stuff is cool

Pete’s comment made me think abut my grandmother’s childhood, and my father’s, which I daydream about often. My great-grandparents house in Elgin, Texas still stands, and it’s been beautifully well-kept. It has a cheerful and inviting bright red door, a big front porch, lots of trees around it, and a big field behind it with a red barn. It’s so perfect.

Here’s a picture from when we were there last May, right after Grandmom passed away.

And the barn

Dad and Danny

Mommie-Me and Daddy D (the D was for Danklefs) standing in front of their house

Unfortunately it’s not in the family anymore, but anytime we go anywhere near Elgin we make the pilgrimage to go stand out front ad talk about how it used to be. My dad talks about going to visit his grandparents, Mommie-Me and Daddy D, about how hot the bedrooms upstairs were, about riding in Daddy D’s big truck to his grocery store in town, about “the good old days.” I wish I could have been there. I would have competed with my own grandmother for May Queen (she would still win), and we’d both be big bookworms, and we’d help Mommie-Me cook. Maybe she made the same beef stew I made the other day. I learned the recipe from my grandmother.

I miss Grandmom, and Mommie-Me.

This is Grandmom when she was 17 or 18.

Here she is laughing. I never saw this side of her. She was loving and wonderful, but I never saw her laugh like this. She’s so beautiful.

These days, too, will someday be “The Good Old days.” And my grandkids will hopefully know about them from my stories.

Apparently the novel I am currently reading, Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, was quite scandalous when it was published in 1947. According to Wikipedia, 14 states banned it as pornography. It is, of course, about The Restoration, because that’s all I read about these days. And granted, those were bawdy times. But I am about 100 pages in to the 726 page book, and I haven’t seen a singe bit of indecency. In fact, in the one sex scene so far, I had to reread the section several times to realize that intercourse had actually occurred! Either I am reading a wildly abridged and censored version (this edition is from 1971), or it’s about to get a lot sexier, OR people in 1947 were way more uptight than I ever imagined.