Dear Alzheimer's....

I am not a fan of yours.

My sister and I, along with our 5 children, visited our grandma tonight at St. John's Place in Fordyce. I'm not sure that Mamaw ever knew who any of us were. It broke my heart. Mamaw is a tough woman, and I feel like the nursing home has broken her spirit. She so badly wants to go back to her house and tend to her flower beds and be with her dog, Fluffy. She just wants to be outside during the day. I have no doubt that she would work herself silly if only she had the chance.

Mamaw will be 86 in about 3 weeks, and I wish there was some way for her to be at her own house these days. If I lived closer I would happily stay with her 24/7 so that could be a reality. She enjoyed visiting with us, and she loved Sophie. She gave her a bottle, burped her, and Sophie being her usual jovial self cooed, laughed, and played with her. It seemed to make Mamaw happy. I hope that it did. At 86, I hate to see her so unhappy and I hate to be the one to have to make sure the door closes when we all leave. She so badly wants to get out that darn door and always asks me to tell her the code.

It's so hard to see such a strong person in such a helpless situation.

Teachers...

Lately, as Abby is learning new things it brings back memories of when I was in school and my favorite teachers. I was one of those kids that LOVED school. From day one I loved it. Much of that was because I had the very best Kindergarten teacher a child could ever have. Her name was Miss Linnie Grice.

I will be 29 in a couple of days and I remember exactly what Miss Linnie smelled like. I remember that she kept her paddle (yes, teachers had paddles when I was younger) under a big stuffed puppy dog on top of the filing cabinet. I also remember Drell Rainey had more meetings with that paddle than I'm sure he ever wanted to. I remember at nap time on days when it was raining Miss Linnie would leave the door open and I would listen to the rain.

I remember a pair of monkeys Miss Linnie had above her door that said "left" and "right" and sometimes when I'm thinking really hard about something those monkeys pop into my head. I remember where her alphabet chart and counting chart were hung. I even remember that the bathroom in our classroom smelled like tempra paint.

I remember many times when we sat around the piano in her room singing fun learning songs as a class. I remember making butter in a Mason jar. I remember cleaning the glue off the tables with shaving cream....boy was that fun! Snack time was always fun, and whenever I have to take snacks anywhere for kids I think of Mrs. Ruby Hamilton's peanut butter Rice Krispy Treats. I also remember Miss Linnie making me taste a mushroom at some kind of taste testing thing we did and how gross it was. I still don't like mushrooms no matter how much I want to.

As I sit here thinking I am full of nostalgia and tears are likely at any moment. I can't think of any single bad memory from Miss Linnie's classroom. Well, unless you count one day when I had to stay in at recess to re-color a picture of a blue bird that I rushed through and scribbled on. I find it strange that I don't remember exactly which kids were in my class, although I remember Drell Rainey, Veronica Tolfree, and Vincent Stroud with perfect clarity. I mostly remember Miss Linnie and how much I loved her.

Thanks, Miss Linnie, for all the great memories!

Abby can READ!!!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday my biggest baby, Abby, came home from school with "sight words" on flashcards. She's in a little preschool here and yesterday she won the phonics game with 61 words! Today she read me 3 books from this set:

http://www.leapfrog.com/en/preschool_toys/sing_along_read_along.html














She is so excited! She's waiting for Daddy so she can read to him.

Heartache

I have a tremendous heartache lately as I worry and pray for my baby brother. I am the oldest of three kids, and my brother is 17 months younger than me which makes him 27. He has always been a stubborn person, you can't talk to him without him getting mad and he has a horrible temper. He first got into trouble when he was about 16 when he got a DUI. Since then he's had at least one more of those, along with at least one arrest for posession, and who knows how many tickets for other acts of extreme stupidity.

For several years my prayers were that he would simply grow up and act like the man that I know he was raised to be. Recently though, since we've been closer to home I worry even more because I can see the destruction that he is causing himself. Because I can see it myself it worries me more. It is causing my parents and grandparents grief that they do not deserve, and that breaks my heart. I love my brother and I don't want to see bad things happen to him, yet I am seeing them with ever increasing regularity.

Part of me wants to punch him and tell him to really look at what he's doing to himself, and the other part of me wants to hug him and tell him how much I love him and that I don't want to watch his self destruction anymore. I have no idea what to do....I mean, you really can't help an adult who doesn't want to help himself, right?

