Bullying - I couldn't believe my eyes.

Doug and I ate lunch today at Granny's Restaurant on the corner in Samson. It is located at the traffic light where we turn and go to Elba. I witnessed something in there that disturbed me very much. Now friends in Samson, or in our surrounding area, should share this post with the hopes that somebody will recognize the people and take action to do something about it fast!

We had enjoyed a delicious meal and went over to the counter to pay. Douglas went to the restroom first and I sat down sideways in a booth nearby and waited and watched people. 

The young lady checking everybody out was probably a senior in high school. At least that was written on her shirt. She was a pretty girl, one that any boy would want to impress, I think. She didn't seem to pay much attention to the family (or friends) of four, a man, woman, and two boys, that came to her counter other than doing her job. One was a very handsome, tall, young boy about the girl's age. Beside him was a younger boy who was shorter with slightly reddish hair. He was a little overweight, but nice looking. I wondered if they were brothers or friends.

The tall boy stood with his legs far apart at the corner of the counter, flipped his head at one time as if to throw his hair out of his eyes. I think it was too short for that, but that was an impressive move for the one he was hoping to impress. I wouldn't have thought much about any of that except that tall boy suddenly reached over and thumped the smaller boys ear very hard. I know it hurt because he grabbed his ear immediately. The man and woman were not paying attention to what was going on. Soon the tall boy punched the smaller boy in the stomach with his elbow. Wow, I knew that had to hurt by his reaction. That's when he caught me looking at him. 

I said, "Don't do that." He smiled at me, and I hoped in some way I had helped the situation. I knew I was witnessing a bully in action.

Doug came and paid and we walked to our truck parked outside. After we were pulling out, I saw the group of four walking down the sidewalk toward where we had parked. That's when I saw the older boy turn around and he butt-headed the younger boy. The young fellow grabbed his head and was bending over in pain.

Now, folks, that is what I call a genuine bully. I wish I had done more. Maybe that way I could get it off my mind. It may be that some of you will recognize the people in this true story. It may be they were just passing through and didn't even live around here. I just want the adults to know that other people are seeing one of the kids as a bully, and that's not a good thing. In fact, it is a very dangerous thing. I can only imagine how he will treat a girlfriend or a wife one day. Help any way you can, please. By the way, the food was delicious. This incident won't keep us from going back again.

Toy Car Memories From Underneath the Front Porch

For some time I have been looking for a 1956 Bel-Air Chevrolet toy car. I'd like one to set on a shelf and remember it was a similar car which was my first car. Mine wasn't sporty with two doors. Most I have seen in my search have two doors and look sporty, but mine had four doors and was turquoise with a white top and trim.

Guess I never look at vintage toy cars in my search without thinking of a game that my cousin, Brenda, and I played underneath the front porch of our old unpainted house. The porch was high enough off the ground that we could sit up and crawl around under it without bumping our heads. At the same time, it provided us with privacy for those make-believe games we played.

The dirt under the porch was hard, or at least there was a section of it that was hard. We took our little metal cars and made roads for our cars to travel on the bank of hard dirt. We cut the roads out on the side of the bank with sticks or hard objects. We made curves and hills, and we had the neatest little country roads on that bank underneath the porch. We pushed our little cars and pretended we were going to visit each other.

Brenda always was creative and she decided to build her a farm on the flat sandy land beside the bank of hard dirt. She made a dirt fence around it by piling up dirt in a large circular like area. Why anyone with any imagination at all could tell that was someone's homestead. I moved over a piece from her and I built mine, too. We'd drive our cars through the gate on our farm and park them up near our house. Then it wasn't long until we wanted to visit each other and off we'd go pushing our little cars down the hard roads on the edge of the bank.

I don't remember how many years we played that game, and I don't know what happened to our little cars either. One thing is for certain, they brought us lots of joy.

Brenda and I enjoyed being together. I don't recall us ever having ill words with each other. She was special to me back then and has become even more so as the years have passed on.
We share lots of precious memories of the times we played together. If you enjoy these stories and would like to read more, visit glendawilliamsonline.blogspot.com.

Pulling Chewing Gum

We grew up poor but we didn't know we were poor. Even as poor as we were we had more than some. I had a cousin and her mother and daddy who came to visit us nearly every Friday or Saturday evening if memory serves me correctly. They seemed to not be as poor as we were. They had more than we did financially. I remember I always got hand me down clothes of hers and was so proud of them. My cousin and I were very close. We still cherish our close friendship even today. In fact, I asked her permission before sharing this story and told her I wouldn't call her name. She said she didn't care for me sharing it. You may think I should have better sense than to share it after you read it.

