Favorite Things

I always liked my dolls. One kind of doll was a Betsy Wetsy doll. She had a bottle and if you put water in the bottle and fed it to her, she would wet her diaper like a baby. I had two Betsy Wetsies. My favorite one one was a bit old and had melted fingers and toes (she was rubber), but I liked to take care of her. I also had other baby dolls and a very pretty doll with blonde curls and a pretty dress. But I liked my Story Book dolls even better. These were little dolls that sometimes had on fancy costumes and sometimes pretty party dresses. They weren't very big, so I had a lot of them in a box. Sometimes they would have weddings (There were a bride and groom).
I also liked paper dolls. I had a whole family, mother and father, grandpa and grandma, and several children. I think they were a farm family. They had several different changes of clothes. We also had movie star paper dolls, but the family was more fun. Sometimes we would make them new clothes out of plain paper which we then colored. My mother was an artist, so she could make really pretty clothes.
I learned to ride a bike when I was about 6 years old. It was a 24 inch bike, which is pretty big for someone that age, but that's what I had so I used it. I was proud of myself. A little later I had stilts and a pogo stick. It was great fun to walk on the stilts or jump on the pogo stick.
I also got a hula-hoop and loved to make it go round and round. I still like the hula-hoop. Here is a recent picture of me.

One toy that was a real favorite was my little picnic set. It was a small basket (maybe 6 inches by 9 inches) that opened up and held little tiny plates and silverware and also little plastic food models--chicken, peas, etc. You could set the table and put the food on the plates and let the dolls eat it.
A game that we loved to play was called Blockhead. There were a lot of different shaped blocks. The first person put one on the table. The next person had to put one on top of that one. Then the next person put one on top. If the tower fell down, you were out and the game went on until just one person was left.

Rubber Band Rope

One of my favorite games to play on the playground was called rubber band rope. It is easy to make a rubber band rope. You take about 20 rubber bands. The first one you leave in a loop. The second one you fold over so it goes around the first one. The third one you fold over and put through the two ends of the second one. You keep adding more folded-over rubberbands. When you have a rope about 3 feet long, you pull the last rubberband through itself to tie off the end.

Now two people have to hold the ends of the rope, stretching it out so it is taut. They shouldn't pull too hard or the rubber bands will break.
At first they hold it about 2 inches off the ground (ankle height). If you are the jumper, you stand with your back to the rope and jump. First you put one foot over the rope, pulling it toward you with your ankle. Then you put over the second foot the same way. Then you take them back to where you started. You repeat this 5 timrs. If you aren't tangled up in the rope by then, the rope holders raise it to the height of your knees and you do it again. You keep going, jumping at arms length, hip height, waist height, underarm height, shoulder height and head height. After about hip height, you get to hold the rope with one foot while putting the other in and out. Almost no one can kick a foot high enough to pull down the rope from shoulder or head height, but you get to try.
When you miss (step on the rope, tangle it, etc or can't reach the rope with your foot) one of the rope holders gets to jump while you hold the rope. On your next turn, you start at the height you left off at. The game is over when no one can jump at a higher height and the winner is the one who went the highest.

At the Playground

Robert Louis Stevenson asked "How do you like to go up in a swing?".
I liked to very much. Some kids would say that if you swung hard enough you would go over the top of the bar and (if you were lucky) go around without getting hurt. But I never could swing that hard, and I thought you would get hurt. Swings used to have wooden seats, so some kids would stand up and swing really hard. It was fun but dangerous--that's why swings now have soft seats.
The see-saw was pretty much fun. One person sat at each end, and if they weighed about the same amount they could go up and down and up and down. But some kids would get off the see-saw when they were at the bottom, and the person at the top would come down fast! That wasn't good at all.
My favorite playground activity was playing on the jungle-gym. It was made of metal and had lots of bars. You could do somersaults over the bars. You could hang by your knees (or ankles for a minute). You could climb to the top. Sometimes people stood on the top, and sometimes they fell off. I liked to hook my arms around the bar at the top and spin round and round. I was small enough that I would not knock into the other bars. I know exactly what it felt like, and it was wonderful, but I can't imagine how I had the nerve to do it.