All I know for sure is that I feel sorry for him on some level, and I know that it hurts to watch someone you love do such awful things when I can't do anything about it. I just want him to stop the drinking and the drugs and get his life right. Somewhere beneath all of that is a good person, one of the most tender hearted little boys I've ever met. A boy who loves elderly people so much that when he was 10 years old, instead of playing with Clint, he would go next door and talk to Aunt Grace for hours. And I don't want to have to go to my baby brother's funeral. Especially one where I will feel sorry for the preacher who will have to lie about the person that he was. I just wish it didn't hurt so much.

Family

“They can never take away from us the place or two, where always, time stands still. “
-Gene Hill

Let me preface this by saying two things: One, nothing brings a memory crashing back to me the way a song does ( Travelin’ Band and Money for Nothing never fail to make me smile, remembering two kids and their child father dancing to these two songs on a cheap stereo in a rundown house like we were the Vanderbilts, not having a care in the world). And two, there was a period in my life where I was totally obsessed with the group Boston and listened to nothing but the three Boston tapes that I had. But already I digress from my original thought.

I was on my way to work today and heard “Don’t Look Back”, as you might have guessed, a Boston song and immediately thought of one the trout fishing trips that Pop, Dad, Will, and myself used to take every September for about five or six years when I was in junior high and high school. We began taking these when I was in the eighth grade and I can honestly say that I have rarely had as much fun doing anything as I did for the three days that we were in Dripping Springs, Arkansas every year. Dripping Springs was right outside of a little town in north central Arkansas called Pangburn, which has got to be home to the ugliest women in the free world. I don’t think we ever saw one decent looking gal. But once again, I digress. We would go up every during the last weekend in September. The place was a little bit in the mountains and it was beautiful there. Dad and I fished in in one boat and Will and Pop in another. There was always a little friendly competition (sometimes pretty Unfriendly) between the boats and me and Dad always smoked ‘em, in our books anyway. The limit was either six or eight apiece and we would catch our limits sometimes, but usually not, and pretty much relax and do whatever we wanted for a few days.

Once, I caught the biggest trout, by far, that any of us had ever caught. Dad and I normally just put the fish in our “dead well”, as we called the bottom of his boat, but today was to be different. Before I finish this, I just want to remind everyone that there is usually a reason things are left behind or thrown away. That reason would be because they are NO GOOD. Now, back to that fateful day. Dad had found an old bream basket that someone had left on the bank of the river (Little Red by the way) and decided that we should use it. I, being young and naïve, agreed. I can see him now, smiling to himself about someone else’s bad fortune that turned into our good fortune. Well, the first fish that we hooked that morning was my trophy. It really was a nice rainbow and we were even discussing how the trophy shot should be taken when Dad managed to land one of his normal, inferior fish. As he pulled up the basket to put his fish in it, we had just enough time to see my trophy, my white whale, slip through a hole in the basket. That is why we have no picture of this monstrosity. The moral of this story is to never trust other people’s garbage, or your own Dad for that matter, when it comes to fishing.

It is these little stories that we retell over and over again, the stories that would mean nothing to someone else, that always come to my mind. Not how many fish we caught or even how big my trophy was, but how it got away and the things that only men who have “been there” can appreciate. Although I hate to admit it, I wouldn’t trade that fish getting away for anything. Dad and I still laugh about it. And the time t hat Pop’s boat motor died and he and Will had to float backwards down the river a bit before they got it going again. Seeing the look on Pop’s face, as he was wearing his usual one size too small Duxbak hat tightly on the top of his head, you would have thought that he was about to travel down a sixty foot waterfall on some unexplored river in the African jungle instead of a two foot deep “rapid” that was about twenty yards in the middle of the Little Red River. I will never forget his desperate look and how me and Dad laughed until our stomachs hurt. Things that mean nothing to the outsider, but the world to us who saw and lived it.

At last, I come back to my original thought. The song reminded me not only of trout fishing, but one trip in particular. I believe it was the year that I was in ninth or tenth grade and it rained the entire first two days. Living in a tent in the rain can be pretty miserable. Not to mention the fact that we couldn’t have a fire and had to eat bologna sandwiches for EVERY meal. The second afternoon, it was really raining and Dad and I were in his little “champagne” Ranger listening to the radio. Naturally for this time, we were listening to a Boston tape and more specifically, “Don’t Look Back”. Every time I hear it now I think about that moment, and how we were all miserable, just wanting to go home, but no one would say it. We stayed and didn’t catch much and it was pretty uneventful on the whole. But I was thinking today, how I would give almost anything to be able to go back and live it again. I would sit through a tornado just to be able to do it with Pop and Dad and Will. Back before Will and I knew the meaning of responsibility, back before Pop had so much taken from him, back before I realized that Dad didn’t have all the answers. Growing up isn’t having to get a job and pay bills, growing up is finding out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

