remember

willy wonka

the only movie i was afraid of as a child was willy wonka & the chocolate factory. i got to the part where the boy went down the bathtub drain, and i got scared and wouldn't watch any further. to this day i've not seen the end.

ain't that pitiful?

in fourth grade i spent many hours reading. so many, in fact, that i frequently gave up my recess to stay inside and finish an interesting book. one of my classmates, kenneth, commented to my teacher mrs. means and me that i was missing a good dodge ball game for this silly pastime, finishing his expression of amazement with "she's missing recess! ain't that pitiful?"

go cardinals

i was a cheerleader in high school and our school mascot was the cardinal. i remember performing at pep rallys, winning the spirit stick at summer camp, wearing sweaters and long socks with our skirts for the cold football games, and riding in the homecoming parade. my european friends think cheerleading is silly (well so do many of my american friends) and i can see where they are coming from, but i still have to admit i enjoyed it.

a picture is worth a thousand words.

kansas history

raleigh and i spent many hours exploring the countryside around our kansas home. there was a creek that spread its fingers through the parched flat land around our house, and that creek provided hours of fishing, wading and fodder for our young imaginations. among other treasures on the creekbed, raleigh and i found the wheel and base from an old horse and buggy and a rotten model-t ford, rusty and forgotten.

two for a penny

when we moved to conway springs, we bought a house five miles outside of town. we called it springgrove. it was a big old farmhouse from the turn of the century, on five acres of land. it sounds wonderful, and by the time my parents moved to missouri ten years later, it was. but when we arrived, it needed a lot of attention.

throughout the time we lived in kansas, my parents worked on that house. dad closed in the front porch, making it into a room. he built a large bedroom off the back. he closed in the screened-in back porch and we used it for a breakfast nook. we reshingled. we scraped and painted. we planted trees and lilacs and a large vegetable garden.

raleigh and i did our part in the house makeover too. when we moved to springgrove, none of us could walk outside barefoot for fear of tearing holes in our feet. glass, nails and other sharp objects covered the ground surrounding the house. i don't know how so much trash and other bits and pieces could get into the soil, but there were sharp objects every square inch of the property. raleigh and i earned our spending money the first summer in kansas, sitting on the ground and picking those bits up. we collected them in coffee cans and glass jars, and threw them away. mom and dad paid us a penny for every two pieces we collected. in kids' salary, we made a fortune.

coffee can trinkets

samantha is six years my junior. when i was a kid, she was an amazing companion, always chipping in and keeping me company on whatever project i had on the go.

throughout grade school, i had a coffee tin, decorated with stickers on the outside, that i kept full of small trinkets--gum ball machine toys that i no longer wanted, prizes i had won for reading the most books in my class and other small random tidbits. i somehow convinced her through "thank you" bribes of these toys to help me with cleaning my closet, going through papers, creating crafts or re-arranging my bedroom furniture.

wichita summer

before we moved to conway springs, we lived for a while with grandpa petie in wichita. it was the hottest, driest summer on record--so hot that a bunch of cheap indoor thermometers that petie had burst and the mercury exploded out in little balls of silver. raleigh and i spent the summer riding our bikes around the neighborhood and going to free afternoon movies. we walked to the cinema one day to see mary poppins by ourselves.