LOOKING FOR TREASURE

Once my friend Lisa and I saw some rocks in a hole in the park near us. We thought they were covering the entrance to a cave, and decided we would start digging for treasure. We got some shovels from her house and used them and our hands to take out rocks and dirt from the hole. We worked on our hole for about 3 days. But then Lisa's father came to get us home and saw what we were doing. He got very worried because when you dig a big hole, it might fall in on you and hurt you. He filled in the hole and told use we couldn't dig any more. It was very disappointing, since we never found out if there was treasure.

Another treasure dig was at the end of our driveway.The area at the end of the driveway was dirt and gravel, and I decided to dig for a while. Not too far from the surface I found some shiny white material. I thought it was precious stones. My mom said it was an old toilet that someone had broken up and buried to get rid of it. That was another disappointment.

Once Lisa found a place where someone had buried a beaded belt. We spent a lot of time collecting the little beads from the dirt. We enjoyed sorting them by color and digging out a few more each time we went digging.

Another kind of treasure hunting was to look in the trash in the neighbor's backyards, hoping to find something interesting. It turns out that that is a VERY SILLY thing to do. One time my brother found a bottle of cod-liver oil. That is a smelly fish oil that people used to give to babies because of the vitamins in it. My brother didn't know what it was. He opened it and got it all over himself. He smelled so awful that we didn't want to go near him! Another time, Betty who lived down the street found what she thought was a bottle of soda. It was actually bubble bath. She drank some before she realized that it was really yucky. She could have gotten really very sick. We learned that you should NEVER go hunting in trash or garbage, and you should NEVER drink or eat something that you find (unless your Mommy or Daddy grows it in the garden and gives you permission).
Looking back, I think the best treasures I found were the four-leaf clovers I wrote about the other day.

Poppables

Sorrel.
Sorrel looks a little like three leaf clovers, but the leaves have little scallops. It has little yellow flowers. The most interesting thing about sorrel is that it has little seed pods. When they get ripe, they turn from green to yellowish green. When you touch a ripe one, little seeds pop out. It's really fun to make them pop. When my friends and I used to find them, we would look at them and decide whether we could make them pop. If we thought it was too soon for popping, we would say, "That one is poppable but not probable".

Four Leaf Clover

Four and Five Leaf Clover from my collection.

Today I found two four leaf clovers on my walk to work. I have quite a large collection of four leaf clovers, and a few with five leaves. Usually I spot them as I walk, or I stop for a few minutes to look for them. Most clovers have three leaves, and some people think those with four leaves are good luck. I keep most of mine on page 3000 of the Oxford English Dictionary. They keep better if pressed in a book. I have three of them stuck up on the wall of my cublicle at work, but they are turning a sort of brownish color from getting too much light.
When I was little, I sometimes would find a four leaf clover while I was standing on my hands in the backyard. My eyes would be close to the ground so I could see them better. When I was in junior high school and had to play softball, I would sometimes hunt for them in the outfield. My gym teacher didn't like that, but I wasn't very good at catching the ball, and it hardly ever came out there anyway. I had about as good a chance of finding a four leafer as I did of making a play.
Our neighbors had a patch in their backyard where there were clovers with four, five, six and maybe even more leaves! There were so many in the one patch, though, that it was almost too easy to find them. It's the challenge of finding something rare that makes it fun.
Sometimes people play tricks with clovers. They take one with three leaves, and pull two of the leaves off another one and then hold the stems together so it looks like there are four leaves. That can trick someone for a few minutes. Sometimes the clovers in a patch do the same thing--two of them get so close together that you might think you've seen one with more than three leaves.
Even if you don't find any clovers with extra leaves, you can have fun with the clover flowers. You pick a bunch of clover flowers with long stems and use your fingernail to poke a hole in each stem. Then you thread them together to make a chain. You can attach the two ends together to make a crown, a necklace or a bracelet. You can also do this with other flowers, but you should never pick flowers without asking your Mommy or Daddy if it's ok. But it is just about always ok to pick clovers, since most people think they are weeds.

