War Wedding 1943

Mom and Dad, the day of their wedding on February 13, 1943

FBI's Most Wanted

My mother's older sister Irene had eight children, seven of them girls.  One of those girls was named Lois.

Some time in the late 1950s, Lois crossed paths with a man named Everett Leroy Biggs.

Biggs was from another Illinois family, like my cousin.  He had served in the U.S. Marines in post-war Korea.

At any rate, they met, married, and had several children together.  And during their marriage, Everett became a wanted man.  A very wanted man.

He was so 'wanted', that he made it onto the FBI's most wanted list on November 21, 1966, as #240.  The FBI described him as a "serial armed bank robber".

He wasn't on the list long, only two weeks.  On December 1, 1966, Everett was arrested,  taken by surprise outside his Colorado home.  It is said that they tracked him down through his children, who were enrolled in a nearby school.  He served his time, was released, and to my knowledge, walked the straight and narrow thereafter.

I'm not sure when my cousin divorced him, but in 1979, he married again, and he and his second wife were together until his death in 1997.

Dad's Birthday, March 14th

Tomorrow, my father would be 93 years old if he was still with us. He made up great stories, loved watching cartoons with me, helped me build a fence, I helped him move an outhouse; through the years he shared his life with me, and when he couldn't, he wrote it down for me to find later after he was gone. Near the end, I helped him walk and take showers, and listened as he shared how it was to slowly lose your body not just to age but to Parkinson's, yet feel the same as when you were young inside. Tomorrow, I will miss Dad, as I miss him and Mom every single day.

The Language of Sewing

Hems. Tension. Darts. Inset sleeves. Pleats. Notions¹. A-line. Remnant. Basting (and not as in a Turkey!) Bias. Blind-stitching. Spool.  Tracing. Interfacing. Ripper (of which I have become very familiar with through the years!) Gather. Lining. Seams. Patterns. Pinking Shears.

All these words and terms are old friends of mine.  I have neglected them in the last few years because other things in life became a higher priority, not to mention lack of time.  I realize now that much of it was my own tendency to become easily distracted and enamored by all things new or different.

It's not that I didn't realize the value of knowing how to take up a hem, mend a tear, sew on a button, or even sew an entire garment.  No, it was more about eating up life as fast as I could because with every passing year I felt the hand of the Grim Reaper tapping me a little harder on the shoulder, and I wasn't going down before seeing and doing all I could.

Now that I have come full circle, and am on the homestretch towards that "undiscovered country", I reflect on the skills of my youth.  I cannot fathom producing dresses, blouses, skirts, etc. as I once did, but I do love knowing that I could, if I had to.

Sewing is like a riding a bicycle, and getting back on the wheel, bobbin, foot, and feed would be easy as pie.  Oh dear, I am really mixing my metaphors!

 ¹ - Speaking of notions (i.e., buttons, trim, zippers, etc.), my grandmother and mother were very practical, economical women.  When a garment became irreparable, you didn't simply throw it away.  First, you stripped it of anything useful - old buttons, zippers, hooks and eyes, appliques, even collars, lace or ribbon.  Anything that could be recycled was carefully removed and stored for possible future use.

Play House

Me, in front of the Play house [Summer, circa 1964]
My first small house...little did I know then, that my playhouse would in
in its way be prophetic in how I eventually viewed living space.  It also 
didn't hurt that I grew up in an old house which imprinted on me the value
of using space wisely, and valuing such simple things as being cozy.

Delphine: Boy do I remember that play house...it was so cute and fun to play in. Grandma even had built little cupboards in it. She was quite the carpenter.  

Me: Delphine, I didn't know there had been cupboards in there. By the time I played in it, they were gone. Maybe Mom and Dad repurposed them for another outbuilding, like one of the sheds Dad used for his tools. Anyways, I always wondered about the history of the playhouse. Do you know if it had been something else before it was a playhouse (such as a chicken coop, or...?) I thought it was very cool that it had linoleum on the floors, the old kind, too...

 My family wasn't rich.  We weren't dirt poor, either, although nowadays, some people might look on us then and think we weren't far from it.  When I was growing up, it was like they say - you had love, you had food, you had family and community - it was all you knew.  It felt right.

What we didn't lack was inventiveness, creativity, the make-do mentality, and imagination.

For instance, my parents took a small outbuilding, and turned it into a play house for my sisters.  I later inherited it.  I had a children's ice cream parlor table set, that my Mom had scooped up for little cost from the Lewthwaite Drug Store in Emerson years before when they shut down their soda fountain counter.  We took scrap fabric and made little curtains for the window.  There was a big window that had a screen on the outside, and the inside window swung up on a top hinge, and could hook to the ceiling to provide a lovely breeze during the warm months of summer.  My grandmother had helped lay down old linoleum on the floor, and the walls had been nicely painted.  Many tea parties and conversations with my doll Sally were conducted inside, or just outside if we were in the mood for a picnic...

Parkinson's Black Cloud

Parkinson's Disease forces a person to face their mortality every day...
Photo Credit:  Salon / Shutterstock

My father had Parkinson's. He was diagnosed with it not long after he retired.  At first, the symptoms were hardly noticeable, and with low doses of medication, didn't affect his daily life much at all.  But as it always does with the disease, it progressed.  Medication dosages increased, and despite them the signs such as decreased speech volume, trembling, and general weakness heightened.  Mom tried not to show it, but she grew angry, taking it very personally.  To her, Parkinson's was a very real enemy, and she resented the fact that just as Dad and her were not only alone, but free to travel and enjoy their golden years, there was a black cloud over them.

In 2001, my sisters and I found out that Parkinson's was taking a heavy toll on both Mom and Dad.  As we brought Dad and Mom came back from New Mexico for good., I didn't know I had so little time left with him.

During the quiet moments when Dad and I were alone, he would share with me what it was like to have hallucinations, a common side effect of his meds.  How, although he knew he was awake and "they weren't really there", he often saw wee, little people sitting on the end of his bed, or climbing up his dresser.  He said it was a surreal experience, something he couldn't explain away.  I asked him how he dealt with it.  "I just watch them, remind myself it's not real."  What else could he do?

Dad had a dignity and pragmatism about his growing frailty.  He cherished Mom while at the same time being very concerned for her, recognizing that the mental health concerns and emotional weakness he had long been aware of, was now growing stronger for her.  He had been shielding her from their consequences as much as she had been helping his due to Parkinson's.  They were a team.

Dad went first, only a few months after their return; in the end, it was his heart that gave out.  Mom went with him that day...but her body held on for another six years.

Violated

I was groped once, aggressively groped. I was coming out of science class in high school. I and two boys were the last to leave class. The boys were brothers. One came up behind me just as I was exiting the science room and reached around and grabbed one of my breasts. I stopped dead, then he let go, walking on with his brother, both laughing. I stood there for a minute, then went into the girls' lavatory just down the hall on the left. I didn't understand what just happened, not really, but I knew it wasn't right. My first reaction? Anger. Anger at being violated. I never told anyone that time, but if it had ever been attempted again, I would have...