Summers as a teenager, growing up in Southern Illinois...
I was a tv freak, as most kids in the 60's. I loved, loved, loved soap operas. General Hospital was my favorite, that and Dark Shadows. Oh Dark Shadows was so scary, it really was. It had a resident vampire, and he would certainly give me chills on weekday afternoons.
Mother always sewed and tried to instill her love of sewing in me, unfortunately it didn't work. I do, however, have vivid memories of making two dresses, both of which I adored. I made these when I was about sixteen years old, the first one was a shift. Remember those? I made mine from "mint green" polished cotton, it was sleeveless and I smocked the yoke. An elderly neighbor taught me the art of smocking, and the finished product was pretty cute, if I do say so myself. The second dress was a tent dress. Tent dresses were the rage in the mid-60's, my fabric was hopsacking, and it was cream with burgundy polka dots. I still have the patterns for both of those dresses, some day I need to scrap a page and describe them in detail...
Warm summer days would find me sitting barefoot on the porch swing, wearing short shorts of course, drinking iced tea with my nose in a book. As I look back at my life, we didn't have the distractions that we do now. We had more time to focus on the changing seasons, and I think we were much more in tune with nature than people are today.
When I used the telephone, it went to a local operator who placed the call for me. I went to high school with the boy whose Mother ran the switchboard, and sometimes he would be working a shift, and we would chat before he placed the call. Egads, that seems like another lifetime. I can remember back to when I was a small girl having a big oak telephone and a party line. Our ring was two longs and a short... The phone ran on batteries and you would have to replace them when the ring started fading...
We had a big yard, an acre, and I mowed it with a push mower. I remind Ryan of this a lot this summer when he is complaining about weed eating his yard, a chore he doesn't enjoy. He loves to mow, just doesn't like the weed eating. He has an acre of grass to cut as I did, but of course he does it on a riding mower.
We always had a garden, and we would turn the soil over in the spring with a three wheeled plow. Mother had gooseberry bushes, and rhubarb plants, and there were apple, cherry and apricot trees in our yard. She canned hundreds of jars of vegetables, fruit, pickles and relishes to last us thru the winter, and all of this was done in a kitchen with no air conditioning or running water.
But it's all good memories. To some of you it probably sounds just horrific, but we lived in a valley, our yard was shaded with trees, we had good cross-thru ventilation in our house and it really wasn't that hot until the dog days of August.
One of my most vivid memories of those summers was in 1966 when Safeguard Soap was first introduced. Oh my, I thought it was the most amazing, freshest smelling scent ever. I still enjoy it to this day, and buy it often...
I enjoy remembering where I came from and how the impact of those early years molded me into who I am today. That's one of the pleasures of growing older, all the memories I've gathered over the years, I've learned to discard the bad ones and cherish the good...
