Flowers

Gathering knowledge of what kind of flowers to grow was something I also paid alot of attention my women mentors. My daddy's only sister taught me alot after I was grown. Grandmother's know of what would come back each year, plus the taste my aunt had gives me a good bit of knowledge on what grows well in our area. The flowers that bloom only for a short time where the one's my grandmother would not waste time on. I would say waste money on, but I never remember her buying any type of flowers. She did by seeds. We bought some tomato plants. Most of the time we sowed the seed to transplant. Grandmother loved sweet potatos. She bought the plants from the little store a half mile up the road from us. A sweet potato placed in water makes a pretty vine. We did that every once and awhile when I was little. My aunt Nell did it more than we did at Grandmother's house.

Edger Newton was the owner of the store that had  the sweet potato plants.. I used to work for him watering the potato vines. They had to be water for four hours solid to soak the saw dust that was used as mulch. That was were we walked to the store if we had to have something. Many times we collected coke bottles to get a coke and potato chips. I have drank two seven-ups one right after the other. I was that thirsty after walking or riding my bike in the hot summer time.

 The thing that I mess up with that is I should remember to buy the seeds sooner. Marigolds and Zinnias for sure. Planting the seeds for them is a certain way of having plenty of fill in for what I plants I do break down and buy. The ladies up the hill from the church we attended had lots of flowers we got seed from. The was a flower that Grandmother called touch-me-nots. I haven't seen this flower since I was a child. The name my grandmother called it is not he correct name. The blooms were all the way up the stem and look like a sweet pea bloom. The amazing thing about this flower was the seeds. They were in a pod that when you touched it it would pop and curl up. I would stand at the front of grandmother's house for long periods of time just popping them open.

I feel a little guilty buying them knowing that I could dig them up from family and friends. I noticed a pot of Canas is very expensive. That is one of the easiest to dig up. Anyone that has them has them spreading all over the place. I still go to the house I sold to dig up things that I had planted there more than twenty years ago. The bed of Canas that I had there was the size of a small garage. It was actually planted where an old garage was. The kind of garage that was made of wood with a dirt floor. Just like the one we had when I was little.
We called it the car shed. It was cool in the summer. A great place to play for hours. When the roads were all made I had a piece of green carpet that was my yard. At the junk yard that we were forbidden to go to, I found a trailer that was my house on the green piece of carpet yard. Around the mobile home I put flowers that I picked out of the yard. Crape Mirtles worked great. I would pick them and place them around the object that I used for my house on my green piece of carpet yard. The love of flowers has remained in me since I was a little girl. Playing in dirt is great for my soul.

Playing Cars

We played cars in the car shed for hours. My brother always had the best toy cars and tractors. He has the same things today only they are real cars, trucks and tractors. I wonder did he dream that one day he would really have all these things. He is a grown man with more boy toys than anyone I know. He had the best toys because he went to work so young. I said in one of my stories he was twelve or thirteen. I am not sure and it may have been even an earlier age. He could not get away with driving him own self to his job. We took him each day after school. Grandmother in the passager seat and me driving most of the time. Granmother did not drive. She had tried once to learn and ran in a ditch at the Eddy farm that one incident made her stop driving. She did let us take her anywhere we did not have to be on the main road.

The four grandchildren that stayed with Grandmother most of the time, played cars in there for hours. Playing cars consisted of taking a garden hoe, making roads, houses and driving toy cars around the roads. There was an old dump not far from our house that we would go and get toys that other kids had thown away. We were forbidden by Daddy to go there, because it was a place we could easily get hurt.

We got enough deep cuts as it was. There was always a bicycle wreck that left one of us with deep cuts that needed stitches. The cut had to be really bad for a trip to town to have stitches. People are always saying how they soaked cuts in coal oil. We did not have coal oil, we had a gas tractor. The tank for the tractor was our only thing that had anything close to coal oil. There be it was my grandmothers form of coal oil. Gas was what we soaked the cut in. We always healed, so I guess it didn't hurt to use gas instead of coal oil. Kerosene I think is the equivilent to coal oil.