There is something I have been wanting to share with you and tonight, I feel like writing about it.

I have been thinking about Connie’s Story and how it evolved. I started to recall the times I had admired someone else and/or their things and wanted to emulate them. You might think I’m psychoanalyzing myself and you could be right, but I doubt I’m the only person who has struggled with finding their own identity. My first memory of admiring someone else’s style was when I was five years old.

I wanted Lois Lillibridge’s shoes.

I borrowed them and I loved them so much I couldn’t bring myself to give them back. I asked her if she wanted the pink canvas shoes I had and she said, “No.” Then an awful thing happened. Her dad died and Lois and her mom and sister were moving away from Murdo.

Picture below:

I’m sitting on the far left. I’m wearing a white blouse and shorts. Lois is sitting in front of her mother, Marce. My mother is next to Marce, on the far right. She is wearing a dress with a white collar and red shoes. Lois and I are wearing identical white shoes. We were both supposed to be flower girls in a wedding, but Mom said we weren’t going so they got somebody else. Then Mom changed her mind. I got to keep the shoes.

That was a game changer for me. Did I take her shoes back to her? No, I didn’t. I remember as if it was yesterday, taking my pink shoes as close as I could to the moving van parked in front of their house. I never went back to see if she saw them and took them with her, but my conscience wasn’t happy with the rationalization I had come up with, and I never could wear the shoes I had coveted and kept.

Through the years, I spread my coveting around. I thought “so and so” had a better family, nicer house, or…excelled at things I thought I never could or would. It wasn’t until I wrote about Connie in the Murdo Girl stories, that I discovered part of the truth.

“Everyone has their cross to bear.” Mom always said this when I complained about some family problems I thought none of my friends had to deal with. I thought I was the only one in the little town of Murdo who didn’t have the perfect family…

I was wrong and Mom was right.

The fact that I wanted to be “Connie like,” makes so much more sense to me, now. Connie Jackson was an unassuming high school girl who didn’t need the idolatry of anyone else to validate who she was. Looking back, I realize it wasn’t her clothes or her hair that I envied. It was the fact that she didn’t need the attention from people like me. That’s what drew me to her.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some have a strong sense of self and don’t appear to be at all confused about who they are. Other’s self-worth is totally dependent on the admiration of everyone in their world.

Writing Connie’s story was a very enlightening experience for me. I wrote about my desire to be “Connie like” long before I wrote the book, which is about a little girl named Hope.

Connie Jackson’s brother, Eddie, wrote stories about the experiences he and his sister had while going to a country school and what it was like to move to town when Connie started high school. Many readers loved the true experiences he wrote about. I graduated from high school with Eddie, but hadn’t seen or talked to him for over forty years, before we collaborated on the book.

Writing Connie’s Story affected me in another way I hadn’t expected. I recently re-read the book and I felt all of the emotions Hope did. She experienced feelings most people struggle with…fear, loneliness, confusion and the sadness that can eclipse happiness and security. Hope didn’t know who to trust. She didn’t know what a happy family looked like, but in the end she got exactly what she needed. She was one of the fortunate. She recognized the good in her life didn’t have to be like the storybook version.

There are other ways Connie’s Story parallels with my story. Hope lived in Murdo, SD…my hometown. Her grandparents lived south of Highway 16, as did mine. There were two apartments above Sanderson’s Store which in real life was owned by my Grandfather and then my Uncle, Jeff. The businesses on Main Street were as I remembered them when I grew up there.

I had a Great Aunt Grace who kept her little black flats on with a wide rubber band. She never lived in Murdo. I’m grateful I got to spend some time with her after we moved to Texas. Uncle Jeff Sanderson told me she lived in Dallas and I must look her up. Grace outlived her husband, son, and daughter. The only family she had left was her grandson.

Aunt Grace was a hoot! Like her sister, (Grandma Mary), she wasn’t more than five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds, but she remained strong in spite of and because of all she had endured.

Many Connies have shown up in my life. My grandmother on my dad’s side was by all accounts a strong and wise woman. Her name was Constance Abbie Francis. She became a widow when she was in her thirties and was left with a couple of hardware stores and three very young boys. My cousin, Abby, (spelled differently), was named after our Francis grandmother, and I was named after both of my grandmothers…Mary Sanderson and Constance Francis. Constance is my middle name.