It was the highlight of our week to have my cousin and her parents come visit. My daddy and her daddy would leave on the truck and mother and her sister visited. My cousin and I played together.

I guess I was about nine years old one evening when I saw that my cousin was chewing gum. I never remember having chewing gum as a child until I concocted this game to play with my cousin. She was chewing away on that gum, Juicy Fruit if my memory is correct. You know how good that smells. We were sitting on my bed in the big living/bedroom or front room, when I said, "Let's play pulling chewing gum." She said, "How do you play that?" Remember now, I wanted some chewing gum and she had some. I said, "You get a hold of your chewing gum and stretch it out. I will grab the string in between and put it in my mouth. Then I will pull and you can get some." She was very agreeable to play with me and I was looking forward to chewing gum. She willingly stretched the gum out, and I grabbed a handful sticking it in my mouth quickly. She kept pulling and I kept grabbing until I had the majority of her gum in my mouth. Then she said, "Now you pull." Smarty me said, "No, let's don't play anymore."

The song states, "Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?" Well, I chewed the flavor out of that gum and it rested on the bedpost overnight. I was glad to have gum the next morning.

Oh, the games children can make up. Surely we are the only ones who ever played the pulling chewing gum game. What's that saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention"?

"Oh Mama, we have baby rats."

When we moved to the Old Holland Place on the Packing House road, I was four years old. The house was wood and unpainted but daddy wanted to move us out of government housing near Opp where he could have some land to farm. Mama wasn't too excited about it. It seems that he bought it without her seeing it. Guess she could "like it or lump it," as the old saying goes. I've said before that Mama never complained, but I sensed her disappointment.

I remember walking through the front door of that high ceiling large room for the first time. I spotted something moving along the base of the wall and immediately said to Mama, "Oh Mama, we have baby rats."

"Baby rats, my foot. That is nothing proud to have." It wasn't long until mother had what we called rat traps set out for the little creatures and soon they were all gone.

I guess that was the only time I ever remember liking rats in my life.

Mama washed clothes down by the creek

Mama always liked to wash clothes. I've been thinking about how she did that all through her years. I guess I was four years old when we moved to the Old Holland Place on Packing House road in Elba. (There's a funny story still to be told about that, too.) I remember being about four years old and going with mother across the country road in front of our house. We then went down a hill until we found a stream of water. That's where she washed our clothes. The old black wash pot was down by the stream and she built a fire underneath it so as to have hot/warm water. I wonder if Daddy cut the tree that left a stump for Mother to set her tubs of clothes on. She had a battling stick with which she beat the dirt out of the clothes. and she used it to poke the clothes down and stir them in the boiling pot of water. When finished she lifted the clothes out with the battling stick. Her soap was lye soap which she had made. She always had three aluminum tubs to rinse her clothes in. When all was said and done, she carried those clothes back up the hill, across the road, and to the clothesline and hung them out to dry. Daddy always made sure Mama had a good clothes line. Mama didn't just hang the clothes in any way on the line, but just the right way according to her. She taught me early on to help. All the handkerchiefs were together on the line, the undershirts, the shirts, the pillowcases, bath cloths and etc. It made for a neat looking clothesline of clothes, and I still hang things that way when I use the clothesline.

Some years later mother got a wringer washing machine. We still used three tubs when washing/rinsing the clothes. The white wringer washer was housed underneath an open shed out behind our house. The chickens had their open bins nailed on the side of the shed where they had straw and laid their eggs every day which we ate. I guess they didn't do much laying of eggs when we were washing clothes because there was lots of action going on behind their little boxes. I was so happy when mother taught me to take the clothes from the washer and put them through the wringer. She always warned me not to get my hands caught in it. We continued to wash our clothes that way for years and were happy to do so. I remember Mama had special wire frames that she stuck down in daddy's pants legs to make them dry smoother. That always looked funny to me to see daddy's pants with flat stiff legs hanging downward hanging on the clothesline.

After we moved into our new house in the early 1960's, mama got her first automatic washing machine. It was placed in the utility room at the end of the carport. Mama was so proud of it. We continued to hang the clothes on the line, but we were so happy to have an automatic washing machine. Pretty soon Mama found a used clothes dryer and bought it. Now we were really in business. 

You know, I was just thinking, that through all the years with all the trouble and trials Mama went through, I never heard her complain about her situation. She always worked to make things better and she did. Wow, what a woman she was.

Bulletin Board idea - Lord, we need you every hour

Fun in the dark

I guess I was no more than eight years old when I did something that turned out much funnier than I ever could have imagined. Let me start at the beginning.

