Elzie!

Mom was the typical housewife.  She learned to sew and would make us cute dresses from feed sacks.  She learned to cook from watching a TV show. 

She became a very good cook.  She worked hard to keep a clean house and provide good meals.  

She was a good swimmer and had very graceful hands.  it's hard to say much about mom because she was dad's partner.  He was the driving force and she was his mate.  She loved flowers and dad tried to help her flower beds one time by bringing home raw sewage, thinking it would enrich the soil.  He cleaned out septic tanks.  He poured it all over her flower beds and of course, it killed all the flowers.

If she got mad at dad she wouldn't yell, she would just say "ELZIE.!"

The Rock Lily

Dad would order rocks from some company and they would be just plain old looking rocks, but he would order "agate', jasper, bloodstone, and other gemstones.  He would slice them in thickness according to the "finding" (the silver or other setting) .

You never knew what you were going to see.  At first not much, but a rock that looked like one you might pick up from the ground.  But then he would begin to shape it, cutting it into an oval or sometimes a square.  The "lily" just appeared in one of the slices.  The next slice had no lily.  I think it's beautiful.

Aunt Bessie, Taffy and the Harley

Dad was impulsive.  He came home from school one day and his mom had baked fresh bread.  She had told Aunt Bessie to make sure no one got into it until supper time.  He came home and wanted some of that hot bread so he got a butcher knife to cut a slice and at the same time he took a whack at it Aunt Bessie put her hand on it and said "mama said no."  Whack.  He cut her finger off all but a little piece of skin.  They taped it back on and it grew back. It was crooked.  That's actually how I learned about it.  I said "Aunt Bessie, why is that finger crooked?"  Then she told me the tale.

He had a healthy appetite.  He came home from school another time and saw them cooking taffy up on the hill.  He knew the makings and the pot was the taffy pot.  I guess he thought it was cool enough because he dipped both hands in it and it was still boiling.  He lost the skin on both of his hands.  Don't know why there weren't terribly scarred but they weren't.

He loved his big Harley.  Some place I had a picture of him with it and he looked like a little kid.  He wanted to take his dad for a ride on it but his dad was a no nonsense kind of guy and didn't want to. But he finally talked him into it.  He sped off and came around a corner and discovered, too late, there was a train across the track.  It has these high boxcars and he turned it on its side and slid right under it.  Neither of them was hurt but it was the last ride his dad took.  He also had a wreck ...not sure of the details, but he said he slide half a block on his knees and ground the skin off including part of his knee caps.