It is such a cheat that we can never realize how good things are and how much we will miss them when they are gone. George “Bird” Evans once wrote that “the perfection of a bird dog, like the perfection of autumn is tinged with sadness because you know, even as it begins that it must end. Time bestows the gift and steals it in the process.” The end of adolescence, like many things, is like this, you too late realize that you truly can’t go home again. That time is the thief of our yesterdays as well as out tomorrows.I loved those times, but if I could go back, I tell myself that I would love them even more. I wouldn’t sleep but instead try to soak up every single moment. Every joke told, every fishing lie, every fish caught, and every evening fire. I would try to pay the attention deserved. I think that true happiness is being able to say at any given moment that there is nowhere else in the world you would rather be and no one else you’d rather be with, and truly mean it. If that is true, that was happiness. Dripping Springs, little Cleos lures, ugly women, and being with three of the best men who have ever sat around in a wet tent and ate cold bologna sandwiches.

“But I’m not homesick for the camp or even the hunting-it’s the time I weep for; how I felt about being where I was and doing what I was doing. This is one place where I was truly happy………..I remember thinking that nothing here should ever change. And it shouldn’t have. But it does.” - Gene Hill

This was written by my wonderful husband, Matthew. I am truly a lucky girl to have someone who can express himself so well, and is not afraid of emotion. -- Brandy

My 10 year high school reunion....

In some ways it feels like it's been an eternity since I graduated high school, and in others it seems like it was just yesterday. Well, in any case, May marked 10 big ones and since our class president had a baby in April, our reunion got pushed to September.

I went to school in Kingsland, AR...a very small town for anyone who may not know. Kingsland, whose crowning achievement is that it is the birthplace of Johhny Cash, had a population of 449 people during the 2000 census. I was born and raised in New Edinburg, AR which is about 8 miles away, but the NE school closed down the year I started kindergarten. Our school consisted of about 400 people headstart thru seniors, including faculty and staff. Needless to say, everybody knew everybody...and their business.

I went to school for 13 years with mostly the same people. Of course we had a few classmates who would come or go over the years and at our 6th grade graduation we had I think the largest class in all of Cleveland County with either 36 or 38. By the time we were seniors, our numbers had dropped down to 24, and I think only 22 of us actually received diplomas. Regardless of whether we all liked one another or not, we were friends. We had been through alot together, and although many of us have moved away from home, we keep in contact to some extent and still feel a closeness that is very familiar...almost like family.

Today I had the pleasure of contacting our Senior class sponsors and inviting them to our reunion. One, Mr. Powell, I didn't know very well at all. He was a coach that came in my Junior or Senior year, and I never really had any dealings with him until our Sr. Trip. I emailed him and gave him all the info on the reunion and he replied that he already had a commitment that day, wished he could be there, and said that he had been married for 8 years, and had a daughter that would be 3 in January. Then, he asked if I had "any little ones"....which made me laugh out loud. I responded that I had married my highschool sweetheart almost 7 years ago, and that we have a 5 year old, a 3 year old, and are expecting baby number 3 in February. I'm not sure why this amused me so much, but it did. I suppose he wasn't much older than us 10 years ago, I'd say mid twenties. But, by the time I graduated Matthew and I had been dating for almost 3 years, and I think there were some people that were already growing impatient that we weren't at least engaged.

One person in particular, our English/Journalism teacher, Sandra Smead, asked Matthew constantly when he was going to marry me. I suppose in 2002 when our wedding announcement finally came out in the paper she was extremely happy. To me, being 28 and expecting my third child doesn't seem that strange. Maybe it is, but I know at least 2 of my classmates have already had their third child. Maybe it has something to do with a small country town and it's mentality, but I've always wanted to have my kids before I turned 30. I'm glad I felt that way because as tired as they make me these days, I don't think I could keep up with little ones ten years from now!

This has turned into a very long blog, but I'm feeling very nostalgic today, and it has been a long time since I posted anything. I so wish that Mr. Powell could make it to our reunion. I bet the look on his face when he saw all of our kids would be priceless!

New Blog...

Ok guys, most of you know by now that we're expecting baby #3. I have to find a new doctor and I need help thinking of questions to ask him, so go to my new blog http://the3rdtimearound.blogspot.com/ and help me think!