School Picnic

Every year in the spring our elementary school had a school picnic. Everyone in the school went with family to the Highlands, an old amusement park in St. Louis. Our mother didn't know how to drive, and my dad taught at a different school, so my Aunt would drive us there. She had a big car, so my other Aunt, Mom and the 3 kids could all fit. We would take a picnic lunch and the aunts and Mom would set themselves up on a blanket while we would run around with our friends and go on rides.
The merry-go-round was fun, though a bit slow moving. I loved the tilt-a-whirl, which would upset some stomachs, but not mine. I also loved the big ferris wheel. You got a great view as it went up high. Sometimes it would stop when your little car was at the top, which was scary and fun at the same time. There was also a bobsled ride, which tilted from side to side as it went along its track.
The ride I always thought must be the best was the roller coaster. But it had a minimum height limit, and all during elementary school, I was too short to be allowed to ride it. Finally, in 7th grade I was tall enough. I had to go to school, since I wasn't in elementary school any longer. But after school a friend and I got to join my brother and Mother and Aunts at the picnic. Finally I got to go on the roller coaster. It was an old one, without any seatbelts. When I got up on the top and it started to go VERY fast down the track, I was more scared than I'd ever been. I held onto the handbar very tight, but I was sure I would fall out even though there were other people waving their hands around and still not falling.
At last the ride was over. That was the first and only time I ever went on a roller coaster.

Photo courtesy of wgdavis on Flickr. It is the original Highlands carousel, now in Faust Park near St. Louis.

Two Flower Stories

Irises

Picture courtesy of Aunt Tracy
In our yard there were a lot of irises. There was a long row of irises between our house and the house next door, and there were two rows of irises going down the path in the backyard and more irises at the end of the path. A lot of them were dark purple, and there were others that were pale blue, yellow, and yellow wih red. When they were all blooming in the middle of May, they were incredibly beautiful. One year my brother counted the blossoms and found that there were more than 2000 at one time!
Sometimes I would take a bouquet of irises to my teacher. One day I was carrying the bouquet when I went past the house of a lady in the next street. She had irises that were even more beautiful than mine! Some were peach colored, and they were very big. When she saw my bouquet she was very friendly. She asked, "Would you like some of my irises to add to your bouquet"? I was very happy to take some of hers and take my favorite teacher the most beautiful bouquet ever.

Petunias

Picture courtesy of the bridge on Flickr

In front of our house near the front door there were two large flower pots. When I was in kindergarten, there was a special sale at school where we could buy flower seeds. I bought a package of petunia seeds for 5 cents. I put half of them in each flower pot. The little plants came up and the petunias bloomed. They were pale blue and pink and purple. Petunias usually are annual flowers in the northern part of the United States. That means that usually they just bloom for one year and then don't bloom again. But I guess that either St Louis is far enough south or I was very lucky. Those petunias came back up and bloomed every year for as long as we lived in the house! Maybe everyone else just thought of them as "the petunias" but I thought of them as "my petunias" because I had planted them. I felt very special every spring when they bloomed.

Lazy

I am not a very lazy person. I usually do my work when it needs to be done. But I do have one lazy part, my left eye.
I didn't know my eye was lazy until I was almost 6 years old. In kindergarten the teacher tested everyone's eyes. That was when I found out that I do almost all my seeing with my right eye, and only a little with my left eye. I could see all the letters on the eye chart with my right eye, but only the big E
with my left eye. My left eye probably started out weaker when I was born. Sometimes, if one eye is a lot stronger than the other, a person uses it more, and eventually the brain doesn't pay much attention to what the weaker eye is seeing.
Sometimes you can make the weaker eye work harder by putting a patch over the stronger eye. They eye doctor tried that when I was in first grade. I wore that patch for 9 weeks and I hated it. I couldn't see well enough with my left eye to read, and that is what you are supposed to do in first grade. And besides, people were always asking, "What's the matter with you eye"?
One time when someone asked me that I said "You need to pay two cents for each question".
My mommy said I coudn't say that. I suppose I should have said "Please don't ask me that question". But it's hard to be polite when you are unhappy about something and then someone asks about it.
Unfortunately, the 9 weeks didn't help, so I still have a lazy eye. For a long time a blamed my kindergarten teacher for discovering that I had it, but now I know that it wasn't her fault. I've gotten used to the situation. I'm not very good at games where you have to catch or hit a ball. When I draw pictures, sometimes they slant to the left without me wanting them to. And I'm extra careful when I drive a car, because it is harder for me to judge how far away other cars are. But those are small problems and don't really bother me.
And there is one good thing: sometimes when people have two good eyes, they have trouble doing certain things when they close one of them, like touching their nose with their finger. I'm so used to using one eye that I can do it much better!

