Monday Memoir--Family Tree I

Family Trees--The Morgan/McCormack side

As a child I gave very little thought to ancestors. I suppose most don’t. We are much too concerned with where we are going, what we will become and the whole process of becoming a “grown up” to care much about our roots. For many, ancestry hardly emerges as a concern until middle age or even later. Possibly when the older members of the family began to die off, I suddenly got interested in and concerned about saving for posterity whatever information I could. I started to fall heir to family photographs, bits and pieces of genealogical research and then tried to dredge up old stories I had subconsciously recorded when I was young.

Now I find myself the unlikely matriarch of the clan, both of my cousins’ generation which included both family lines and even somewhat of my step children and grandchildren.  It is too late now for regrets that I did not ask more questions, get names written on the backs of old photographs and become more organized in my archival tasks. But here I am, and I’m the best there is in this particular situation—sad though that may be!

I really do not remember my paternal grandparents because they died when I was very small. I have some photos and family stories and maybe a very dim vignette or two that might be memory and might be just what I have been told or imagination.

My paternal grandfather was an only child although there had been a girl born either before or after him who was either stillborn or died very young. His mother had been a widow, Martha Jane Martin, with older children but she and his father only had him. I know his father’s name was John King Lawrence Morgan. The story was he was a riverboat captain on the Missouri, fell ill with something like typhoid and was nursed back to health by a widow who ran a boarding house and later they were married. He just appears as if born full grown! The pair was buried in Missouri, in a Pisgah Cemetery in Saline County. I do have a photo of the stone with dates.   Grandpa was born on June 4, 1878 in Elmwood, Missouri.

Grandma with me, spring '43

Grandma Morgan

Grandma came from an old Virginia family distant kin in one line to the Birds, Carters etc. Her family migrated to Missouri either before or after the Civil War. Her maternal grandparents were first cousins, offspring of two brothers named Haynie. Her father’s name was Daniel McCormack and he was born in Kentucky but came to Missouri.  Grandma, born Dec 28, 1879 was apparently the youngest of several children having one older sister and a least four or five brothers. My dad’s cousin, the son of Grandma’s sister, did a lot of genealogical research and compiled a book so that side of the family, if one trusts his research, is well documented back to the days of Charlemagne!.

At any rate, Charles Alva Morgan married Harriet Vernetta McCormack on April 3, 1905. They lived in Slater, Columbia and Kansas City, Missouri and produced five children, three girls and two boys. They were in order Grace Vernetta,  Ruth Alexandria, Charles McCormack, Roxie Lee and Daniel Lawrence. All but my dad, Charles, are buried in Missouri, in the same cemetery as their parents in Slater, the Slater City Cemetery. The two elder sisters had no children. Dad had three, Aunt Roxie had two sons and Uncle Dan had two girls and a boy plus four of his wife’s children that he adopted.

Sad to say I had little contact with those cousins while I was growing up and never did bond with them very much. Grandma had the huge obsession with family common among the Irish and her children were almost equally intense about it except for Dad. He always went his own way. Unfortunately, he usually only contacted his siblings when he wanted something and never lived close to them after he left home. I think the general consensus is that he was spoiled rotten and always willfully self-centered though very charming and charismatic when he chose to be The other four all stayed in proximity for most of their lives.

Grandma was never anything except a homemaker and I gather that was her choice and good fortune. She was a fine cook and an excellent seamstress and perhaps aided and abetted by her daughters, pushed to move up to larger and better homes and places where all her children could go to college.  I suppose she may have had a high school education. Grandpa did and a business college course as well.but all five of their kids got one or more degrees.  All three girls were teachers and Dad also taught a few years. Uncle became a surgeon. I’ve heard that Grandma was one to celebrate all the holidays with great gusto and try to make even ordinary days special and fun. As a child, I tended to idolize her memory and the many stories my dad told about her. I wanted nothing more than to be considered like her.

As a young woman, she had beautiful auburn hair and was quite pretty from one early photo I have. However, in later years she grew very heavy and I am sure that impacted her health. She was probably at least borderline diabetic and had heart and circulatory problems that caused her early death. She died on May 3, 1945 at the age of sixty five.  I would guess she was about 5’6” and I am sure weighed over two hundred pounds at her death.  

