MELVIN

MELVIN

When our four children were in their preteens and early teens, my husband and I moved, with them, into the country, about five miles from town.

We moved into a house that had been my aunts and that we had traded her for our house in town.  The house was larger than ours in town and met our needs much better.  And it sat in the middle of forty acres.

Besides, I was a country girl, raised in the country, loved the country and all that went with it.

We proceeded to acquire animals.  We had a horse who later had a colt, another horse, named Billy,  that had once been a cutting horse.  He was nearly thirty years old.  We had chickens and rabbits and ducks (lots of ducks, our son, Steve, learned how to hatch eggs in an incubator  and we had every kind of duck you could imagine, starting with four baby ducks that came our way at Easter time).

For the children, I felt that living in the country was a great learning experience.  We grew many of our own vegetables and they learned to eat, fried, just about anything.  I fried our green tomatoes and zucchinis and squash and cucumbers and anything else that would sit still long enough to be sliced and fried.  (So much for all those healthy vegetables).

The children had all the pets they could ever want and regular chores to keep them busy and teach them how to care for things.  They had the freedom to roam the forty or so acres around our house and to climb up into the barn  full of hay and daydream.  They had a tree house, of sorts, in which Mary, our oldest, learned to read for the pleasure of it, a lesson she carries forth to this day.

One of our favorite pets was a dog named Toby.  Toby came to us in a very round about way.  His mother showed up on our doorsteps one day, very hungry and very pregnant.  I fed her and she adopted us immediately.

One of the problems we had, was keeping my Aunt Bryant’s small herd of cattle from congregating on our carport each morning.  The mama dog took it upon herself to suggest to the cattle, in no uncertain terms, that this was her territory and not a place for their morning get together.

Because she was female and pregnant,  we could not keep her and so a friend took her home with him.

About two months later, we went to visit a cousin, who lived half way between our friend and us.  Imagine our surprise to see ‘our mama dog’ there with her five babies.

One of the puppies was a male with the markings of a collie.  Since we had collies while we were in town, and the puppy reminded us of them, he was immediately adopted by our children.  We took him home and named him Toby.

Toby was not as big as a collie, more the size of a border collie, but he was blond, with a white collar and looked, all the world, like a smaller version of our past dogs.

Before Toby came to live with us, we had acquired a black cat.  She was given to us by my Aunt Tootsie, who lived not too far away.  The cat was half Siamese and a female.  As female cats tend to do, she took off one night, looking for male companions and evidently found it because she came back the next day, pregnant.

All of this was at about the time we  brought Toby, the dog, home with us.  He and the black cat, whom we named Sabrina became good friends.  They played in the yard, which  had a four foot chain link fence (here again to keep the cattle out of our yard) around it.

When she got ready to deliver her kittens on the back porch, the Sabrina decided that Toby was not welcome in the back yard.  She relegated him to the front yard only and would bristle and hiss and rush at him if he dared to set foot in the back yard.  Once the kittens were born, there were five, she still would not let him come into her territory.  But later, when the kittens began to walk about, she relented and once again allowed Toby free range of the yard and of her family.

One by one, we found homes for four of the kittens, all black, keeping only one, a fluffy light grey kitten with white markings around his neck.  We called him Melvin.  Melvin and Toby, therefore grew up together in our back yard.  They would lie, forever grooming each other or curled into a single ball, asleep.

Toby, although small in stature, would walk up to our four foot chain link fence, gather up his muscles and hurl himself over the fence.  Neighbors complained, because in the country, a loose dog is not welcome.  But try as we might, we never convinced Toby that it was bad manners to jump the fence and go off visiting neighbors, without an invitation.

Every morning, I drove the children to school.  On this one morning, after driving them to school, I returned home and found that Melvin was nowhere to be found.  He was about five months old at the time and not in the habit of wandering off.

When the children returned that afternoon, they immediately noticed that Melvin was missing.  We all set out looking for him.  We searched the house and the barn and all of the other out buildings, but no Melvin.  In the evening, we had a downpour, but even the rain did not bring Melvin our from his hiding place.

The next morning, a Saturday, we were sitting around the breakfast table.  Everyone had a sad face, all were missing Melvin.

I had a sudden thought.  I jumped up from the table and rushed out the door and into the car.  I took off down the driveway, which was almost a mile long.  When I reached the main road, I made the customary left turn onto the highway.  The deep ditches on either side of the road still had a good six inches of water in them from the rain the evening before.

What had brought me here was a sudden recollection of a sound that I heard as I made that turn the morning before.  It was a strange sound, as if the motor on the car had hiccupped.

