This and That and Good and Bad

After reading Terri's post the other day, Scattered Thoughts of an East Texas Housewife, I got to thinking about how lucky she was to remember her grandparents. I decided to record a few things about my mother that my children and their children might not know about her.

In her later years she had put on quite a bit of weight, but I can remember her when she was thin. I also have pictures of her when she looked as though a good wind could blow her away. She was just a little over five feet tall, but she looked like a giant when she was mad at me. When we were bad, my brother and I had to cut a switch off of a bush that grew by our front porch. This was what she spanked us with. Yes, I got quite a few of those spankings. I might have cried when I was spanked, but my brother would scream for mother not to kill him. I don't know what the neighbors thought. lol

My mother was forty-one when she became a widow, and she was left with a five year old son and a nineteen month old daughter, and no job. My parents had a house loan through a local bank, and a short time after my father's death, the bank told her that they were going to recall the loan. My grandpa Williams got so mad that he went down to the bank and paid off our house loan with cash. All of the family who banked there, then transferred their money to a different bank. My mother went to work in the office of Missouri Power and Light, and was able to pay my grandpa back for the house.

Some other facts you may not know about Grandma Ruby, my mother, was that she had one foot a half size smaller than the other. She had to buy good shoes in the size of the smaller foot, and then have one of the shoes stretched. Better than having to buy two different sizes.

Here are a few other things about my mother.

She liked to fish, but she didn't like their taste. Her feet caused her a lot of trouble, and she loved to have them massaged. She also liked having her back rubbed when she came home from work. Mother loved to go places, but always wanted to be home in her own bed at night. She could not drive. As she was so short, she thought if she hid our Christmas presents on a high shelf, we would be unable to reach them. Wrong. We almost always opened them and put them back before Christmas. I was a bit of a tomboy, and I would climb doorways by putting a foot on each side of the door and working my way up. I could then get the presents and hand them down to my brother. Mother's arthritic hands began bothering her at an early age, and wrapping was hard for her. So, it was easy to unwrap and rewrap the presents.

When my father was alive, they would go to Kansas City to hockey games. They also went to Kansas City to see the Marx brothers. My mother always watched professional football on television. She read several books a week. She was a very good mother, and I miss her a lot. She was so proud of her grandchildren. I'm sorry that they didn't get to know her better.