Grandpa was a large man, about 6’2” and he also became heavy. I found from an obituary that he served in the Spanish-American War though not as part of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He had also gone out west as a youth perhaps with or to see a half brother or other relative on his mother’s side, where he worked awhile in Wyoming and then came back to Missouri to care for aged parents. There he met and fell in love with Grandma. She seems to have been the only woman for him and he was enamored by her vivacious nature, beauty and charm. 

Grandpa Morgan, Roxie, Dad, Grace, Ruth, Dan--
ready for their mother's funeral

His lifelong trade was railroading. I’m not sure where he started but he ended up a passenger conductor for the Chicago and Alton Railroad, a long-defunct Midwestern line. This meant he was gone a lot and it seems he gave his wife free rein and all the financial support he could, leaving the household and child-rearing in her hands almost completely. This was both good and bad! He was devastated when Grandma died and just existed for a few more years, moving to southern California to live with his youngest daughter for his final years. He died on November 1, 1947 at the age of sixty nine.

The five Morgan children died in the same order as their birth. All but Uncle Dan were diabetic the last years of their life and most had heart or arterial diseases that led to their deaths. Aunt Ruth also had cancer. She had a mastectomy in her early fifties and eventually got a brain tumor which was her immediate cause of death. Uncle Dan stayed leaner and more fit but finally got prostate cancer and declined rapidly in health after that. He was in his early 80s but the rest were in mid-seventies. Dad was just short of 77 at his death. Actually I suppose they all lived fairly normal or average life spans for their times. I just tend to contrast theirs to the long lives of my maternal grandparents. They seemed to come from some especially hardy and healthy Kentucky hill people and were survivors. 

Going Back—wayyyy back!

I’ve been at least a semi-believer in reincarnation for most of my life—I’d say since mid teens anyway. I’m not sure if there was anything that triggered it except maybe some correspondence with a long-ago pen pal, Jose Cazador,  who sent me a page ripped out of an old poetry book that spoke about the possibility. I finally tracked down the poem and its writer just a matter of months ago. Anyway, the idea always resonated.

Although it isn’t specific to this theme, I will share my first OOB experience, which was rather odd. It would have been the summer of my 16^th or 17^th year and I was sitting out after supper in the bed of our Ford pickup, just watching the sky and maybe some distant lightning. I looked up and saw a plane, a jet airliner I am sure, going east across the north end of the Verde Valley in Arizona. At that time I had never flown and had no idea what it was like. But for a few seconds, I was in that or another craft with the lights dimmed as they do at night, sitting in a window seat on the plane’s left side. I looked out the small oval window and got a glimpse of lights far below. Then I was abruptly back but that flash had seemed so real and authentic. I’m not sure if I was “remembering” or made some odd link to a person on that or at  least a plane. Now I only shrug and say, “¿Quien sabe?”

I’ve had a number of “déjà vu” experiences and especially have met people with whom I had an instant sense of “knowing” so we could start talking as if we had just left off a conversation a day or two earlier. In most such cases, I was strongly drawn but in a few strongly repelled. This is probably not so uncommon but it has been quite intense a few times. I have a distinct feeling wemet to renew a bond and that we will meet again other places and times. 

Back in about 1998 I went to the RWA (Romance Writers of America) conference which that year was held in New Orleans. I’d met Melinda Rucker Haynes at a previous conference in Anaheim and sat in a couple of her workshops. That year, I scheduled an hour long hypnotic regression with her.  Melinda is a licensed and trained hypnotherapist and I was anxious but not worried or fearful about the experience.

The feeling was odd; I was ‘there’ and yet not there (in my body and in the room) —on the tape she made for me my voice is a bit strange, low, husky and uneven. I went to a lifetime as a Native American woman of perhaps 1000 years ago. My name was  Humming Bird or in their vernacular, “Wind Dancer” and I was a potter.  I visualized woven yucca sandals on my feet and a kind of blanket dress of coarse but soft fabric as my attire. Who knows? It did not seem odd or farfetched.

Before and after that I read a lot of books on the subject such as those by Dick Sutphen, Brian Weiss and many others.  I found regression has often been used to work through traumas of various kinds. Also after that I somewhat self-regressed a few times and in each case found a possible cause of a physical or emotional issue. Wishful thinking or reality?  

