Chats on the Farmhouse Porch 2013: #22

Questions


    When you were a child, what age did you think was "OLD"?
Age thirty was probably old to me back then. I say this because when I was eight years old and my mama turned thirty, I made sure to tell everybody that we ran across. I remember quite clearly telling the people at the life insurance office (which I believe was Life of Georgia). I think me announcing it to everyone kind of interfered with it being a good day for her. Sorry, Mama!

I'm reckoning, though, that maybe she would like to be thirty again. I know that I sure would!

              How often do you have dessert?
It depends on how often my son makes it. He loves to bake cakes and we love to eat his cakes.


What's your favorite kind of exercise?
We're supposed to have a favorite? It isn't "official" exercise, but I love to walk through cemeteries, especially the old ones.


Do you watch movies on TV, movies from a rental or the library, or movies online?
We have a Roku and are able to watch Netflix (from online and on DVD), Amazon, and several other channels through our television. We especially enjoy the Lecture King channel. It shows college lectures from various universities. The Missouri State University videos are the ones that we watch the most on this channel. They have economics, US History, astronomy, all sorts of cool things.


Tell me something you remember about your grand mother's/grand father's house? I'm thinking of something you saw all of the time, like a picture, clock, statue, teapot. or some thing that was always there.
My grandma and grandpa lived in an apartment. One thing that I remember there is the slick tile floor and their chihuahua named Cricket. That combination kept me afraid that one or the other of them would fall and break a hip or something. I also remember their huge room divider that held Grandma's figurines and Grandpa's woodwork.

My granny lived way out in the middle of nowhere (my favorite kind of place to live!) in a little white frame house that she rented for ages. For years it didn't have an indoor bathroom. She had an outhouse and I didn't like going out there one little bit. My daddy eventually built an indoor bathroom for her, but I was already grown by then with children of my own and not able to visit her as often as I had been able to do as a child. She also had a tree in her front yard that one year was totally covered with ladybugs. There were two or three steps up to her porch and once you got inside, she had pictures of Pink Lady and Blue Boy hanging on her living room walls. She also had a picture of her daddy in an oval frame. It was such a nicely done photograph. On a little bookshelf, she had a picture of my Uncle Bobby Joe, her oldest son that had been killed in Germany. He was in the US Army and died before I was born. Also on that shelf was a picture of her mama, my Grandma Fowler, who also died before I was born. Granny lost both of her parents fairly young. Her daddy was forty-four years old and her mama was only fifty-nine years old. She also had a big wood stove in her living room. Going straight on into the next room was her kitchen, my favorite room in her house because that is where the best food on the planet came from. She also had a pretty white china cabinet-type thing that I loved. It had wood-framed glass doors on top. One of her other rooms is where she kept the quilts that she was working on. She did every step by hand, individually hand cutting each square and hand-stitching and quilting them until arthritis made it too painful for her to do. My oldest two children have quilts made by her, but she was no longer able to make them by the time my youngest two were born.

I remember that my papa (formerly married to my granny) lived in several mill houses during the course of my childhood. The two that I remember were both duplexes. I remember that one was white and one was a sort of green color. The only thing that I really remember about visiting him was that his false teeth were too big for his mouth, so they looked kind of funny and when they weren't in his mouth, his lips were sucked in because there were no teeth to set them right. He always called me Susan. He's the only one that could get away with calling me that.


Please be sure to click the button at the top of this post to visit Patrice and her front porch. You won't be sorry!