Nancy was Mom's little angel. She was the last baby and was a surprise. Mom didn't even know she was pregnant. She went to the doc for a checkup because she was sick all the time. They admitted her and she gave birth that day.
Nancy weighed a little over four pounds.
Dad had to buy doll clothes to take her home from the hospital. I remember a little yellow hat and jacket.
Because of this, Mom really babied Nancy. It seemed to some of my sisters that mom loved her more. Maybe she did. I don't know. I didn't notice myself. I always had my nose in a book. Notice how grumpy Enid looks because its not her being in the picture. At least she doesn't know she really is in the picture.
You can't see it in any of these but behind the house was a tall tree. I think it was a maple. I used to go out there and climb that tree with a book to read or a book to write in and usually an apple if I had one. I could sit in that tree for hours until somebody needed me to do something. I loved to look out at the field behind us and watch the wind waving through the oats growing there. At first they were a lovely dusty green until late summer when they turned golden.
Must be the Scot in me because I’ve always loved the site
of oats growing in a field.
I would pretend I was far away in another world where I could fly out over those fields.
I wrote every thing down in my journals which are long gone now. Sometimes they were lost in a move. It seemed that every time we moved, something got lost. I think when we moved from here we lost a lot of cats but it may have been when we moved to here.
My memory is of being in the back of a truck with pieces of the stove pipe and furniture stacked around us in the truck. I know I got my knee cut on a sharp piece of the stove pipe.
We got left at the new place while Dad and someone else went back to get the rest of the stuff including the cats. They put the cats in home made cages and some where along the way the cats got out and jumped out of the moving truck. We never found any of them.
This is our Dad. You can see that house behind him in the distance. My Dad was never a young man while I knew him. He was always old and gray. Yes, both our parents smoked.
To the right of where Dad is standing is a water pump. There was another inside the kitchen. Mom thought that was a luxury and loved it. I loved the outside pump. The water came up icy cold and tasted good. On a hot day we would sometimes take turns under the pump while the other one pumped the cold water on us. Mom would give us hell for wasting the water, but it was fun.
You can't see the pear tree but it is beyond the pump. It had yellow pears on it when it did have fruit and it didn't have much. The people who owned the place took all the pears that we kids didn't swipe first.
One day a huge cloud of honey bees arrived to land on that pear tree. It was an awful time. I think some of us got stung. Dad had to find a man to come to take the Queen away so the rest of the bees would follow to his hives.
This is Enid. She was always very jealous of Nancy. She was five years older than Nancy and before Nancy was born Mom spoiled her. I think maybe it just bothered her too much that suddenly she wasn't the baby anymore.
I think about it now and I don't think I ever felt spoiled or that I was the baby. This could be because there are two years between Anna and Millie and me and then three between me and Sue and two between Sue and Enid. Maybe we just never got to feel like the baby because we were never old enough to think that before a new baby came along.