In one, I was a young Jewish girl living somewhere in the Middle East about 100-200 AD. My father was a merchant and our family well-off so we lived in a walled compound. I had an older brother and one day sneaked out to follow him and his friends to go hear a stranger speak that they had learned of.  The speaker was apparently a follower or disciple of St. Paul and spoke eloquently about women being evil and needing to be controlled and kept from going astray! I got back home without being discovered but felt very guilty and soon after that experienced my first monthly cycle. I was terrified by the blood and pain and just knew I was being punished!  My maid or ‘nanny’ discovered it and calmed me down but the fear and shame prevailed. I was married very young to a contemporary of my father’s and died in childbirth. Ah ha, was that a partial source or cause of my severe cramps in this life and also sterility? Who can say?

Another time, I was cooking supper and suddenly slipped off for a short time. Since Melinda first asks you what is on your feet, I asked myself. “Jackboots, o’ course” was the reply and spoken not in my voice at all. Turned out I was a younger son of minor nobility in England and a bit wild. My elder brother banished me and I took the horse I considered mine but he had me named a horse thief and I was hanged! Another ah-ha—I hate to be touched round my throat and did not even like to wear turtlenecks or choker necklaces!  Did some part of me recall that rope and my neck breaking? Again, who can say!

There have been others but those are quite vivid. A dear spirit-kin friend told me of two instances relative to his own memories. In one he dreamed he was near an oasis in the desert with his brother, just a bit younger. Some bandits or maybe Bedouins came to the water and the boys hid but the younger one was caught and my friend remembered watching the strangers take him away and being too scared to do anything but feeling very guilty and sad. . At that time he had no knowledge of real desert, camels etc. but visualized it all clearly. He, like me, is the eldest child and almost compulsively protective of his siblings and other kin. 

In another, he was helping brand calves on his parent’s ranch as a young kid and looked up to see a plane flying above. He didn’t quite go there as I had but he felt a strong connection and kinship to the idea of flying. Later, when he took flying lessons, he zipped through the ground school and on his first actual flight, the instructor was amazed to find he knew exactly what to do and needed no coaching at all. He is sure he had been a pilot who probably died young in one of the two world wars and came back quickly. I think this is not an uncommon thing as early deaths may leave karma and work undone and the spirit needs to return and carry on with the prior plan, one way or another! Oddly we “knew” each other at the first meeting after corresponding and talking on the phone for about a month; there was a spontaneous rapport as if from true recognition but we don’t know where or when that bond started, just that it exists.

If any of my readers have any experiences they'd like to share, I'd love to hear of them! You can email me privately at azwriter427@yahoo.com if you prefer not to go public in a comment.

More picture for Big Sister Memories

The first two were taken in the fall of 1967. Our family went through some difficult times and were scattered apart for several months. In the first shots, I was waiting to see Charlie off on the train to California where he would stay with an aunt, our dad's younger sister. He was sixteen, or almost and I was twenty four and on my second year of college at Northern Arizona University. These were at the Santa Fe Depot on Flagstaff's old main street. The depot looks much the same today and still serves Amtrak and is a visitor center. At that time Charlie would board the San Francisco Chief.

The third picture is two years later, at Christmas 1969 when I was visiting the reunited family now living in Farmington, NM. I'm with Alex who was ten years old at that time. I was then working into my MA degree having earned my BA the previous summer and gone right on with classes. I had trouble deciding what to do!

The fourth photo is Charlie and Alex together for the first time in some years when Charlie and his wife visited Mom, Dad and Alex in the summer of 1985 in Duncan, AZ where our parents lived out their lives from 1977 until their respective deaths.

And the final one is the three of us, probably the last time we were all together in a photo. It was the spring of 1997 and we had held a memorial service for Mom for her friends in the community. Her funeral had been in Kentucky shortly after her death in Nov 1996 and I brought her ashes back with me then. We had just interred her ashes beside Dad in the Duncan Cemetery.  Yes, there is a family resemblance and we all three showed that life had been a "broadening experience," especially Alex in law school and me with a 'desk job' for too long. We were starting the long process of cleaning up the folks' stuff--it took a lot of effort, mostly Alex and mine since Charlie was working in Colorado and it as hard for him to get away.

