Rebecca Nolen, historical diaries, home renovation, on writing, writing life

My usual morning routine is this: I haven’t got one. Monday through Friday I rise at 4:15 and stumble downstairs and then across a small yard to my daughter’s apartment above our garage. I get into her bed as she is off to save the world from micro-organisms that may be up at that hour also. The grand-girl is asleep. Well, usually. More usually (IS there such a phrase? Yes, at that hour, yes.) she wakes as soon as her mother leaves. I fix her a bottle and put her in bed with me. This sometimes gives me a few more winks, but sometimes I’m not able to go back to sleep and I lie awake planning all the things I could get done as soon as there is light to see.

Let me just say here. We have tried the cry herself to sleep business and it doesn’t work for her. More like cry-herself-to-throwing-up-her-supper is what happens. Let’s just say her mother doesn’t let her cry herself to sleep but perhaps for others that is an option.

The past few weeks the grand-girl has been waking at 9 AM (the real wake time is when she sits up and says “Hi!”, other times she wakes crying, she isn’t awake.) I have already made myself a cup of milky sweet tea and have drunk it. She is so adorable when she wakes. She crawls out of bed and brings me my crocs, one clutched under each arm. I change her and dress her and take her to my house to see Big Boy and think about what we will do for the day.

The past week it has rained, seems like nonstop, so we haven’t done much. Yesterday after her mother got home from work, we all went to Babies-R-Us to stock up on foods for her. I discovered Sam Moon imports next to Babies-R-Us. It is a big-box store full of really cheap designer knock-off purses, cheap, shiny jewelry, and wallets. I didn’t think I would get anything but I actually surprised myself and ended up buying a wallet.

Still rainy afterward, all night last night and mucho-much-more rain today.

She is asleep as I type this. So precious. Such angels when asleep, right? Here is a snippet of what we do on rainy days. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of loading a video, so – Hope it works for you.

https://rebeccanolen.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/image00161.avi

Let crying babies lie: Study (sunnewsnetwork.ca)

I’ve moved my mother to a nursing home. It is a gorgeous situation where she has an almost private room with her own shower. This is an unusual thing. Most of the nursing homes have semi-private rooms with a curtain between residents and a shower down the hall. She has spent the last three months in a tiny room with the shower down the hall, so we know. Now, her room has a wooden divider between her roommate and herself and a shower in the room. She is one fortunate woman.

I’m going through her things, which is no trouble because though she saved every little thing from 1939 on, this is only a quarter of what we went through trying to clear her house out.

But here is a sample of what I found in one box: Old rubber bands, old worn dog tags from every dog we ever owned, hat pins (a treasure!), human teeth with fillings, old lead bullets dug from our ditch in South Houston, broken paste jewelry, name tags from the Houston Fat Stock Show 1973, Amway reward pins (I used to sell Amway, too. Don’t get me started.), her diploma from Secretarial School, her rejection from the Civil Service during WWII, Canadian money, her saving account book dated 1942 in which she spent five months saving up pennies to $5.95, several lace mantillas that she wore to church, dozens of tiny old perfume bottles, and ancient salt and pepper shakers.

The most interesting find of all may be the letters from the German POW in France. He had found her address in an address book on her dead cousin’s body. MORE on this later.

I had never seen any of it before. After my father died suddenly, I squeezed a vast amount of her personal belongings from their large four bedroom ranch house into her one bedroom apartment. I did not spend a lot of time poking around. It was toss and go, her house was in foreclosure. It was a tough time for all of us. There wasn’t any time to peruse things. Also, it was horrid enough for my mother to lose her husband and her home at the same time, I needed to give her a bit of privacy with her personal things as much as possible. I would go through drawers, see her handwriting and toss the notebook or scrap of paper into a box while I was clearing her house. So most of her personal writing, poems, and photos were salvaged.

I never looked at them until now.

My mom was an aspiring writer. In those days there wasn’t much in the way of information about publishing but she sent her poems and short stories to Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, and Saturday Evening Post from 1959 until the mid 1960’s. She was never published. I look at what she has and know that with a bit of editing and some serious cutting she has some golden kernels.

I’m sad for her. If someone had taken the time with her, she could have been a contender.

So…I’m going to be publishing her poems and short stories on my blog. In honor of her, my mom, the writer.

I will do it within the jacket of an idea, a casing if you will, of the vacation notes she made of our trip to Canada and back to Texas in 1970. I found that she not only journaled everything we did, she included the mileage and the amount of money spent for everything. This trip was amazing. We left (I know this from the extensive notes that she made) on June 29 and returned on August 25. Who does that? Two months of vacation? Wow.

Also, she says some things that might seem shocking and controversial in our new politically charged environment, but these are real things that she said. The date is 1970, a very politically charged time indeed. So bear with the things she says, take them for being said at that time, and realize that something shocking and related to my mother’s controversial statements took place the day we returned from our vacation. You’ll have to keep reading to discover what happened.

I know that for so many years she tried and tried to get her efforts published. Now they will be, albeit not in the format she was hoping for. But I think that if she had ever learned how to get on the internet, I know that she would be pleased. It would be especially exciting for her to know that you will read what she had written.