Her Father's Daughter

I often mention things my granddaughters do that remind me of their fathers doing the same thing when they were little boys.  This photo Jeremy sent me of Jordann tackling a bowl of watermelon slices almost as big as she is takes me back to days when our boys would ask if we could "cut this watermelon" as they rolled it across the kitchen floor. As they stood digging with forks into the heart of a watermelon half, juice sparkling on their chins, they had the same happy smile as this one.  Sometimes we took the melons outside on the porch and  enjoyed the cool sweetness that seems part of hot Texas summers. Then they would have a seed spitting contest!

 Going back to the 40's and 50's,  I think of all the watermelons grown by my grandfathers or the farmers on nearby farms.  The vines sprawled out in sandy fields, where melons swelled and grew juicy, and melons were harvested, piled into the beds of pickup trucks and taken to town or roadside to sell.  I grew up thinking the heart of the melon was for us to eat, sprinkled with a little salt.  The rest of the melon and its rind could be thrown acorss the fence for the cows to enjoy.  How different that image is from the dear prices we pay for a single melon today!  

Bon Appetit, Jordann!

A Love Note from Mother

My mother, Opal Auntionette Terrell Teal, mothered me long into my own adventures with motherhood. She was not a hover mother or helicopter parent (today's terminology) but she was a a careful parent. "Be careful on your way home."  "Wrap up, it's cold and wet outside!"  "You need to eat right to keep up your strength."
"Don't try to do so much. Slow down."  - only a few examples.  As she advanced in years, eventually wearing a diagnosis she didn't even understand (Alzheimers), she often repeated herself.  Her short term memory was gone, but she never forgot something she had always said often: "I love you."  By the time she died 8 years ago, she had resorted to leaving yellow sticky notes all over her room where she wrote that.

Since she could no longer plant things for herself, various of our family members brought her a pot with a blooming amaryllis from time to time. She enjoyed the blooms, but when they faded she would hand me the pot and tell me to plant it in my yard.  Each year now since she left us, the amaryllis plants that I stuck here and there push their green spears out, shoot up long stems and flower.  Do you see the yellow sticky note?

Crawfish Season

My granddaughters are such a source of delight for me, often reenacting a scene straight out of the past when their daddies were the same age.  In this photograph, Maddie has captured a large crawfish from one of the mounds near their house.  Her gleeful grimace may be a touch more dainty than those I remember on the face of her Dad and his brothers, but I love hearing that Maddie and her sister Jordann have now lured their neighboring friends from the grip of Minecraft and Dora the Explorer to this sunny spot outdoors to join them in their quest to "catch critters."  I am sure my son enjoyed showing them how, which is exactly what he did nearly 40 years ago!  Our sons were 3, 5, and 8 when we moved to a house that backed up to a creek in Plano, Texas.  They didn't have any trouble making friends once they got out their string and bacon and began fishing for the crawfish that were all along the creekbanks.  In good old East Texas lingo, they called them "crawdads."

The boys enjoyed keeping one for a pet now and then.  They had captured a very large crawfish which was being kept in an aquarium on our kitchen buffet. My mother came to visit and as usual, she got up earlier in the morning than any of us and slipped barefoot into the kitchen to make her first cup of coffee.  She suddenly woke up the rest of the house when she started yelling because she didn't know what had invaded the kitchen floor. The boys had unwittingly caught a mama crawfish that had dozens of tiny babies clinging to her swimmerets  She had crawled out of the tank, slipped onto the floor, and scattered little crawfish everywhere.  Mother thought they were bugs, and indeed, in some places they are called mud bugs!