Richmond, Texas

For the first twenty-eight years of my marriage, we moved alot.  Twenty one times, in fact.  There were assorted apartments, duplexes, old houses, new houses, even a 3 month sojourn in a hotel in Indonesia.  Every time we moved, we said our goodbyes to one place and our hellos to another with the glad anticipation that in yet another place, we would make a home.  And we did.  But when we returned to the United States after living in Jakarta for nearly five years, we settled in a place that has been home for twenty years now. We have lived in two different houses, but within the same neighborhood.  We have a Sugar Land, Texas postal address, but live just beyond the edge of the Richmond, Texas city limits.  Although our work and shopping may take us frequently into Sugar Land and beyond into Houston, our feeling of community is in our neighborhood and in the small town of  Richmond.  There is our church, and a sense of returning to the kind of small town which nurtured me in my growing up years.

Freeways and cell phones and internet connections may link our lives in ways I could never have imagined as a young girl but I am rooted in this place and with these people.  Appreciation of history is strong here, as evidenced in a recent anniversary celebration for the town.  I love to be at home here.

Marlin

What do these things have in common other than the fact they are all colored glass?  I could say that all three pieces belonged to my mother, as did the aluminum tray. They were all originally purchased in what was once termed a "five and dime" store.  True, too that each piece of glass reflects a part of childhood images: the little cruet filled with vinegar for my mother's favorite wilted lettuce salad, the ashtray once holding Daddy's Lucky Strike cigarette ashes, the candy bowl that held lemon drops.

My story is not about where the items came from, or what they were used for.  It is the story of how they changed from plain clear glass to the colors of honey and amber. Each one of these pieces was carried on one of our family's rare summer trips for an unusual purpose.  Hardly a vacation, still somewhere to go and much anticipated, Mother, Daddy, my sister Janice, and I for several years traveled from our home in Jacksonville, Texas down to central Texas to a similar sized town where we stayed in a tiny motel room cooking our own meals.  There were no theme or waterparks, little scenic attraction, and no relatives to visit.

 Why would we use Daddy's precious one week of time off from work to do this?  One reason:  Marlin, Texas had a mineral hot springs. Located about four miles east of the Brazos River,   Marlin had a clinic and bath house where people with various ailments (Daddy had rheumatism) could go for a round of hot mineral baths as healing therapy.  Daddy signed up for a week's worth of the baths at the bathhouse. He encouraged us to drink the mineral water for its health benefits, but I hated the taste. Mother, my sister, and I amused ourselves in various ways, the most exciting thing being taking dime store glass to the mineral water fountain in the center of town and leaving it for the hot mineral salts to splash over  We checked it every day. Yes, it was still there, along with assorted other glass objects that people had left - to my knowledge, no one ever took anyone else's glass.  By the end of the week, the glass had turned varying degrees of golden colors, an enchanting kind of magic to me. 

It was a long time before I learned more of Marlin's history. While digging to find a water supply for Marlin’s 2,500 residents in 1891,  engineers struck sulfur-laden water that gushed out of the ground at 147 degrees F. Several physicians interested in the curative properties established clinics, bathhouses and sanitariums. More wells were drilled, hotels and boarding houses opened their doors, and by 1900, Marlin was a popular spa emphasizing medical water treatments. The New York Giants baseball team trained there from 1908 to 1919.  Some think it was not  mere coincidence that the Giants won the National League pennant in 1911, 1912 and 1913.

In the 1920s, the Marlin Hot Wells Foundation for Crippled Children established a hospital to treat young polio victims  In 1929, Conrad Hilton built his eighth Hilton Hotel in his chain in Marlin, a nine-floor, 110 room Falls Hotel, which could be seen for miles from the city limits of Marlin. Across the street was the Marlin Sanitarium Bathhouse. An underground tunnel connected the two buildings. A fire destroyed the underground tunnel, the Sanitarium Bath House was torn down, and the Falls Hotel was closed. Despite sporadic attempts to revive them, Marlin’s mineral-water establishments were pretty much gone by the 1960's.

 The hotel remains the tallest building in Falls County. The location of the bath house is now the city post office and a gazebo park. Another former hotel, the Arlington Hotel on Coleman Street, is now the location of a Mexican restaurant, Lupita's, and the Marlin Inn.

Today, you can drink mineral water  from a fountain from that era, right next to the Chamber of Commerce Office. You can soak your feet too, (they've thoughtfully provided a separate facility for that )  Water has laxative properties, which locals have timed at 43 minutes!.  I think it is fun to visit the fountain, but I don't seen any glassware transformation going on there these days.  I still don't drink the water, but Lupita's is a great place for lunch.

Honoring People and Places

"We clasp the hands of those who go before us.” – Wendell Berry

Home has for many years meant the place I lived with my husband and our sons (and now gather them with their wives and children).  We have made a home in many places and learned to move on and call another place home.  But, as Eudora Welty says so beautifully,

There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.

I am grateful for the piney woods of East Texas around Tyler, my birthplace, and Jacksonville, where I grew up. I also warm with a smile when I think of Bullard, the tiny town in between those two.