Content Abbie Bottom Francis Bowers. (she changed her name from Content to Constance

Mary Tyrrell Sanderson

A few years after Mom died her sister, Helen, passed away. Her daughter shared with me that one night, she heard her mother having a conversation with my mother. Helen kept opening the door to let the angels in and out. My cousin also said she had heard her mom talking to someone named Connie. After reading Connie’s story in my Murdo Girl blog, she asked me if there was a connection.

Could all of the Connie Angels be merely coincidences? I will let you come to your own conclusions, but I believe Connie’s story evolved as it did for all of us to learn from. I don’t write like an expert. All of my thoughts and feelings don’t transfer into words as readily as they do to more experienced writers, but I have learned about myself and my beliefs by sharing my stories with you. I owe you all a debt of gratitude.

There must be a strong bond between those who have passed before us, and those who are still living, that cannot be broken. We can still feel the comforting connection to those we won’t see again in this life. Whether they are family, friends, or people we never knew… If they had a profound and positive effect on our lives, they will remain in our hearts forever. Likewise, we can hope that we will live in the hearts of those we have spent our lives loving. We are forever connected, forever family, forever friends.

https://g.co/kgs/ekbUEd 

My Angel by Kellie Pickler about the grandmother she loved

You, (or it), are, (or is), driving me to distraction.!! I can still hear Mom say this…her hazel eyes flashing. Everything Mom did was fast. She power walked before it became popular. If I hoped to get a little more sleep on Saturday mornings, my hopes were always dashed. I could hear Mom walking from the kitchen to the laundry area of our basement house, which had a tile floor. Clomp, clomp, clomp… back and forth she went. She wasn’t doing it to disturb me. That’s how she walked. She would find one piece of laundry and walk to the washing machine to throw it in, wash a few dishes and then go into the living room to grab her coffee cup. She might take a couple of puffs of her Salem cigarette, but could rarely sit down long enough to smoke the whole thing.

Eventually, it would start to bug her that I hadn’t gotten up yet. She would stand in the doorway of my bedroom off the kitchen and flip the light on and off a few times before she said, “Rise and Shine!!”

This was my mother, who got many of her mothering tips from Ann Landers or a friend that had read Ann Landers. I wrote about the afternoon  I got home from school just in time to change, grab a bite to eat, and get to the auditorium for the basketball game? I walked into my room and everything in my closet was now on the floor, and everything in my dresser drawers was thrown onto the unmade bed. Mom was right behind me, arms folded. She informed me that so and so had read Ann Landers and she said if your teenager refused to keep his or her room clean, you should throw everything on the floor and tell them they can’t leave until everything was neatly put away.

I cried and she caved, but it was all waiting for me when I got home. The older I get, the more I’m like my mother, only a couple of octaves lower.

My brother, Billy, and I are seven and a half years apart in age. I was in the fourth grade when he left for California to go to work and attend college. Most of our dad’s family lived out there and he lived with them for a while. Our Uncle got Billy a job parking cars for the Dodgers. Little did he know that he would spend the next fifty some years of his life in the parking industry. He is finally going to retire the end of this month. He has been a little nervous about retirement. We’re all just going to hide and watch.

Billy and I didn’t spend long periods of time together after he left for college, and I think we both felt a little like only children. When we were together, he would say, “Do you know what my mother said or what my dad did?” I sometimes said, “Hey, it’s our mother and our father.”

Billy and I are really close now. I can’t wait to see Gus and him and of course, cousin Valerie and Ken in Arizona in a couple of weeks. We’ll all be there for the Jones County reunion.

I have no idea how I got off on the subject of my mother, though I shouldn’t be surprised. She has a firm place in my head all the time.

On to other things…

Kip and I left our house about seven-thirty this morning to check out the lots we had uncovered with the realtor, yesterday. The first one was too far away, but we decided to look at it anyway. We took the dogs with us, and apparently they hadn’t gone to the bathroom before we left and were getting kind of antsy. We pulled off the road and let them run around a bit. That’s how we got the jeep stuck.

I know it doesn’t look like we’re stuck, but the tires just kept spinning. We were trying to back up. The second photo is Kip walking downhill to the road to make sure there was no quicksand to get into. I ended up pushing a little and we made it. The lot wasn’t an option anyway, the subdivision doesn’t allow tiny homes.

They do, however, allow people to put a propane tank on their front porch. The little mother-in-law suite next door looks like it could be having some foundation issues.

