“Little Me” Stories

Dearest Reader: It appears I may have taken an unplanned Sabbatical. It will soon be a year since I posted here.

As I look back over the course of 2025, I see that I started and left four posts unfinished. 

For starters, I attended the graduation of a grandson in Oregon, visited my brother’s family in Montana (including my niece and her family, who were home on a visit from New Zealand), and we celebrated our 55th anniversary with our family in Wisconsin. We are grateful that we can still travel; however, we avoid red-eye and 7:00 a.m. flights if at all possible.

Meanwhile, I continue to participate in and enjoy my weekly “Memoir Mentors” online writing group, benefiting from their support and feedback as I write for my family. Another project dear to me is reformatting my parents’ story for their family and friends. Some days, delving into writing simply takes more energy than I have available. So there’s that too. But writing is always on my mind.

Along the way, someone asked, “What do you do with your days?”

My answer? “I wake up each morning, thinking, ‘When can I write today?‘ I go to bed each night thinking, ‘When can I write tomorrow?'” which prompted the start of this post in January 2025. 

Join me as I do a bit of catching up, starting with a Super Bowl Post from January 2025.

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Super Bowl Sunday, January 2025
Here I am sitting at a card table in the living room, my computer in front of me with the TV in view. (although I would have been hard-pressed to tell you who was playing tonight). This way, I can be with Galen, who is watching. Anyway, I hear Lauren Daigle is singing the National Anthem (I love her music voice and music,) and Matthew McConaughey is going to be in a commercial. So what’s not to love?

Meanwhile, back to my writing life: I have been absorbed in writing memories of “Little Me ” and my life in South Alabama in the early 1950s. ( I spent the first four years in south central Pennsylvania.)

My Dad and Mom wrote their story for us, and inspired this effort of mine to write my story for my children, my grandchildren, and those yet to come (great-grandchildren, that is). I just turned 77 and can’t help but feel a sense of urgency to tell my story, the things that mean the most to me and and how my faith has shaped my life.

To give you an idea of how I spend a lot of my time, I’ve included an excerpt for you to read, written in the present tense / first-person voice of “Little Me.”

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Arriving in Dixie, South Alabama, In March 1952 as a four-year-old

It looks a lot different than our home in Pennsylvania. There are fewer hills here, although it’s hilly up in the northern part of the state. We are only twenty-five miles from the Florida/Alabama state line, and more importantly, only fifty miles from the Gulf and white sand beaches.

Our “new” southern home is a square wooden frame house that nestles back from the country road, Rt. 29, twenty-five miles south and west of Andalusia. My parents love to tell people from back home in Pennsylvania, “We live on the edge of the Conecuh National Forest.” The pine trees are tall and straight, with little grass growing under them because the pine needles that drop from the trees provide a pine needle carpet. We love the pine forests. It is hot in the summer, but then so was Pennsylvania

Our house is elevated off the ground, resting on brick pillars all around the foundation. Many homes in the South are built this way. As you can see, there would be enough room for dogs, cats, and other animals to run around under there, as well as the more adventurous child, I suppose.  I, however, am not one of those children.

Our house has two bedrooms, like our apartment in Pennsylvania, but the kitchen and living room are much larger. And no grumpy landlady to tell me I can’t step on the grass. It, however, does not have a bathroom or running water.  (click HERE to read the Outhouse story!)

Here is where I will remember my first Christmas Tree, a pine tree freshly cut from the woods and brought into the house, decorated with muilticolored lights,  silver garland wrapped around the tree, and silver “icicles.”

(And I still use multicolored lights, wrap a silver garland around the tree, and carefully drape silver icicles on the ends of the branches.  

Dixie, our small community, has a small country store, a school, and our little church down the road. Other than that, houses are scattered here and there along back roads. Daddy will preach at the church, and they will teach people about Jesus. They are  “home missionaries.” (I’ll find out later that they considered going to Africa, and then they would have been “foreign missionaries,” and I would have grown up in Africa.)

Our church: as it looks in April 2018 – much improved from 1952

The church sits up on a slight rise, shaded by tall pine trees. A small cemetery is in the back, and of course, another outhouse. No running water here either. The building needs a coat of paint.

The two tall Pine trees are perfect for “dinner on the grounds.” It’s not eating dinner sitting on the ground. It is on the “grounds” – as in the property around the church.

“Dinner on the Grounds” happens occasionally after a Sunday morning service. In preparation for a meal after church, the men stretch welded wire fencing from one of the pine trees to the other. This becomes the “table” for the food the women bring. This thing would sway down with the weight of the food. No one sat at this table. Chairs and blankets on the ground are for sitting.(Years later, we visit this little church. The two tall pine trees are still there, and there is now a picnic table between the two trees. I wonder if there is a new version of “Dinner on the Grounds”.)

I love these Sundays. Everyone is happy to be together, and the food is delicious, especially the Fried Chicken.  Oh, and the biscuits,  sweet iced tea, and lemonade, all made from scratch. (I never learned to enjoy the turnip greens.) 

I love it when Mom makes lemonade. You’ll never find a better-tasting lemonade. She squeezes the cut-up lemons, drops the rinds and the juice from all that squeezing into a gallon jar, then adds sugar and mixes it all together. After that comes the cold water and more sugar until it tastes just right.

It’s important to know that lemonade and sweet tea must be poured into a glass filled to the top with ice cubes. Up north, we only used a couple ice cubes for a drink. I still want a glass full of ice cubes for a cold drink.

The people are nice here. In Sunday School, I meet a little girl named Charlie who lives in a house right across the road from the church. Mother and Daddy take me to play at her house one day. For some reason, I get the idea to take off my blouse and wear only my skirt and underwear. Charlie’s mom says maybe that isn’t a good idea, but I see nothing wrong with it. When my parents come to pick me up, they don’t agree and tell me that little girls don’t run around without their blouses, just like men don’t run around without their pants. I don’t get “in trouble,” but I do get the message.

John and Elsie Lehman (the ones who inspired Daddy and Mother to come here to Alabama) live over in Horn Hill, and we often visit them. Sometimes they come to visit with their son, Johnny, who is my age.

A family with a little girl my age lives on the other side of our house – just a short walk on the path through the woods. Sometimes, I walk the short distance to her house by myself. One night, our family visits them in their home. My new friend and I entertain ourselves by jumping on the bed. Jumping on beds isn’t usually allowed, but she says it’s ok. The fun lasts until I tumble hard into the wall, hurting my arm. We end up going home.

Mother and Daddy try to decide what to do about it. They have no money to go to a doctor, and anyway, we are so new here, they don’t even have a doctor yet. (There were no emergency rooms then.) They decide to pray about it and give it time. If it doesn’t heal, we’ll have to find a doctor and pay for it somehow.

It heals all by itself.

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Thanks for joining me, Dear Readers, as I catch up. Stick around . . . there are at least a few more posts to finish.

There have been changes at my lake – The Weeping Willow Tree is gone, and so is the “Tiny Little tree” I wrote letters to. You can start HERE if you are new aound here and haven’t read them yet.