Some of my fondest memories are of
the creativity of my mother. She grew up
on a farm in Arkansas and lived through the depression, so there was no money
in those days for buying toys or other frivolous things. Money bought food and the few clothes that
she washed out daily and left to dry overnight.
She married my dad at age 22 and they started their family
immediately. I was the last daughter of
three when she again found herself with no money for expensive toys . . . but
she was creative, and we didn’t lack for play things.
Even now I can smell the concoction of flour, salt, oil,
and water that Mother mixed together to make play dough. Our fun began when we added the different
drops of food coloring to each batch and mixed it up. It stuck to our fingers until we could get it
thoroughly mixed and then we would make our shapes . . . faces, boxes, worms…or
just use cookie cutters. When the dough
was played with beyond keeping, we would shape our final delights and let them
harden for posterity. Of course,
posterity only lasted until Mother cleaned our room.
I remember her tracing our feet on a piece of cardboard
and cutting them out, lacing a strap through our toes and around our ankles to
keep them on. I felt like I was a
princess walking around in those homemade sandals. I also knew that I could be pretty rough on
them because all I needed was another piece of cardboard and I was a princess
again.
Summer afternoons we would chase butterflies, very rarely
catching them, and at dusk we would lie out on the warm pavement in front of
the house and watch the stars, seeing what kind of creatures we could shape
with our imagination.
Then
there were the mud pies out in the back yard.
Mother would give us a bucket of water, a shovel, an old piece of scrap
board and we would plop ourselves down upon a mound of dirt, make a hole, and
fill it with water. We would mix and mix
our little sprinkles of dirt until we had a nice hole of mud. Then we patted out our pancake size mud pies
and lay them out to dry on the board. We
usually decorated a face on each before they completely dried in the sun.
Then,
because we were so-o-o muddy, Mother would spray us down with
the garden hose or set up the sprinkler and let us run and jump over it and get
wet. The end of the day brought our
tired little bodies in to be bathed and dried and dressed up in our warm
flannel jammies. Special nights we were
treated to popcorn and a program on television . . . Jackie Gleason or Ed
Sullivan.
I
remember, too, a big vacant field at the top of the hill where we lived. It’s now overgrown with houses and freeway
and shopping, but when I was a little girl, cows were on the upper side. We would drag big pieces of cardboard up to
the edge of the fence and slide down on the overgrown grass. We were always worn out by the time we got
home and I’m sure Mother was glad we were ready to sit down and rest for a
while.
And,
oh, the forts we would make under the kitchen table with the chairs pulled out
and a big blanket thrown over the top, which hung down. Milk and cookies tasted sweeter under that
makeshift fortress.
Mother
was a school teacher in lower elementary and was even my substitute teacher a
few times before taking a permanent position.
A real treat for me was when Dad lined one wall of our garage with
blackboards and I would “play school” for hours and hours. As I grew older than the class Mother was
teaching, she enlisted my help to grade papers and decorate bulletin
boards. One of my favorite vacations was
our trip across country from California to New York. We stopped at every sight-seeing attraction
it was possible to see; most were educational but we had fun, too. Maybe she hoped I would become a school
teacher some day but my first typing class sent me in another direction and
shorthand confirmed it . . . I would be a secretary.
I
wish families today would give their children and grandchildren the opportunity
to exercise their creative juices, to have the joy of producing something made
with their own hands, and the satisfaction and pride of showing off a job well
done.
Yes,
my mother shaped me, and I have many wonderful memories of my childhood. Thanks, Mom, I love you . . . Elsie Mae (Daugherty)
Goines!!!
May,
2005
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