Both my parents grew up in Bullard.    Because both sets of my grandparents lived there, it is part of the place of my childhood and fondly remembered.  The Bullard cemetery is where a great many of my ancestors are buried: parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and great grandparents!  But this is no longer just a little country community, a "wide place in the road," my Daddy called it.

I read with interest how Bullard has changed and grown.  One of the old buildings I remember as Ferrell's Drug Store used to be the location of the medical practice of the Ferrell's daughter, Dr. Marjorie Roper.   We called her Dr. Marjie. She is a legendary physician and has always been one of my heros.  She practiced family medicine in Bullard for 60 years, retiring, she says, because she was not computer literate!
http://americanprofile.com/articles/doctoring-for-decades/

 I was recently sent the link below telling of her plans to convert the old pharmacy.  I think I need to go to Bullard for a museum trip.  But I will also take some herb bouquets to place on cemetery markers, honoring those who have gone before me.

Longtime doctor transforms historic pharmacy into museum#.UIVCe2TOPOI.gmail

Mother's Purse

Today, in tribute to the day in 1913 on which Opal Auntionette Terrell Teal was born, I am being grateful for the birthday which made my own birthday possible, and for the strong woman who gave birth and life to me.
She never went anywhere without her purse.  I have the ones shown here, and most of the contents!
Happy Birthday, Mother.

Mother’s  Purse

1.

pastel patterns sparkle on

beaded pouch dangling 

from tarnished chain

room only for a hankie

hung from your thin

flapper girl shoulder

2.

fun dressup became working casual

brown beige black grey

bag with zippers

pockets and handles

capacious, strong, heavy holding

keys and address book

wallet and check books and coupons

driver's license, children's photograph

a pleated plastic headwrap

S&H green stamps

Kleenex and comb and metal folding cup

red lipstick worn to slant

nail file and Ritz crackers

always anchored on your arm

2.

Red pocketbook with gold snaps

monogrammed “T”

inside pockets sparsely filled

½ roll Tums

1 cough drop

nail scissors

allergy card no

penicillin or codeine

Dr. business card

sticky note with

my children:

names and phone numbers

$6.00

Thompson Funeral Home card

kept until we needed it

held now in a hand missing

holding yours

                                                

After Dinner Gardening

Many things we enjoyed doing with our sons when they were growing up are being revisited as we have fun with granddaughters.  One project with almost endless possibilities is "after dinner gardening."  Yes, we can grow pineapples in our own back yard here on the Gulf Coast of South Texas.  Once the pineapple top has been sliced off before paring and slicing the fruit for eating, it can be placed into soil mixed with a few coffee grounds.  Kept moist, it will root and make a new pineapple plant.  We have sprouted avocado seeds, apple, peach, and grapefruit seeds, also lemon and orange.  Celery root ends kept in a shallow dish with water will grow new celery leaves, and carrot tops done the same way are wonderful little ferns to use in a fairy garden.  We have successfully grown ginger from ginger root and garlic from garlic pods.  Of course, potato eyes can be fun to plant and grow, too.  Another part of this project is becoming seed savers which leads to sharing seeds, just like my grandmother did.

I think we are also growing gardeners!

The Buttermilk Glass

I am a keeper, but not a collector.  A collector might find this lovely glass and purchase it to add to a shelf with other depression glass treasures. That person would probably know whether this is called pink or peach, the name of the pattern, and just how much it is worth.  I know none of those things.  I only know I love to hold the glass, and use it for a "feel better" boost by filling it with iced tea or lemonade when I need to feel a little pampered.  I have only one other piece of a similar color and vintage, a cracked candy bowl, which was once owned by the person who gave the footed tumbler.   I don't even think depression glass when I take it out of the china cabinet.  This was my grandmother's favorite buttermilk glass!  So that is what I call it - the buttermilk glass.  She liked to fill it with cold buttermilk and sometimes crumbled cornbread in to eat with a spoon.  It has been mine for many years now.  I wonder if one of my granddaughters will one day call it "the lemonade glass?"   For more story about Grandma Terrell -

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1961267651365563869#editor/target=post;postID=111748802559416224

Most of my garden photographs get posted in my blog www.stonesandfeathers.wordpress.com . Most of my kitchen stories and recipes get told at www.kitchenkeepers.wordpress.com .   But this blue pea vine that blooms so profusely at my kitchen window reminds me why I love vines so much: they are quite alot like families.  There is something magical about a climbing vine in a garden. Vines seem to have a mind of their own and grow here and there in many directions - but they need something to cling to or climb on, a support.  Like morning glories and moonflowers, they reach for the strength of a trellis or rail and hang on, blooming and blooming some more.

Families can be like that too. Especially in our marriages,  I think sometimes we are branches of  the vine and at other times we need to be the trellis, offering support for each other's growth and change. As I age, my children help me do things I once could do for myself or for them. So last night, as the blue pea vine peeked in my kitchen window, I cooked a pot of seafood gumbo with my granddaughter's good help while my son hung curtain rods for me and my daughter in law stood on a ladder to change light bulbs. I am thankful for my trellis and glad I can still bloom.  They loved the gumbo.