We moved to the Old Holland Place on Route 4, Elba, AL, when I was four or five years old. It wasn't near as nice as the government house where I was born, but I liked it. Mama tells me that as we walked through the house for the first time that I said, "Oh Mama, we've got baby mice." She wasn't excited in the least about my discovery. "Baby mice my foot," she said, "that's nothing to be proud of."

That reminds me of a time when our daughter and her husband and daughter were visiting us many years later. We saw a mouse in our den and closed up everything so it could not escape and preceded to kill it. Little Ambrianna was sitting in the swing in our den beside her daddy. She asked, "Why do they want to kill Stewart Wittle?"

Back to the Holland Place. The house was old and unpainted. From the porch that went all the way across the front of the house, on the right side you entered a large room with an oil heater. Mama and Daddy divided the room up into a living area where we sat around the heater. Right behind that was a full size bed on either side of the room. At the end of the beds we walked through to the dining area, which also had a door to the front porch. The kitchen was behind the dining area and then you turned right into a small hall and onto the bedroom where my two brothers slept. That was the extent of the house except from the small back hall, there was a back door with an uncovered porch. It had a shelf with running water out there. The house was basically square with four rooms and a closet opposite the back door. That's where we kept our chamber at night and pretended the room was our indoor bathroom. It had a curtain for a door. We also had a nice outdoor toilet. Daddy always saw that our toilets were as nice as could be built.

One night mother and daddy were in their bed at the back of the living room and my bed was right across from them. We had cotton mattresses and I took my left hand and found a slit in the material. Reaching in gently I pulled out a hand full of cotton and began rolling it up in an oblong fashion. I put it in my right hand, pulled my hand back over my head and sailed it across the room in the stillness of the night. Believe me, I wasn't ready for what I heard!

"Grady, get up," Mama yelled, " A rat has fallen out of the ceiling and landed on my stomach!!!"

I started giggling, and Mama caught on.

"Glenda, you'd better not pull the cotton out of the mattress. We need to take care of what we have." I don't recall what else she said, but I have laughed lots of times about that through the years.

Another thing I recall about my brothers sleeping in the bedroom is that they slept together on a full size bed. There was no heat in the room and they slept under a load of quilts so heavy that once they got in bed, they could hardly turn over. I remember one was made out of brown velvet patches.

Grandmommie Did All Things Well

Douglas and I said goodbye to his mother, Margaret Ann Warren Williams, this weekend. Grandmommie, as we called her, was born May 14, 1916 and passed away January 12, 2011. She was 94 years old. Family members came from far and near to pay their final respects to this Godly woman. I requested a family picture be made and everyone was gracious to oblige me. Even with the large number present there were three family members unable to attend. Don, Doug's older brother, was in the hospital in Nashville. Jessica Dragonetti, granddaughter, is teaching in Turkey on a Fulbright Scholarship. Wyatt Williams, grandson, is serving in the U.S. Air Force in Washington State. His wife, Julie, and son Fischer, are with him.

Looking over the picture we think of a few who were not in the picture for some reason. This was made right before we said our final goodbyes to Grandmommie and went into the chapel for her service.

The outpouring of love from family and friends was wonderful. The McMinnville Funeral Home couldn't have been nicer. Grandmommie's visitation began with the family at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 15, and lasted until 8:00 p.m. The funeral home in McMinnville, TN, allows people to bring food so the family can eat at any time. It seemed from the very beginning people started bringing food and it continued until right before the actual service on Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Being from the deep South I was not accustomed to this practice but found it very nice. Different people obviously were assigned the duty of keeping a check on the food and putting it away when needed. One might think this would require a large room but it did not. An island in the center held some food and the shelves on the walls held other food and paper items. I wish I had made a picture of it, but did not. How do you thank people for their kindnesses in times such as this?

The grandchildren served as pall bearers. No doubt it will be a long time before this group of first cousins will be together again.

The service was conducted by Lynwood Mathis, a beloved family friend and Jerry Davidson, son-in-law. Congregational songs were directed by Mark and Art Williams, grandsons. David Williams, grandson, read Revelation 21:1-5 and Michael Gary, grandson, read a beautiful poem as a tribute. Douglas Williams, oldest child present and my husband, felt compelled to share some thoughts and did so at the end of the beautiful service. Brandon Potter, great-grand-son-in-law, videotaped the service. Art Williams recorded the audio.

Snow was on the ground as the family walked to the graveside service. Grandmommie loved the beautiful snow and would have approved of everything about her service. She has done all things well. Even though our hearts are breaking because of our loss, we rejoice in knowing that as David of long ago said, "I can't bring my son back, but I can go to him." We look forward to being reunited one sweet day.

