Saturday, October 8, 2011

Some Thoughts and Memories of My Sister

My sister, Mary Jane, was ten years my senior.  My parents wanted two children and they had my brother and my sister two years apart.  Ten years later, once they thought my mother too old to conceive and stopped taking precautions guess what happened.  Yep, me.  So, my memories of my brother and sister during my childhood are somewhat limited as they were always "adults" to me and both of them left home early to escape my father.  Or, so I believe.

My very first memory of Mary Jane, as I've mentioned earlier, was at the little, log cabin where I was born.  She was sitting on the porch with her feet on the step and both my mother and my Dad were whipping her.  Dad with his belt (his favorite weapon) and mother with a switch. 

That is, perhaps, not my first memory of her although no one else will believe I can remember the episode as I was too young.  She was on the kitchen porch rocking me and rocked off the porch with me.  I can distinctly remember being in a rocking chair and looking at the rockers and the way they would move a little bit each time from where they were the last time.  Maybe, I'm wrong but I think that must be the time it happened. 

My memories of her are very limited in the next several years.  I can remember her watching "American Bandstand" when we lived at Stafford.  I remember her sweeping up the living room and throwing my brother's "playing cards" into the pot bellied stove in the living room.  I remember she and my mother in the upstairs where my mother was ironing and they would not let me leave to go play until I could recite my ABCs and count to ten.  I must have been around three then.  Maybe four.

I don't recall her at all when we were living at Spring Knob.  I think, though I'm not sure, she was living with my aunt Dixie.   I will have to ask my brother about that sometime. 

Even after we moved to West Van Lear just a few houses away from where aunt Dixie lived I can not really remember her staying with us a lot.  Just a few vague memories of them needing a fourth for playing Rook and, there being no one else, they let me play.  I did not really understand the game and was quite bad at it so they just quit playing.

I remember, after we moved to the second house we lived in up Burglar Holler (Burger Hollow is its correct name) she would not let me watch Mr Cartoon until after I finished my homework.   No matter how much I promised to do it right afterwards. 

That house had hardwood floors.  I can remember after waxing them she would turn a throw rug upside down and let me sit on it while she pulled it around to buff the wax to a nice shine.  But, most of the time I don't think she was there.  I know she spent a lot of time living with aunt Dixie and I know she moved to Columbus, OH to babysit for a couple.  I do not recall who that was but for some reason I think it may have been one of the Vargos.  I keep wanting to call them the Fargos because at that time there was a western TV show on called "Tales of Wells Fargo". 

I remember  her coming home one time and fixing us a rump roast for supper.  (Yes, supper dammit.  Not dinner.  Dinner is what you eat during the middle of the day.  Supper is what you eat in the evening.  There is a reason they called it a 'Dinner Bucket'.)  I thought that was the best thing I had ever eaten.  To this day I cannot be in the grocery and see a  rump roast and not remember that.

And she told a story about the young boy she was babysitting for that all VanHoose's should relate to.  Seems the boy did not want to eat his meal and wanted some kind of dessert.  She told him he could not have any dessert until he emptied his plate and went about her chores in another room.

A few minutes later he brought her his plate to show her it was empty.  She gave him his dessert only to later find all his food dumped in the garbage can.  I mean, hey, she never specified he had to empty his plate by EATING the food.  I have no clue now who the kid was but I like the way he thought.

But, most of the memories I have of my sister are as an adult.  She, like my mother, was a very devout Jehovah's Witness and attended services at the Kingdom Hall on a regular basis.  I am not sure how exactly it came about but she went to Daniel's Creek to meet a young man named Wayne Collins.  I was never told the details but it ended up instead of marrying the son she married the father, Homer Collins.  At the time of their wedding she was twenty-three and he was fifty-one. 

I do not know that they were always happy because no one that I know is.  But, I will say one thing for certain;  with what came later I was happy she did marry him.  But that will become obvious later on.



Jimmy Ray was the first child they had.  He was born in nineteen and sixty eight.  I spent a lot of time there doing other chores while Mary Jane tended to the baby.  Memories of that time are somewhat jumbled so I'm not entirely sure of the true sequence of events but I'll relate them as I remember them.  And, I'll throw in a few memories that are really not related to  anything else.  Just memories.

Odds and ends kind of things.  For breakfast up until then I had always eaten my eggs with the yolk fried hard.  Homer wanted his eggs with the yolk still runny.  He would break the yolk on the top and put a chunk of butter inside it.  I tried it and I liked it and to this day prefer my eggs "over medium" with a chunk of butter in the yolk.  Funny how such tiny things stick with us so clearly.

After meals, when I was there, I would do the dishes.  While doing those I always had the radio tuned to WSIP in Paintsville.  Country  music all the time.  We were too far away from Huntington, Wv to get Key 101 or 103 or whatever.  That was the top forty station and I always listened to it at home.  Back then, at any given time, I could have given you the complete lyrics of any song in the top forty.

But I liked Country as well.  The big song that sticks with me from those days was Tammy Wynette singing "D-I-V-O-R-C-E".  I had my hands deep in dish water when the news about the RFK assassination came across on the news.  I look back and wonder what a different world this would have been had that not happened.  Better or worse I have no idea but I think it would have been different.  For one I don't think he would have reversed Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy and that would have certainly changed the world.  But, one will never know.

Another, off the wall memory is the beds hall had feather beds on them.  Two of them, one for lying on and one for pulling over you.  Man, no winter weather was cold enough to get through that.  Snug and warm all night long.  When they got more modern and got real mattresses my sister made pillows out of the feather beds.  Only two pillows for each one.  You could barely cram them into a king sized pillow case.  I got a pair of those and slept on them for years and years.  I still cannot stand thin pillows.  I hate staying in a hotel.  I have to steal all the pillows off the second bed and hunt for more in all the drawers.

There are a lot more things I'll go into at some later date.  Enough for now, though. 

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