep63
Comments
The family that lived next door had a lot of boys--older (probably 13!)--and one use to pop wheelies on his bike going down the street to show off.
The house at the corner had a big lot and lots of overgrown plants and weeds in the front. And geese. It was the scariest, most daring thing to go into their gate & up to the house on Halloween. :)
Oh, we had a goose in the neighborhood too! the old lady that had it had a well in her front yard and I was fascinated by the well but I could never get close to it because of that darn goose!