I was the first daughter-in-law in the family. I have loved Doug's mother for many years. I will say once more that I couldn't have looked the world over and found a more wonderful husband or mother-in-law. God has blessed me richly and I thank Him.

The enemy was digging up the yard at night

Daddy was a person who took great pride in his yards. He kept them mowed and bushes trimmed and it seemed to me he kept extending the area of mowing more each time. We lived in a large curve and you didn't have to start around the curve before you noticed the side of the road was mowed and the yard. It was very pretty. 

Mother took pride in her flowers. She always liked what she called "blooming flowers." One thing was for certain, they didn't want a little animal digging holes all over their yard during the night. Daddy watched until he finally figured out what was making the holes on his manicured lawn. An armadillo was identified as the enemy. At that time they must have just been moving into lower Alabama. I guess we never did know from where they came.

Doug and I were visiting one night and the subject of holes in the yard came up. Mother and Daddy were aggravated about it. They wished the little enemy was gone. Well, what was I to do? The pellet gun with plenty of pellets was still there. 

It just happened that Daddy was keeping up with the little fellow and could tell us where he was at that particular time. He was under the storage building at the back of his outdoor truck shelter.

I got the gun. Doug got the flashlight and out to the shed we went. We both got down on our knees and Doug shined the light until he found the animal. I positioned myself where I could get a good aim. I didn't know where I shot him but Doug told me later I had shot him right between the eyes. That took care of their yard problems. I got up and took my gun into the house and left the job of getting him out from under the shed to Doug and Daddy.

Hunting with Daddy and our dog and coming back smelling like a skunk

When I was a girl at home, Daddy asked me to go with him down to the edge of the woods to see what Julie, our curled-tailed dog, had treed, or was barking at? 

I was still a teenager and had real long hair. I was dressed for bed in my pajamas and had on a housecoat and shoes. Daddy needed me to hold the flashlight so he could kill what Julie was barking at. Sure, I'd go. Who wouldn't help their daddy, right?

Down across the pasture, we went in the dark to the edge of the woods. Daddy told me where to shine the light, and I did it perfectly. Daddy shot. Julie was happy, but the smell was horrendous.

Have you ever smelled a skunk up close? Daddy was so tickled. I was choking on the smell and it was in my hair and in my clothes big time. I had to get back in the shower and start over getting ready for bed. I can hear daddy laughing now.

I didn't go hunting with him anymore, no matter how hard Julie barked!!!

Making Mama Happy Killing Rats

When Daddy was building our house in the early 1960's, he tore down the old unpainted house we had lived in since I was four years old and we moved into the new house. 

There was a chimney that fell down across the yard from the old house and it stayed together though there was a hole broken in it.

One morning mother was leaving for work and said she did wish those rats were killed that were in the chimney that had fallen. Now there is no one more frightened of a mouse than I am, but mother was talking about rats. I am doubly afraid of rats. At least that is what we called the gopher rats.

Daddy had a pump up pellet rifle he had ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and he had taught me to use it. I don't recall if I was in high school or already working, but one afternoon I put on my blue jeans, got that pellet gun and went hunting. I positioned myself so I could watch the hole in the chimney and I laid down on my stomach a good piece away, pumped my gun up that I had loaded, and started making a sucking sound with my mouth. Oh my, I remember it well.

The sound I made must have sounded like what the rats make because they started coming out of the hole in the chimney. I aimed and I shot one. The rest went back in the hole. I kept doing that until I had shot 21 rats and killed them. I could hardly wait for mother and daddy to come home from work so I could show them what I had done. Mother was so happy to see the dead rats laying all over the ground. I'm sure Daddy was equally as happy and buried them. I still have that gun. 

The Old Chimney Entertained Me After School

Dot Gatlin Merritt and I have been friends a long time. On FB tonight and had my memories flowing following her post about memories of childhood. It reminded me that we had a chimney on the side of our old unpainted wood house on the packing house road in Elba. In the afternoons after coming home from school I entertained myself by taking my little-painted ball with stars on it and throwing it against the chimney as high up as possible. When it hit the ground I jumped over it for fun. I ran after it, came back and repositioned myself and did it all over again.

I remember counting the bricks coming down at an angle on the side of the chimney. There were 13 bricks coming out like small doorsteps to make the chimney wider at the bottom section. My ball hit in the widest part at the top. Guess that is one of the reasons I have counted things all my life.

When we worked with the church at Cedar Grove near Andalusia, the walls were knotty hole pine paneling. I sat on the second row from the front on the left side. There was one panel at one time I could tell you how many knot holes were in it. Seems like it had 30 something. Silly me.