Along the right side of the road, I stopped and got out of the car but there was nothing there.  Then I made a u turn and started back along the left side of the road.

All of a sudden, I heard the anguished cry.  It was Melvin.  Stopping the car, I got out.  There, just a few inches above the water in the ditch sat Melvin, cold, wet and very angry, crying his eyes out.  He had evidently crawled up into the motor of the car the night before and when we went off to school, had held on until I made that wide turn onto the highway.  The centrifugal force had sent him into the ditch on the right side of the road.  Somehow, he made it up out of the ditch and to the other side of the busy highway, without being crushed.  But when he went down into the ditch on the side closest to home, he could not cross it because the water, in the ditch,  from the last night’s rain, stopped him.  He, therefore, could not get home.  There he sat, the most miserable kitty I had ever seen.  He was shivering from the cold and the shock of it all.

I wrapped him in a sweatshirt and dried him off and took him home.  Connie and Linda, our two youngest,  met us at the door, with the other two kids not two steps behind them.  There wee enthusiastic shouts and astonishment as to why I would even had gone to the highway and looked in the ditches.

It is funny how a bit of information will sit in the back of our brains and only come out in an unexpected way.  How I remembered that strange sound coming from under the hood of my car when I turned the corner that morning, I will never know.  How I applied it to Melvin, only the next morning, I will never know.  But needless to say, I did and I was the hero of our family that day.

Later, we moved back to our old house in town.  We had to give away most of our animals but we kept Toby and Melvin.  They came to reside in our sixty by one hundred foot back yard, fenced in with six foot planks, that Toby could not jump nor could he even see over the top.  Nor could I see over the top.

He never quite adjusted to town living and neither did I,but our children did.  They went on to become productive adults and though all have an affinity toward animals, none of them ever returned to country living.

As for Toby and Melvin, they lived out their lives in the back yard in town, friends until the end of their days.

Shirley Tracy Price  August 17, 2011



 
   

www.elbertprice.com

MY GREATGRANDMOTHER'S QUILT

MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER'S QUILT

When I was five years old, I was sent to live with one of my aunts for a short period of time. It seems that the child next door in the duplex where we lived, had contracted whooping cough or some other contagious disease. My mother was expecting a new baby, my sister, Carolyn, and could not take the chance of my catching the child next door‘s disease.


At my Aunt Rose’s house, besides Aunt Rose and Uncle Sidney, my cousins, Sonny Boy, Wanda and Hugh, lived, my great grandmother ‘Mamu’. At that time she must have been about 98 years old. She was very, very old.
Mamu, as we all called her, was my grandfather, Edward Bryant Calhoun’s mother. She had reached an age where she tended to forget things, little things and big things. But of course, only being five years old, I did not understand this.


One day my Aunt Rose had to go out for a short while. She left me and Mamu along, together. She told me that I was in charge and she would not be gone long. Mamu went into the kitchen and using a spoon, got a spoon full of peanut butter. She did not offer me any and I am sure that I was pissed about that. When she finished eating the peanut butter off of the spoon, she opened the clean silverware drawer, and, to my absolute horror, put the, now dirty spoon, back into the drawer with all of the clean spoons.


I sprung into action, after all I was in charge. When she went back into her room for something, I quickly grabbed the key and locked her door from the outside, making her a prisoner in her own bedroom. When Aunt Rose finally came home, she had been detained longer than expected, she found me sitting at the kitchen table, key in hand, and Mamu “safely” locked in her room.


Aunt Rose scolded me roundly, although she was quite amused, I am sure. Mamu when released from her “prison” quickly forgot and forgave me for my deed.


Mamu, in her young life, had been a very courageous woman. She lost her husband, a sailing ship caption . He carried cotton to Galveston, Texas from Cameron, Louisiana on his ship. He was overwhelmed by his crew of men, who were like pirates. They beheaded him, as pirates tend to do, and threw him overboard. His body washed up on shore and Mamu was fetched to identify him. She did so by looking at his long slender fingers. Since that day, many of his descendents have been born with his long, slender fingers. They are a family characteristic
Besides being a sailboat caption, our great grandfather also was a farmer and Mamu continued in the only way of life she knew, farming. She raised several boys and several girls on that farm.


There was also a story about the family having a retail meat store in Lake Charles. The story continues that my grandfather went to the Junior collage there. I am not sure how this story fits into the picture, maybe someone else in the family might remember it.


