Ramblings

Both my husband and I come from humble people.  My mother and father came from farmers and ranchers in Northwest Oklahoma, children of the depression.  They moved to the central Willamette Valley in Oregon in the late 1950s.  I grew up in a house that my father built with his own hands the spring, summer, and fall of 1963.  I was 4.  We still own it and I love it and dream about it, but it was 1200 square feet, dark and small by today's standards.

My husband's mother was a Creek Indian on an Eastern Oklahoma Indian reservation.  His father was a really exciting and interested and little dangerous young man who took her to California to wait for him throughout WWII. 

Yes, we are a movie, but with pain and life lessons and consequenses that aren't addressed in real movies.  They moved multiple times between California and Oregon throughout his growing up years pursuing better jobs and being chased by their own demons. Some of the challenges they faced as a married couple and a family crossed common boundaries and are better left unsaid.

Today, I understand that both families faced huge challenges.  Life is hard for all of us.  We all face drama. 

Life is a little prettier for us today.  We live in a nicer house.  There are 4 toilets in my house, twice the number of bedrooms as the house I grew up in.  It's warm when it's cold outside and cool which it's hot outside.  But we are still the same humble people and when I prepare a meal, the same humble principles apply. 

I regret that the young ones hunger for fancy coffee drinks and gormet this and that, with aioli sauce with capers and roast peppers.  And then they find life to be unsatisfying,  Or they have challenges that they have trouble facing.  I worry about their future. They seek pleasure in their next purchase or their next trip to the mall. 

The cute little person I was in my early 20s was not about what brand names I wore or what I consumed.  I bought Levis from a small store in Corvallis, Oregon.  And when it got warm, I cut off the legs with my mother's sewing scissors.  (We called them Cut-Offs).  We wore what is now called flip-flops, but we used to call them thongs.  Today, thong means something else.  And tank tops ( apparently that still means the same thing) and halter tops. 

We were simple people. The vehicles we drove were trucks.  Fancy or cute people had Pacers, Honda Civics, Fiats, or Carmen Gias

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