Category Archives: Childhood memories

Child of the Fifties for SOCS, July 11, 2025

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Child of the Fifties

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These folks were the epitomes of every her and him.
The men were all smooth-shaven with haircuts short and trim.
The ladies of the fifties had their pearls and curly hair,
and fancy little house dresses were what they chose to wear.

Their kids were the epitomes of reproductive joy
who could serve as patterns for the perfect girl or boy.
They came out cute and perfect, created just to please.
They never fought or cheated or brought home F’s or D’s.

How do I know that what I say is not stretching the truth?
How do I know these folks were all red-blooded, honest, couth;
and that every one of them maintained the status quo?
I know for I’m the perfect child that sits in the front row

who somehow by the sixties  got somewhat out of step
and later by the seventies had misplaced all her “hep,”
did not become a hippie until nineteen eighty seven,
and will join the moral majority  too late to get to heaven.

I am not the epitome of any group you know.
I do not wear the clothes you wear or go where you may go.
Epitome’s a talent that I forgot to hone,
and ever since I’ve chosen a pattern all my own.

So, thanks to Forgottenman for reminding me it is time for SOCS. Today the inspirational word is “curl.”

Mother’s Pocket, For RDP “Oasis”, Mar 30, 2025

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Mother’s Pocket

“Not your average peddler,” my mom was heard to say,
as she paid him for the prism that she promptly tucked away—
her pocket an oasis where my hand would go to play
when other things went wrong or on a sunless, rainy day.

In her pocket I found magic things—smooth stones that were magnetic.
Pulling them apart calmed hands otherwise frenetic.
Cherry-flavored Lifesavers and pretzels clothed in salt.
If they vanished from her pocket, it never seemed a fault.

Words written on grains of rice, hankies trimmed in lace
that I liked to hold against my lips and arms and face.
Tiny detached doll heads to put upon one’s fingers.
The memory of their spirited dialogues still lingers.

But that magic prism was the best of all her treasure.
Once I drew it from her pocket, I kept it for my pleasure.
Still it sits upon my shelf where it invites my gaze,
still transmitting mother’s light on sunless rainy days.

For RDP the prompt is Oasis

The Numbers Game #39, Sept. 16, 2024. Please Play Along!

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Welcome to “The Numbers Game #39”. Today’s number is 160. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find under that number and include a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.

This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. Below are my contributions to the album:

Click on photos to enlarge.

Click on photos to enlarge.

SANDERSON’S STORE

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What we braved to reach Sanderson’s Store.
M&Ms
Jelly Beans
Chicken Bones

Sanderson’s Store

Allowance day on Saturday dispelled the winter’s gloom
of trudging through the snow to school or sealed up in my room.
Too cold and blizzardy outside, my mother had the gall
to ban me to a play space of room and stairs and hall.

No Fox Fox Goose, no snow forts. No sliding on the ice
of sidewalks frozen over.  Just games of cards and dice,
dolls and dressing up in my older sister’s clothes.
No snow boots shedding ice and sludge. No chilblains on my nose.

Oh but on certain Saturdays, with weather calming down,
armed with dough, we kids would form a caravan to town
six blocks away, ploughing the snow with boots sliding in front of us,
a column of five kids or more made snowdrifts feel the brunt of us.

Flashing our allowances, we plundered penny sweets
in the big assorted box of Tootsie Rolls and treats
like Double Bubble, Chicken Bones, Fireballs and Nik-L-Nips.
Now and Laters, Jelly Beans and chewable Wax Lips.

Tootsie Rolls and Red Hots, M&Ms and Jaw Breakers.
Malt balls, Sugar Babies, Lemon Heads and Necco Wafers.
As we counted out our pennies, Tet would add one candy more
every Saturday that we could get to Sanderson’s Store. 

Prompt words today are caravan, gall, gloom and candy. (Jelly beans, M& Ms and candy heart photos thanks to Unsplash. Used with permission.)

 

Here is a note I got from Mary, She is the grandniece of Tet (of Sanderson’s Store.) 

“This certainly brings back warm memories. I remember getting my brown bag of candy at Sanderson’s to take to the show with me on Saturday night. Aunt Tet loved all the kids and wouldn’t take her lunch break until after all the kids had stopped to buy their treats on their way back to school. I had forgotten some of the candies you mentioned. Thanks for sharing this with me. I loved it!  Mary.”

Below is a photo of Tet, standing between her sister Melitha and her brother, M.E., who was a recruiter for Cornell College in Iowa and who recruited my older sister Betty Jo to go to college there. My middle sister, Patti, also went there for one year. Lots of connections in a small town.

Blackberry Balsam

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Blackberry Balsam

Blackberry Balsam, the scourge of my youth.
It was repulsive, my father uncouth
for presenting this mucous-like liquid most vile,
insisting I swallow the ghastly brown bile.
I gritted my teeth and went sullen and wild,
but how could I refuse? I was only a child.

Gagging and choking, I chased it with Coke,
expecting another dose when I awoke.
All these years later, its flavor unfaded,
its vomitous odor my memory invaded.
Blackberry Balsam? No taste could be worse,
proving sometimes the cure is worse than the curse.

