Jill talks about playing board games as a child, her favourite books and outdoor activities and her friend, Maria.
Jill talks about her carefree childhood growing up in Clare South Australia. She tells us how she played dolls and dress up with her friends and describes a variety of other childhood games.
I have so many fond memories of my childhood home at 70 Rockland St, Natick, Massachusetts. Surrounded by family farms, the little home was the first for my Mom and Dad to own. As their family grew to 10 kids Dad had to keep adding space. We were all packed into...
Boys will be boys. Oh yea. At the Cormier home the three oldest boys, Jimmy, Johnny and me, were fit to be tied. We knew Mom was too busy tending to the 7 other kids to be paying very close attention to us boys and Dad was always at work. What...
It cut her head wide open and she went screaming to her house. When I saw all that blood, I ran into my house to hide
The brain and memories are a funny thing. I don’t have a good memory. I’m also horrible with dates, and names. Yet, I can still pull out of my brain commercial jingles from early childhood - like Libby’s, Oscar Mayer, and Fig Newton’s and songs from the radio. Yep, I'm...
You might be thinking, "What the heck is he talking about?" As I was growing up in North Conway, N.H., the most common type of home in the area was a Cape Cod style with a full basement. Most people never finished off the basement so the steps downstairs were usually...
On the road…again! Afghanistan to ZambiaChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek Growing Bamboo Almost every time that he passed the dwarf bamboo thicket planted alongside his house in Pennsylvania, the Footloose Forester was reminded that bamboo was part of his family life. At one time or another, he fished...
When I was much, much younger, and that was a long, long time ago, because I have always been as old as I am now--life was lived at a different pace. For one thng, we lived in black and white and often the contrast between those colors was muted. I remember...
In the 1930’s, Central Oklahoma would have made any film director looking for an “On Location” site for a movie depicting the seven plagues of Ancient Egypt drool with desire. Most of Oklahoma, after enduring the destruction of the Dust Bowl, foreclosures on family farms and double-digit unemployment had one...
I wish I studied harder in school! My folks were not pushy in the "gotta get ultra educated" department when my brother and I were groing up. Both of them came from blue-collar working-man families and they really didn't understand what it was like to be college educated and how that...
The song sung by the Judds, "Grandpa, Tell Me About The Good Old Days" makes me yearn for my Grandpa Higgerson. Although he departed this life in 1973, in so many ways, he lives on. In 1952, Grandpa was involved in a serious automobile accident and suffered several broken ribs. While...
Well, I was about 6 years old and I had been riding my first bike for about a year. We were living in a small town in N.H. called Conway. We had a driveway that was about 100 ft. long to the main road and was two cars wide. My younger...
When I was a boy about 12 years old I was in the band and I played the Trumpet. I was outside one day practicing in the backyard when my brother came up from behind me and quickly jumped in front of me and intentionally whacked the front of the horn. ...
The strain of being a single parent living in poverty at one point proved to be too much for Mother. One day when I was tagging along behind Willard and Gene as they roamed around playing in a field across the highway someone came to tell them to come home quickly. ...
To her dying day, Mother had a terrible fear of “storms.” Soon after moving onto an oil company lease near Drumright OK, she gave my brothers Rudy, Willard and Gene the job of digging a storm cellar. It would be a refuge for her and her brood when the always-expected tornado...
When we lived on the Thomas Long Lease I had a friend, Jimmy Cargill, whose family, unbelievably, was even poorer than mine. Jimmy and I took turns riding my tireless, pedal-less bike until we both learned to stay on it as long as we wanted to. But Jimmy’s biggest contribution to...
Our house on the Thomas Long lease sat back about a hundred yards from Oklahoma Highway 33 which was surfaced with walnut-sized rocks. A few times a year a road grader would come along to smooth out the ruts and level the high and low spots. The roads that branched off...
In school you can be influence both negatively and positively by teachers. ..... In the new school, one day for a spelling test we had the word, "Of". Now you would think that word would be pronounced the same most places here in the united states. The teacher pronounced it nearly identical to the word "Off". I could not distinguish the difference between how she was pronouncing the two words. Both 'Off' and 'Of' sounded the same because she didn't sound like a "Texan".
The school term had started before we moved to Caney. I went into Miss Toner’s third grade classroom and endured the misery of being “the new kid” for whatever time it took my classmates to divide into their “He’s okay, he’s a loser”, groups. Then life went on. I made friends...
