Notice the scarecrow man climbing the tree. This is my grandfather, Roscoe Holdaway. He must have been at least seventy years old at the time. The only thing that would have induced him to climb that sapling would have been the dead raccoon he’d just shot hanging on the branch high above his head. Note the rapt attention that coon is getting Continue reading
family stories
See What All that Marrying Gets You!
I’ve never properly introduced you to my family. You hear me tease and torment my mother Kathleen in my blog all the time. She’s a good sport, and believe me, she gives as good as she gets. Luckily, she lives very close to me. I see her several times a week, and speak to her at least daily. Mother illustrates my blog. She has always loved sketching but came into professional art late in life. Continue reading
Grandpa Was a Dancing Fool
repost:
When my Grandpa Roscoe and his brothers were young, they never missed the rare opportunity to attend a dance or church social, no matter how hard they’d been working on the farm. They’d work like mad all week to get through in time to ride out to any barn-dance, Continue reading
Kathleen and the Phantom Killer
(How my parents met in June 1945. My mother had just graduated and was working as a waitress while she waited to start college that fall, when she met my father. From her memoirs I am currently writing.)
After I graduated, I looked forward to being a lawyer or a teacher for a few years before settling down with a doting husband, maybe a doctor or judge, in a nice little house in town Continue reading
“Don’t She Look Natural!”
This is an excerpt from Kathleen’s Memoirs of the 1930’s, my book in progress. Kathleen grew up in rural East Texas in the 1930’s during the height of The Great Depression.
The events surrounding Aunt Ellie’s death were a thrilling event for me since we hadn’t invested too much affection in each other. The wake was unforgettable with all its glorious food: fried chicken, peach cobbler, deviled eggs, bread ‘n butter pickles, dainties not seen outside “dinner on the grounds.” Sprinkled with carbolic acid, Aunt Ellie lay in a pine box Continue reading
The Axe, the Snake, and the Doll. It Ain’t a Purty Thing!
Though my grandpa Roscoe Holdaway worked as a farmer back in the 1920s, once he took the opportunity to get temporary work for a few weeks at a logging camp deep in the Continue reading
Instrument of Torture
I grew up way back in the 1950s and 1960s before the days of “Time Outs.” I think I would have loved time out. My parents had five wild kids. They were partial to the time- honored switch and belt system. If Mother wasn’t too serious about the point she was making, she was fairly likely to pull the plastic fly swat off the nail by the stove and give us Continue reading
The Sad Saga of the Beakless, Tailless, Gizzard-bobbing, One-leg Hopping chicken
Repost of an earlier post.
Being a farm kid is not for sissies and cowards. The dark side of the chicken experience is slaughtering, plucking, cleaning, and preparing chickens for the pot. I watched as Mother transformed into a slobbering beast as she towered over the caged chickens, snagging her victim by the leg with a twisted coat-hanger, ringing its neck and releasing it for its last run. We crowded by, horribly thrilled by what we knew was coming. It was scarier than ”The Night of the Living Dead”, as the chicken flapping its wings, Continue reading
Murdering Bum (from Kathleen’s Memoirs of The Great Depression)
Boy was Mama ever mad when I got home! Rob Grissom, was sitting kicked back in front room reading when I walked in. Lord only knows why Daddy tolerated him. Mama just said he didn’t have the gumption to run him off. As much as I hate to admit it, she was probably right. Daddy was a soft touch. Rob just showed up once in a while and hung Continue reading
Nutsrok 