A Brief Story of my Life

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I must be nuts because I decided to take on this May Challenge.  If anyone else wants to participate, here is the link:
Story of My Life: Blog every day in May: a challenge



I was born in the city of Houston, but I grew up on a farm south of there. While farm living probably had some benefits, the city always intrigued me I loved the thought of going to town. We rarely went as kids.


We finally moved to town when I was about fifteen or sixteen. My next sister and I always walked to the stores after that. We loved going “shopping.” We would walk blocks and blocks just to look because, of course, we had no money to spend, unless we saved out allowance for school lunches, which is usually what we did. Sometimes we had babysitting money.

I learned to sew and in those days, fabric was cheap at twenty-five cents a yard. I could spend days in the fabric store. We could also spend many hours in the bookstores and just looking around the five and dime.

The summer of my sixteenth birthday, I went to California for the first time to spend the summer with my grandmother. I was so excited. Two of my other sisters were also going, but one chickened out because of her boyfriend, so we left her in Tyler at my great grandmothers and my parents went to pick her up. The two of us had a blast that summer going between the two houses my grandmother owned in North Hollywood and Palm Springs. When I look back on it, I’m not sure how we laid out everyday to work on our suntans when it was in the 90’s, but we loved every minute of it and going to all the places we never got to see at home.

I hated to see that summer end. We were supposed to fly back, but the airlines were on strike and my parents wouldn’t let us stay and go to school there, so we had to take Greyhound back to Texas and that’s a whole other story. What a miserable, long trip.

I made a promise to myself back then to go and live in California after I could make my own decisions, which I finally was able to keep. I spent twenty-five wonderful years there. It will always hold a special place in my heart.