In those days, it was not like it is today. There was no electricity, no TV, no video games, no computers. Any water they had came from either a well or from a cistern, a large container set up to catch water when it rained.
Times were hard in those days. We, today, all live in better conditions than even the richest people did in those days.


Like most women, Mamu made do with what she had. When a piece of clothing wore out, she could not go to the nearest Walmart or Target and buy a new dress or shirt. Instead, she sewed the needed garment, by hand, because few people had sewing machines. She made dresses and shirts and underware. When those dresses and shirts and underware wore out, she cut it into small pieces to make quilts to keep away the cold in the wintertime.
Many beautiful quilts were made. Women took pride in their quilt making. It was a form of artistic expression when no other form was available to them.


Mamu spent many hours working on her quilts, usually by candlelight or by coal oil lamps, because remember there was no electric lights. Even by the time I was young, in Johnsons Bayou, where I lived, part of the time, there was no electricity.


One of Mamu’s quilts survived. Somehow, it ended up in another of my aunt’s trunk. Aunt Nobia had been forced to “break up housekeeping” as they called it, when I was about eight. She put some of her things in a big trunk.
When I was nine, my family, which included, me, my mother, Edytha, my stepfather, L.K., my sister Carolyn and brother Kelly, moved back from Orange, Texas where L.K. had worked in the war factory during World War II. He had been a tool pusher, whatever that means. We moved into a house on Pitre Street in Sulphur, La. The house belonged to my Grandmother Calhoun and we lived there until I was grown and married.


At one time, Aunt Nobia’s son, Levert and his wife, Mary Katheryn had lived there with my grandmother. This is how Aunt Nobia’s trunk had ended up there, I suppose, although I do not know for sure


Anyway out in the outside building which contained a washroom, a garage and a chicken house, sat this old, big trunk.


As a kid, I was fascinated by the trunk, having read stories about trunks and treasures and all of that stuff. The trunk was not locked and so occasionally, I would crack the top and peek at the contents.
On the very top lay a beautiful quilt top. It was small, about the size you would need to make a baby’s crib quilt. Made up of two inch hexagons, all hand stitched together. There was every color under the sun and every pattern also, red hexagons with white spots, blue striped hexagons, black hexagons with yellow flowers, you name it, and there it was. I guess I had an artist eye, even then, thought I was not aware. I was entranced with this quilt top.
It was not yet a quilt and had a long way to go before it became a quilt, but I did not yet know that.


After some years, Aunt Nobia became settled again and was able to reclaim her trunk. I confessed to her that I had peeked into the trunk and how beautiful the quilt top was. She told me that Mamu had made it and she said that I could have it.


The quilt went into my “hope chest” and remained there for many years. I would take it out and look at it and spread it out on my bed. But, alas it was too small to be a bed cover so back into the cedar chest it would go.


When Elbert and I built the house on Lake Street in Lake Charles, La, I pulled the quilt top out and lay it on the bed. Again, I expressed the thought that, if only it were bigger it would make a fine bedcover.
Elbert said that we could fix that. He knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who would quilt a top into a bedcover. We contacted her and she agreed to expand the quilt top onto a larger background. She then proceeded to do just that.
After she expanded it she then quilted it to the pattern, which means that she followed the hexagon pattern and sewed only on the seams. When she finished, it was indeed a fine work of art.


We had her make us several other quilts including one for my son Steven who is very fond of quilts.


We left Louisiana and came to California in 1984. With us came the quilt. We used it on our beds in all of the different places that we lived. With time, it began to show some wear. It needed to go up on the wall, where it could be seen, but not subjected to the wear and tear of everyday use. After all, it had started out as garmets in the 1870’s and that is a long time for a piece of fabric to survive.


Alas, we had no wall space. We are artist, remember, and every inch of our walls were and are always covered with our own art.


My youngest daughter, Linda, had professed an interest in the quilt, so I shipped it to her about eight years ago. When she received it, she called me to be sure that I did not have something dreadfully wrong with me. She was sure that I would only give up the quilt if my demise was imminent. I assured her that was not the case, that I was healthy, but could no longer care for the quilt that Mamu had made and that I felt she would give it a good home
Yesterday, she told me about the quilts new place of honor.


In Ouray, Colorado, she and Carl are restoring a house that will become their summer home. The guest bedroom has been chosen for the place for Mamu’s quilt. It will hang on the wall, in a place of honor, a piece of art, which has found it’s proper place.


Mamu would be very proud.



By Shirley Jean Tracy Price
April 5, 2008


Update, August 12, 2011:  Linda's house in Ouray was completed and the quilt was hung in a place of honor along with a painting that I did that was inspired by the quilt.