Dear Diary, Aug 20, 1958

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I recently found my old diary, pictured above. I was eleven years old when I wrote the entry below.

Dear Diary

August 20, 1958

Dear Diary,

After I got up I started to clean up living room and finished after dinner*. Then I read, played cards and watched t.v. Patti and I just had a fight. She wanted to listen to her radio and I was listening to t.v. or I should say watching it. Anyway, it causes a little static when the t.v. is on too so Patti turned off the t.v. I kept turning it on and she off. Well, finally I shut if off for a while and went up to listen to her radio. She didn’t like that either because I was humming, so she told me to read a book.  I wanted to watch one of my favorite programs so I turned on the t.v. She started crying and I can’t bear to see a woman cry so I turned it off and told her for a girl of 15 who thinks she’s a lot older, she sure was a baby sometimes. For that, she hit me with a book hard.

P.S I’m writing the part about our fight outside.

………….

*We called lunch dinner back then.

Love the last line. Ha!!! Sorry, Patti, but this was too funny not to share. She now lets me watch TV whenever I want to plus she pays my land taxes and signs my income taxes for me and performs all sorts of other generous sisterly duties.  xooxox

Collecting Myself

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Collecting Myself

My juvenile aspirations were not like any others––
my idols not my parents or my sisters or my brothers.
I wanted to be different, intrepid and exploring
regions and activities less mainstream and less boring.
I felt my whole identity tied up in what I did,
but my friends had just a glimpse of me–for most of me just hid,
waiting for a time when the world would want to see
all that biggest part of me that was really me.

When it finally happened, I came out bit by bit,
each part coming into view as I discovered it
through doing and by trying, by traveling and proving.
It seems I only sloughed off walls as I kept on moving.
Parts of me found here and there in every varied clime.
I’m still finding parts of me up to the present time.
Daughter, friend and lover, writer, artist, wife––
to discover all of them is what creates a life.

 

Today’s prompts are intrepid, differ, glimpse, juvenile and identity.

Summer Courtship

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Our back yard. Lots of places to hide in yards like this up and down the block, as well as in the deep ditches of the school yard across the street.

Summer Courtship

Those summer nights of hide and seek where we were willing quarry,
our efforts to make curfew were too often dilatory.
Our neighborhood adventures stretched out under the stars—
those shadowed venturings abroad, hiding behind cars,
in barrow pits or hedges, darting through the dark,
avoiding passing car lights and the dog’s insistent bark.
Bigger kids the kingpins of this nightly sequestering,
lying still as death with our fears of capture festering.
That titillating strain of remaining undetected,
somehow in our memories has made us more connected.
How we so consistently lay spread out on the ground
cowering, but secretly hoping to be found
by that special someone who, in our pre-teen flush
even then, in passing, could bring about our blush.
All this search and parrying that we called summer games
very soon would fill our lives called by other names.

 

Prompt words today are strain, kingpin, nightly and dilatory.

Limbo

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1960, Murdo, South Dakota

Limbo

My best friend taught me about limbo and saints,
Showed me their stacks of National Geographic.
You had to be invited into membership, she said,
not everyone could join. I rated them against
my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journals
and felt deficient, somehow.

No wine in our Methodist kitchen cupboards.
No tuna and salmon tins
stacked up awaiting Friday.
All those cans on my friend’s mother’s shelves in limbo
all Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
that long summer when we were still twelve.

Wanting something we didn’t yet know the name of.
Restless stirrings the little boys our age 
did not know how to respond to.
All of them inches shorter than us
 except for one—a tall country boy
new to town school,
the most innocent of all.

How we waited to be chosen—
the fact that we’d already chosen in our minds
having little consequence.
How we watched. How we kept secrets,
even from each other.

I knew what to call it, at least,
if not much else,
that summer I turned thirteen,
expectantly,

and
absolutely
nothing changed.

Limbo.

The dVerse poets prompt is “Limbo.”

But Jimmy Cliff says it best!!!!

And “Limbo” of a different sort was two years in our future: 

Explorers

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Click to enlarge photos.

Patti, Me, Patty Peck
Patti and I under the rose trellis.
Patti, her friend and I on the schoolground slides across the street from our house.
With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
First day of school.

Explorers

Sitting up past midnight, we search our mind for facts,
parting long grasses of the past for long-forgotten pacts
of secrets kept from parents and long-forgotten games:
“New Orleans” and “Send ‘Em” *. We comb our minds for names.

Of talents left to childhood, like flips off monkey bars.
Adventures dreamed on rooftops and the back seats of cars.
Favorite childhood dresses and jokes pulled on our folks.
Afternoons in Mack’s Cafe, sipping on our Cokes.

Hot beef sandwiches at Fern’s and running up the stairs
to avoid Mom’s fly swatter aimed at our derrieres.
Childhood dramas staged in trees or in our backyard lawn.
Teenage slumber parties that stretched out into dawn.

We journey through old albums, searching photos for
any tiny detail that will open up a door.
Each time I come to visit, we remember a bit more
on these safaris of the mind that we both adore.

*These are the names of childhood games. Did anyone else play them?

For the Word of the Day challenge: Exploring