Memoir Monday: Making a Big Sister

For eight years, six months and seventeen days. I was an only child. As the first grandchild on both sides, I expect I was pretty spoiled. I was able to amuse myself without a lot of playmates and always had a vivid imagination to make up games for myself that were ‘stories’ in many ways. By 1951, a miserable first grade in a larger town school had seen my introduction to other kids in the rough and tumble of grammar school playground. Second grade, as the only girl in a tiny one room eight student school was more fun. By then I realized that many families had several kids and had begun to wish for a sibling, especially a sister since my seven classmates were all boys.

By the middle of that summer, I was aware there would soon be another child in the family. However, that was the summer Mom and Dad ran a forest fire lookout tower in the North Kaibab Forest on the north side of the Grand Canyon. The novelty of this adventure held most of my attention. Fall came and we went back to Camp Wood for my third grade year but soon Mom was remaining home in Jerome awaiting the new arrival. The expected baby made his appearance early in the morning of November 14. Had he been a girl, he was to be named Priscilla Ruth but as a boy, he got the family name of Charles but a new added middle name of Michael which was not found in either family. Mom and Dad did not like “Juniors” though the initials were the same.

Through that winter and spring I stayed home and was home schooled for several months to assist

Jerome, spring 1952

Mom and at least be able to run to a neighbor’s for help if anything bad happened. I enjoyed the new living baby doll until the novelty wore off. Then  I am sure I felt a bit of resentment to no longer be the one and only but I generally accepted the new role and responsibility of being a big sister. Over time it grew on me and became not only comfortable but a pillar of my life. I did try to set a good example most of the time and guide and support as I could.

This younger brother and I came to share the ever greater chores and stand by each other through some complex and difficult times. Oh, we fought as siblings will and I often was bossy and not always gentle since as the senior partner in the chores I was nominally in charge, but by the time I finished high school and

On the corral rail, c:1959

Charlie (who was called Mike at home but took the name Charlie as soon as he left home) was a ‘tween,’ he was big and strong enough to be a real help and we learned to work together.  We became co-conspirators on various escapades, too, and backed each other up on some wild explanations of activities we did not want to disclose in any detail!

By this time, there was a third child for whom we became the Big Sister and Big Brother. I was just past sixteen and Charlie was not quite eight when Robert Alexander was born. Mom was thirty nine and the pregnancy was a bit hard for her. She also breast fed the baby for most of the first year, so I took on a good part of the household work as well as continuing the livestock and ranch chores for several months. This made Charlie’s help even more necessary and I found one caught more flies with sugar than vinegar! An attitude adjustment was definitely required! I think that was when our relationship began to mature and solidify to the strong bond it has been for the rest of our lives.

Alex and me, Jul 4, 1962

Young Alex was still just a small kid when I left home a few years later so I never worked with him and built the same connection with him that Charlie and I had. However, we had fun and I did take care of him quite often for the first few years. Actually it was much later after first Dad and then Mom had died as well as my husband when Alex and I became close friends and shared the task of cleaning up our parent’s mess in the home where they’d lived their last twenty years or so. I became a kind of surrogate mom as Alex completed law school and went on this first job and then settled into the career in a law office in Sierra Vista where he was employed at the time of his untimely death.

At nineteen, he was found to have a heart defect, a constricted aorta which caused very low blood pressure below the midline and high above it. He had open heart surgery to place a stint to bypass this narrow passage. He did well and survived for twenty seven years after that surgery but in the fall of 2005, developed an aneurysm near the site of the original surgery and bled to death internally before they were able to find what the problem was and attempt to repair it. His passage left a hollow spot in the hearts of both his big sister and his big brother but we soon found ourselves both single in our later years and combined forces to keep from either of us having to struggle alone as we get older and probably of decreasing health and capabilities.