Photo courtesy of firemind on Flickr.

Prune Whip

When we moved to our new house when I was 5 years old, almost everything was better than in the old apartment. We had bigger rooms, more rooms, a big yard and lots of friends to play with. We even had a big new refrigerator. There was only one thing in the new house I didn't like as well, and that was the prune whip. Prune whip was a dessert that my Mommy made.
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Here is the recipe (which I still have, written by Mommy):
1 can (4 oz.) baby prunes (Junior baby food) or prune pulp
1 1/3 tablespoon lemon juice
1/8 tsp salt

1 small can cold evaporated milk
1 tsp lemon juice.
1/3 cup sugar

Mix together the prunes, 1 1/3 T lemon juice and salt.
In a different chilled bowl, with a chilled egg beater (or an unchilled mixer), beat until stiff the evaporated milk and 1 tsp lemon juice. Then beat in 1/3 C or a little more sugar and the prune mixture. Put into a freezable dish and put in the freezer.
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Here was the trouble. In our apartment we had a little old refrigerator where the freezer compartment was just a little box inside the other compartment. It didn't keep things very cold, just barely frozen. So the prune whip came out really creamy and soft, cold and delicious. When we got our new refrigerator, it had a separate freezer compartment. The prune whip got too hard and icy.
I think I should make prune whip again sometime soon, but eat it before it gets frozen too hard!

LET'S GO FOR A RIDE

1950 Chevrolet

Until I was about 5 years old, our family didn't own a car. My father would take the bus or streetcar to work. My mother didn't know how to drive. We would walk to the grocery store or to the park or to school.
Our first car was a used car that my father bought from one of his friends. It was old--I think a 1939 Chevrolet--and quite small. When we first got it, it did n't have a back seat. My sister and I sat on little children's chairs that just were loose in the back. After a little while, Daddy had a small backseat installed and we sat there. My brother was a baby, so Mommy would hold him in her lap. That was before anyone had seatbelts or car seats or thought about safety!
About a year late, we got a 1950 Chevrolet. From the time we got the first car, going for a ride was one of our favorite family activities. In hot weather, we went to cool off, but at other times we just rode for the fun of it. We would drive out on the little roads that went into the country near St. Louis. There were still farms not too far from where we lived, so we could see corn growing or cows and horses in the fields. We would stop at roadside stands to buy tomatoes or corn or peaches and apples. Sometimes we would drive over a bridge across the Mississippi or the Missouri River.
We each had our place to sit in the car. Daddy always drove. Mommy sat next to him. My sister always sat on the right side in the back. I wanted to sit on the right side, because she did, but I always had to sit on the left side. And my brother always stood on the bump in the middle of the back. Eventually he wore all the carpeting off the driveshaft hump in the back seat, so you could see the metal driveshaft!
I still remember how happy I was and how ready to jump into the car the minute Daddy said, "Let's go for a ride!"

FIGHTING THE HEAT

The heat wave this summer has made me remember what we did when it was hot when I was a little girl. Our house was not air-conditioned, and the St. Louis area can be VERY hot in the summer. I remember that one summer the temperature got up to 113 degrees Farenheit! That was before the heat-index was invented, so it doesn't count the humidity, which was also very high. Since heat rises, my dad set up a cot in the basement and took a book down there to read where it was cooler.

In the afternoons, sometimes we would go out in the yard and play in the spray from the hose, or sit in an enameled dishpan, a small one for each of us. Our house had a big front porch, where we would sit on rocking chairs and try to keep from moving too much when it was really hot.
Sometimes we would go to the city's swimming pool, but not very often.
Sometimes in the evening we would go for a ride in the car, just to cool off. The car wasn't air-conditioned either, but if we opened the window the wind would make us cooler.

Sometimes we would go to Heman Park or Forest Park to look at the fountains with their colored lights. We weren't allowed to run through the fountains, but sometimes a little spray would blow at us and make us feel cooler.
Picture of Forest Park Fountain courtesy of J.S. Hollands on Flickr.
To cool off the house at night, we had a big window fan in the upstairs hall. The doors at the bottom of the stairs would be closed and the upstairs windows were opened. That would cause the fan to pull air from the upstairs windows. The idea was that the breeze would cool us off enough that we could sleep. It usually worked, but sometimes it was so hot outside, that nothing made us comfortable.