My tiny home and I will not go where we’re not wanted. They would rather have a house like that in the neighborhood, than this:

This is the Meadow View. You have seen it before in the blog, but I keep coming back to the wrap around deck, two doors to the outside and the outdoor fireplace. After you pick your floor plan, which we haven’t, there are still so many choices on the inside. Here are some pics of the same model, and the same floor plan, but the colors and staging make it look very different.

The island counter is on wheels so it can be moved out-of-the-way or face another directio

I like the stone walk- in shower, below. We can switch it out, but if it requires more space, it has to come from the kitchen or bedroom.

I took some other pictures of lots, but we don’t know the story on them, yet. Our realtor said he would get with us tomorrow after he does some research. In the meantime, I’m rather enjoying our “small home.”

See, I’m a lot like Mom. I jump around a lot and sometimes I have a difficult time finishing what I started…makes me smile, but it drives others to distraction.

You all haven’t been much help in deciding which model tiny home you like best. That’s okay…we have a little time, but once we get the lot, I think it will be downhill from there.

Kip and I met with the real estate agent who was recommended by the tiny home salesman. He is a super nice guy, energetic, and fun. He gathered information, gave us suggestions, showed us satellite views of lots that are for sale, but not listed. They’re called pocket listings. This guy would make a great detective. It won’t be easy to find what we need, but if anyone can do it, he can. Kip and I are going in the morning to look at some possibilities he gave us. I really believe the McNinch TH1 will happen in my lifetime.

Now…what do you need from me to facilitate a final favorite tiny home? Would you like more model choices or more pictures of different styles of the floor plans you have seen. We can alter some things as long as it doesn’t affect the square footage.

Oh fudge…Here are two more models to look at.

The Berry

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See the stairway in the floor plan? It would not be there because we are not going to have a loft. Without the stairway, we could make the bedroom larger.

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You can’t see the walls clearly in these photos, but the walls are rustic side boards painted white. There would be an electric fireplace on the wall with the television above. The kitchen is across from the couch.

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The shower door is not a sliding door. It pulls open. There is a door to the bathroom from the bedroom and another into the hall.

The Mountainview

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The Mountainview is wider and shorter than any of the others, giving it a square design, There is no loft. The space between the bedroom and bathroom is a closet,

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The kitchen…you can see the open barn door to the bedroom. The living room is separated from the kitchen by a long bar,

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Kitchen from another angle…and the bedroom.

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The bathroom – you can see on the floor plan, there is no door from the bedroom to the bathroom. That wouldn’t bother me. Two doors can be a hassle.

If you want me to, I can show more pictures of the three faves we all chose from previous photographs. Tell me in your comments and I will add them tomorrow as well as the lots we will see in the morning.

The Bishop 2

The Meadowview

The Trinica

Remember where the floor plan shows stairs to a loft, there will be added floor space to the living room or bedroom because we aren’t going to have a loft. There is a space for a washer and dryer in all of the floor plans. The ceilings will be vaulted throughout.

We will be busy little bee’s tomorrow. We will be cleaning and staging the sun room tomorrow too. I’ll show pictures of the “small home” soon, while it’s still clean,

I wasn’t going to write a blog tonight because I figured you were tired of hearing about our back-breaking efforts to clean up our small house mess. It will be several more days before we will be able to see the light at the end of the powdery dust that gets into everything, tunnel.

I only got three little breaks today. We braved the freezing cold to go to McDonald’s for breakfast, then on to shop for new bathroom towels and rugs. The second break was a quick trip to Dollar Gentril to buy some Fabuloso. Dollar Gentril is right next door to Goodwill, so I stuck my head in there to say hi to my friends, and check out the newer old merchandise.

The third break was when my brother, Billy, called. I kind of thought I would hear from him today. I was a little fuzzy on the details about Mom’s early room-renting days. Billy told me to get a pen and take notes.

First of all, there were two signs directing people to our house…one at the end of our street by Highway 16, and one in front of the house.

Billy said we all slept downstairs and the tourists stayed upstairs. I told him I specifically remembered the roll-away beds downstairs. He told me they were for us to sleep on.

I guess I didn’t tell the part about Dad waking him up to ask where Mom was right either. Billy said he was coming out of a  dream and he told Dad she was at the Murdo house. The one that had six or eight rooms in it.”

Dad was really confused about that and he continued to question Billy, which is why Billy started crying. Dad was trying to make sense out of what he was saying, and Billy was getting his information from the dream he just had.