Gaye and Charlie, 1974 in Colo

I may be the eldest still but being “the big sister’ no longer figures very much in my habits or my thoughts. Those eight years that were so significant when we were 8 and 16 or 12 and 20 have very little significance these days. We seek each other’s advice at times, share the joy and frustration of being creative –Charlie is a musician and song writer while I am a fiction writer and poet. I have no way to know which one of us will go first to join our parents and brother in the next realm since we both expected Alex to outlive us, but for now it is good to have a brother at my back as I try to be there for him.

Memoir Monday--Spring in the High Desert

I'm not sure when I really began to notice the seasons and the attendant weather and other changes, but probably in the mid 1950s when we got into the livestock business. When you are caring for animals, these things really matter. I watched for the first green plants to appear as did the horses and mules. They were tired of dry hay and ready for some fresh "salad". Two of the plants that appeared early were Filaree and Globe Mallow. Both were okay for grazing and would not harm the critters who ate them. I still look for them out of habit and saw a few coming out here before my recent trip to Alaska.

One constant for all the years still remains. The various types of mesquite are very prevalent in the

New mesquites while I train Buzzie

whole southwestern region  from Texas into parts of California. The Verde Valley was about the same elevation as the Las Cruces area here in NM  but being a few degrees farther north had a climate much like Alamogordo which is about 2,000 feet higher. I am sure the winters were colder, longer and wetter back through at least the middle seventies although change had begun by then. Still I always knew that when the first green leaflets appeared on the mesquites,another frost was very unlikely. In fact I cannot ever recall mesquites being burned black by a late frost. If there was one, it would be light enough to do little harm.

That sweet ,fragile shade of green just says 'spring' to me like nothing else. Although fall is my

Budding mesquite, Alamogordo, 2013

favorite season, spring is a close second. Both are often fleeting here in the southwest with abrupt shifts from not-summer to really-summer instead of the four seasons seen elsewhere. There is the wind,too, the only down side in this change of patterns, but the rest, when you can grab a few days, is just wonderful. And it is here. I came home from Alaska on the 15th going from a temperature of about +10 with wind chill down to zero or below the evening of the 14th and got off the final plane in El Paso to the mid 80s! And the last few days have seen it nudging 90 in the middle of the afternoon.

Fillaree Plant

My lilacs are bursting into bloom, the roses are budding and the apricot tree bloomed while I was gone but what really surprised me was the mesquites starting to leaf out. I just saw this yesterday. Back in the Verde Valley in Arizona that usually happened just a few weeks ahead of the end of school in late May. In Cochise County, down in southeastern Arizona, I remember seeing the early hints about the first of May. I am sure of the date because our VFW Post celebrated "Loyalty Day" the weekend closest to May 1. This was originally established to counter the Workers' May  Day festivities in the Soviet countries. Before I left that area in 2008, I do not remember greening mesquites before at least a week or two into April. The hummingbirds usually arrived just a bit sooner. The cottonwoods, such as grew up on Fort Huachuca, would be coming out much earlier and they did get nipped now and then. I will have to check those down in Alameda Park by the main drag and railroad tracks there o see if they have come out. At any rate, once again spring comes to the high desert and I welcome it, still in awe of Nature's miracle of rebirth and renewal, the ageless and faithful promise ever sacred and precious.

Memoir Monday: My Mom

My Mom

This is a day early because today would have been my mother’s ninety-seventh birthday. Margaret Louise Witt was born on February 19, 1920, the eldest child of Robert Witt and Lula Belle Wilcox Witt in the small town of Irvine, Kentucky, pronounced “Irvin” by the locals. Although her hair was curlier, her early pictures look a lot like some of mine, a big-eyed rather serious looking child. When grown, she was about 5’5” with a slender but feminine figure. She had luminous pale blue-gray eyes, very much like her father’s, and dark auburn hair.  Although perhaps not a great beauty, she had very sweet and pretty face and could certainly be called attractive. When she was happy her face glowed with a lovely joy from the inside.