Billy and Mary… when we lived at the new house

Let me look at my notes here…

The very first night, a nice couple rented one of the upstairs rooms. The husband and Dad started talking and one thing led to another. A fun evening was had by all. Unfortunately, it was at our expense and since we only charged five dollars a night, we lost money.

Billy said we rented out our bedrooms because we needed money to buy drapes, which was apparently a real motivator. We also needed a sidewalk. We had wood planks leading from our house to the street. One night, two very well-heeled women rented a room and when one of the ladies went back to the car to get her suitcase, she decided to take a shortcut to the door and walked through a bunch of mud. (We hadn’t put the lawn in yet either.) She sunk her well-heeled foot up to her ankles in South Dakota gumbo. It was the kind of soil that if dry, would have very deep cracks in it. Billy said he stuck a hose in one of those cracks and left it running all day. It never did fill up.

One night Uncle Al and Mr. Brost came over to visit with Dad. They had to talk downstairs because we had tourists upstairs. After a while, one of them started playing songs on the jukebox. We had all kinds of forty-five records which they played loudly. Billy said he was in his room and he heard the McGuire Sisters singing the same song over and over again. The jukebox had so much power, you could hear it all the way to Draper. I forgot to write down the song, but it might have been “Just for Old Times Sake.” I remember their song, “Sugar in the Morning, Sugar in the Evening, Sugar at Suppertime.”

Mom had rented the upstairs rooms to two couples. They all left in the middle of the night. Billy said they didn’t even ask for their five dollars back.

Mom got some real nice drapes and eventually, Dad put in a sidewalk, but we never did have a lawn. Fortunately, the weeds grew thick and green, so we just mowed them down.

We had an old push mower and weeds like in the picture. Once, Mom was mowing at the motel and hit a rock. Her foot got caught in the mower and it cut half of two toes off. (She was wearing sandals.)

When we lived at the new house, Mom grew flowers in the planter under the picture window and she had a spearmint plant beside the front steps. You could always smell spearmint gum when you walked past that plant in the summertime.

I know what Loretta-ism Billy and I would hear if Mom was around. “If you’re going to tell a story make it good or don’t tell it!”  It’s the same one I heard her say the other night, but we tell a story a minute in our family. Mom also said, “I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.”

Talk to you tomorrow, Billy…THE END

I’m tired. I haven’t been able to stay asleep for the last couple of nights. I  guess I forgot that allergy medications keep me awake. I thought a persistent headache was due to allergies, and decided the headache was worse than the side effects of the medication. I was wrong. No sleep is the side effect and it’s worse.

It’s hard for me to think right when I’m sleep deprived. I wait all day to go back to bed. You see, I can’t take naps. There are two things that wake me right up…trying to take a  nap, and going to bed early. Kip will say he’s going to sit in his recliner and take a fifteen minute nap. He’s asleep before he can finish the sentence and wakes up at the specified time. Don’t even get me started on the dogs and cat.

I wasn’t going to write a blog tonight because of my….uh, my…I forgot what I was thinking. Mom used to say, “If you can’t remember what you were going to say, it must have been a lie.” Well, Mom, if that’s true the older I get the more lies I tell.
I hate to be caught in a falsehood. I remember making a spinach dip for my sister-in-law’s Thanksgiving dinner. My nephew made a comment that it was really good. In fact, he loved it. I just haaad to go and say it was my own special recipe. One I had developed over the years. He frowned at me, and then got up and walked to the kitchen. He came back with a Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix. The recipe for my dip was on the back. He said, “Other people make your spinach dip, Aunt Mary.”

“But I use only the freshest ingredients,” I mumbled.

He turned the package over to read the recipe. It called for mayo, frozen spinach, buttermilk, and the powdered Hidden Valley ranch dressing mix.

I don’t do that anymore. I just tell everyone who likes what I bring to potlucks that I know where to buy good food.

 I remember Mom telling Billy she made the cherry turnovers he loved, from scratch. Then he found the empty box that had held four frozen cherry turnovers. It was in the garbage. He was very upset, but not as mad as he was when he caught her putting a raw egg in his hot chocolate. It wasn’t bad for you to eat raw eggs back then. Mom thought he needed an egg each morning and he wouldn’t eat a cooked one.

Is pretending the same as lying? No, I don’t think so.

I remember what I was going to write about tonight. Have you ever put your foot in your mouth? When we were at our Tuesday dinner last night, a good friend said to me,”Your hair looks really cute tonight, Mary…Did you wash it?”