She was always bright and did so well in school that her teachers skipped her ahead twice, passing her over second and eighth grades. This put her in an awkward situation socially and since she was naturally a very shy and somewhat self-effacing person, I get an impression from her sporadic diary that she was often a bit lonely and not happy. She was also a talented musician and learned to play the piano early and quite well.  She graduated from Irvine High School in May, 1936 and from college (Eastern Kentucky in Richmond was her alma mater) in 1940. She always made honor roll level grades and in college had a dual major in math and music. She played some recitals during college but basically quit her music as an adult. After college she became a medical technologist, studying and working at a Catholic hospital in Lexington and sharing an apartment with some other young women,

In Lexington spring 1942

It was there that she met my father in the spring of 1942.  Although he was born and raised in Missouri, by then WW II was going on and he was involved in some ‘hush-hush’ electronic communications projects since he had been an amateur radio operator as a youth and young man. They had a brief courtship as many did during those uncertain times and married on July 6, 1942. All the photos in those early years show her glowing with happiness. I am sure she was very much in love and apparently delighted to become pregnant right away and provide the first grandchild to both sides of the family. Although Dad had two older sisters, both were involved in teaching careers and never married or bore children although his younger sister did a couple of years later.  Of course that first child was me.

In KC, MO winter 42

I am pretty sure Mom had no idea how her life was going to turn out and her vow for “richer or poorer” etc. led her through some very difficult and I think often painful times as the years went by but she stuck it out and remained married to Dad until his sudden death in an accident in March 1989. She bore him two more children, Charles Michael in November 1951 and Robert Alexander in May 1959.

I suppose it is mainly due to her self-effacing nature and to Dad’s personality but she gave up almost all of her interests and pursuits once she married. She had written poetry, played the piano and enjoyed embroidery and reading but much of that was abandoned as the years went by. After Dad’s death, she did read a lot and continued to walk daily and collect “pretty rocks”, a trait which I took on early also.  She spent a lot of time in Kentucky with her father after her mother’s and only brother’s deaths. He outlived her by almost two years.

Then in 1993 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and fought it valiantly for three and a half years, finally succumbing in November 1996.  Although she died in her family home in Kentucky, after a normal funeral with viewing etc. she was cremated and I brought her ashes back to Arizona where my brothers and I had them interred the following spring beside my dad. They both rest in the small cemetery in Duncan, Arizona where they lived their last years together from 1977 until Dad’s death.

 A rare shot-Mom with a mule
out in the mountains

I regret that as a teenager and even later, I did not relate to her or even show her the respect that I should have. After Dad’s death, we did grow closer and I am most thankful for that. My main regret is that her health did not allow her the peaceful years she deserved when we might have grown even closer as we shared widowhood and aging. There are often things I would like to ask of her or share with her yet today, over twenty years later.

Yes, my birth certificate proves that I share her first name; I have never used it as it does not seem to fit me as it did her. But I am not ashamed or unhappy to share it in honor of her memory. She was a kind and caring person, the best mother she could be, and strong in a quiet way that was sometimes hard to recognize or understand. She was a product of her times and did her best to raise me to be independent and yet remain a lady, as she was to her last breath.  Go in peace and harmony, Margaret Witt Morgan, with my heart’s love until we again together.

Mom and me, 3 wks old

Clarkdale, AZ 1959

Memoir Monday-Stitching In Time

My first exposure to sewing came when I was in fourth grade and got into 4-H for a year. As far as I recall there was no sewing machine in our home so anything I did—a pincushion and maybe a dresser scarf—was done by hand. I was not real thrilled and my stitches were very awkward and uneven. Skip ahead four years.  Now I was in eighth grade and had a mandatory home economics class. There I had to learn to use a sewing machine. My teacher was—at least to me at that time—an old harridan and martinet who demanded we cut all those notches in the pattern we chose to make, baste everything and all the other traditional non-labor and non-step saving “rules”. Despite that, I quickly developed a fascination. My project was a simple gored skirt and the fabric I chose was white with red roses and printed stitch lines to look quilted. There is a scrap or two in my first quilt I mentioned awhile back. Other than getting the side zipper in, I did not have a lot of trouble.

Peasant blouse and broomstick skirt 

By now there was a sewing machine at home, an electric portable, probably from Sears or Montgomery Wards. I think Dad had gotten it for Mom, definitely not at her request, but because since his mother was an excellent seamstress and all three of his sisters sewed at least some, he figured every wife and mother needed one. My maternal grandmother was also an avid sewist but the gene seemed to have skipped Mom entirely.  She had no interest and little skill in it.  She did a few patching jobs and occasionally darned socks or reattached a button. That time was still close enough after the Great Depression and World War II so almost everyone at least tried to be thrifty, still not used to have mostly enough money and reasonable supplies of most commodities.  She also embroidered a little and taught me a few stitches but I did not get into that for many years.

However, once eighth grade and the somewhat onerous class were behind me, I got the sewing machine out and proceeded to become a maker of garments and household items! Although my grandma and her sister, the same ones who created the wonderful quilts, kept me in nice outfits for school, as I slipped into the teens, I developed a real interest in clothes! I was never quite a fashionista but I had my favorite styles and colors. I liked full skirts, ruffles, peasant style blouses. Purple, turquoise and red were my favored colors. I know I soon made some more skirts and then tackled a dress or two, gradually getting into more complex and challenging patterns. I ended up with some ugly and ill-done things but some were wearable and my skill improved quickly. I guess it was motivation and heredity. 

About this same time, I got deep into any and all things western and decided the epitome of cool clothing was a western style blouse or shirt with my jeans. They were not cheap, even by that day’s standards, and the regular patterns for them were mostly for men. Not to be foiled, I got a men’s pattern in the approximate size and modified it to fit my very slim but feminine frame. It wasn’t long before I was making a lot of them—all styles of sleeves and collars, different yokes, and my own designs taken from that basic pattern.  I had a whole wardrobe of shirts before long and wore them all with pride. Two of my creations appear at left

By the time I went to college, starting four years late after our horse and mule business finally crashed, Grandma was losing some of her sight and getting severe arthritis so I was pretty much on my own keeping a wardrobe available. I was aided and abetted by three aunts, Dad’s sisters, who were all getting heavier as they aged and outgrowing clothes which they often passed on to me. I restyled things, took them apart and used the larger pieces to devise new garments and also did some thrift store shopping for clothing I used the same way. The only thing I did not make was slacks or jeans. Pantsuits were starting to become acceptable about that time  so I got some ‘riders’, the fitted and flare-bottomed western pants for women, in my favored colors and had a variety of styles and kinds of tops to wear with them. I continued with this after I started to work for the U.S. Army after I graduated.

Then I became an over-night mom when I married and went on sewing, making school dresses and outfits for my daughter and some western shirts for my husband and son. I still made some clothes for myself as well and finally got a pants pattern that fitted—a very simple one with an elastic waist and casual fit. Then sadly the sedentary life—office work and long commutes—took their toll and I followed in my aunts’ footsteps, outgrowing clothes. That was disheartening and I tolerated it far too long. I ended up buying more matronly styles in the sizes I then had to wear. Lots of pull-on pants and skirts, loose tops and shapeless dresses—ugh!! I did not like myself too well then. Not until after my husband had passed away did I finally drop almost 25% of that weight but by then I was back to my tomboy ways and no longer a clothes horse.

I still made curtains for my houses and ended up making my daughter’s wedding dress and then a grand daughter’s graduation dress for the eighth grade—one more mature and fancy than my own high school graduation dress that Grandma had made! Times were changing. By the time those girls graduated from high school they dressed either in slacks or sexy gowns that looked to me appropriate for a showgirl or hooker! Ah well.

I still have a closet full of nice clothes—some long gowns I wore at some of the writer’s conferences I used to attend, broomstick skirts, western blouses and vests and so on but my uniform for 99% of the time is jeans or jean shorts with a t-shirt or pop-over sun top and flannel lumberjack shirts when it is cooler. Most of my sewing today is patchwork projects, a few home or decorative items and an occasional repair job. The old fascination is just not there. I have made a few things and then decided the styles I used to love re really not appropriate anymore; I have just outgrown ruffles and flounces and full, full skirts…. Shoot!  However if my eyes and hands allow it, I will keep sewing as well as making jewelry and other craft stuff until I am really old and not just edging toward it.

These are the 'fancy' efforts I mentioned in the next to last paragraph. Sadly I think my daughter's gown turned out better than her marriage. That sad tale is partly covered in this post:
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8176952721081512220#editor/target=post; postID=3925097277387754565;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=105;src=postname  or skip back to Sept 23, 2015.

Detail of sleeve, headgear

Down the aisle with Dad

8th grade grad-Denise Petty