Of course she didn’t mean it like it sounded. She realized what she had said right away. It’s usually worse when you try to walk it back. I jumped in and told her that yes, I had washed my hair right before we came to dinner. She told me it was really shiny.

I went to Wyoming to visit my son and his family. I was so excited to see everyone. When we got to their house, I walked in and everything looked wonderful. I said, “Boy, your house looks great! You must have worked for a week to make it look this nice.”

The awful thing was, I didn’t even realize what I had said until I looked at my daughter-in-law’s face. She didn’t get where I was coming from, because I would never say such a thing even if it was true, and it most certainly wasn’t.

I felt terrible and I couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t make what I said sound worse. I think I apologized and said I hadn’t slept well for a couple of nights.

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We were busy for most of today researching areas for a possible tiny home site. We didn’t return the call to the realtor we were referred to, and I didn’t call the other “realtor connection” either. We decided to concentrate on putting our house together. Monday, we will begin again.

So, tomorrow we will pack up our teeny house and move back into the small house. I’m hoping for a good night’s sleep. If that doesn’t happen, I’m sure to hear Mom say, “Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket.”

I guess my hair is kinda shiny…

I titled yesterday’s blog, “As happy as if she had good sense.” This is one of the Loretta-isms Mom often used. Translated into today’s lingo, it means something like, “She goes through life unscathed even though she’s clueless.”

My brother, Billy, and I once wrote down all of the Mom metaphors we could think of. Mom was phrase prolific. She had an idiom for every story that required her to give it her own bit of flavor. When I have completed this post, I will name it with another of Mom’s isms. I will be able to see her shake her head and give me a sideways glance as she gives my post a cryptic analysis.

Kip and I took our time this morning. I didn’t sleep very well, so I wasn’t looking forward to doing mundane chores like laundry. The day was warm enough but dreary, which didn’t add to our energy level. By lunchtime, we were pretty caught up with things, so we started looking online for lots in the Cedar Creek area. Kip also called the real estate agent referral we were given and left a message, but we haven’t heard back from him.

We found a lot in Log Cabin that sounded great. The ad showed pictures of all the lake amenities and made it seem as though it was in sort of a resort area. It was also reasonably priced, so we decided to go look at it.

 This was the good part of the neighborhood.

When you are driving in an area and there are houses that would better be described as shelters, and there are signs all over that say, “No Trespassing…Keep Out,” you know it might not be the best place to settle down. As we locked our car doors and headed back to the main road, we realized we hadn’t seen any signs of life other than a dog standing near the road…watching us.

We were about to ditch the idea of looking around anymore, when we came across some lots in a subdivision in Eustace. We headed that way and found them in minutes. The lots are in a pretty good area and they are about the size we want…a quarter acre. They are all heavily wooded, and don’t have any utilities to them, which would really increase the money we would have to invest. It might still be a possibility if we could get the lot price reduced enough, but I think we can do better.

Tomorrow, we will try again to touch base with the realtor Kip called today, or get another referral. We went to our regular Tuesday night group dinner, and our friends, Pat and Jerry, suggested we contact someone they know who has a lot of contacts in the Eustace area. It’s probably wiser to tap into other people’s knowledge of a town than to go off on our own. It’s 328 miles around Cedar Creek Lake and there are several different communities for us to check out. We have only just begun.

On another note, we stopped by the “small home” and the flooring job was almost finished. All they have left to do is finish some of the trim. The lady they lined up to clean everything is supposed to finish tomorrow too. We will all move back in on Thursday morning. There will still be a lot to do to put it all back together.

I like it, but I’m not in love with it. I guess I should reserve judgement until we get all the furniture back in place and add the touches that make it homey. You are the only ones I have said anything to. I didn’t want Kip to know I’m a little nervous. I’m the one who picked the flooring out. I’m sure it will be fine. At the most, we’ll just have to paint the walls…and the kitchen cabinets, but don’t say anything, please.

 My Aunt Ella, Aunt Helen, and Mom…

Mom is looking sideways and I can just hear her say to her sisters, “I told Mary, if the story isn’t interesting, don’t tell it.” Translated…”If you’re going to tell a story make it interesting, (adlib), or forget it!”

One of Mom’s greatest talents was knowing how to tell a good story and she always knew when to forget it.

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Did you know there was a Machiavellian Cabinet plot in the 30’s that would have DENIED the Queen the throne, left her a lowly Duchess of Edinburgh and made William and Harry COMMONERS??

She looks clueless