Well, I am definitely not a writer so don’t have an high expectations on grammar or spelling. But after my Mom died there were so many things I didn’t know about her and the same with my Dad. So many memories just gone. Sadly more and more of mine slip away each day and even before I got older my memories of my childhood were very limited. I see the same memory in you Hannah. But Katie you are lucky like your Dad in that you remember everything so maybe when your Dad and I are gone you can laugh with her and help her remember the good times and at least humorous bad times.

Obviously the only things I remember about my really young life are what my parents told me. I was born in Monahans, Texas which is in West Texas in the desert area near Midland/Odessa some where. Supposedly my Dad was stationed there on some geological expedition. I don’t know how long we stayed there. Probably not past age 1 years old since the pictures start to reflect a more suburban life. My Dad got a job at a University teaching astronomy. Later when we move out towards Kirkindal I will decorate my whole room with nebula’s and other astrological photographs. I assume this must be when we moved to Friendly Texas. I do have a few memories during this time in Friendly but really only of a baitshack that we owned and ran on the weekends in (?) near Galveston. My Dad never did the same job twice I don’t think. I can remember my parents playing cards with another couple and of course they were young so now being older I realize they probably drank while they played. I just remember being out on the dock with my net catching anything and everything the light would afford me. I caught an alligator gar one night which my mother let me keep in the bathtub for a couple of days. I think I am starting to see some resemblance to my mother in this area. I don’t think she was a big fan of having pets either but had a soft heart for her children and didn’t like to see anything suffer much like me. I don’t really have any other memories from this time of my life until about the age of 4 when we moved near Kirkindal I’m guessing close to the woodlands.

I loved living here. It was probably the most magical time of my life but I guess that age is I suppose since it is the age of fairies and Santa. We lived out in the woods. The closest friend I had was quite a walk and she was 14 years old. This is where the dark secrets start to come out. I had my first cigarette with that girl at the age of 5 so let that be a lesson to you not to let your kids play with kids who are too old for them. But for the most part it was pretty fantastical. We started out living in a trailer while my Dad was building our first house which was a castle. My Dad decided to build our house to look like a castle. He even bought a set of a knights armor to post outside the door to look like a King Arthur type sentry. The castle had a bridge to a smaller cinder block house which was really just a room but kind of cool since you could walk the bridge and stand on the roof an look over out into the woods. Since this clearly wasn’t practical he build another house that was much more normal about 100 yards away and connected them with a bridge as well. It was build on stilts since this part of the property was proved to floods due to lower land and having Cypress Creek in our back yard. Funny, people think all the time to build houses on stilts at the beach for flooding but I don’t think to this day there is another house in Houston on stilts and people lose their houses to flooding year after year and just rebuild they same old house all over again. I loved that creek in the backyard and when it did flood we just took the john boat out and rowed around like we had gotten snow or something to play in. We also loved swimming in that creek. We would cover ourselves in mud and call ourselves sand nigers. Lord help me I still can’t believe it. I don’t know if my mother had lost her mind and not scolded us, just never heard it or if my Dad just laughed so hard and told her to let it be. I had a cousin I would play this with named Wesley Peck. I don’t know whatever happened to him as he wasn’t a real cousin they were just that good of friends. I remember we had this amazing tree that was on it’s side dead. All the pine needles had fallen over the years and created a bed of needles in the branches. I was so light I could actually sit in the middle of the needles and it would support me without falling through. But one day either in anger or just plain michivinous I pushed cousin Wesley through the needles ruining my little needle bed forever. I had just about every animal imaginable here. We had goats I think for milk since I was allergic to milk and drank goats milk so I guess my Dad not wanting to pay for it for my brother in the event he was allergic bought some goats. That’s my Dad for you. My most memorable pet of course was Jingles. There were two Jingles though, as the first one my Dad accidentally backed over with his car. But Jinles #2 was a great dog and really smart and they looked almost identical. She was my partner in crime where ever I went which I know made my mother really happy since she LOVED to kill snakes. Very handy when you have a lot of copper heads and even coral snakes around. Your Dad made fun of me for years about what a bad person I was because I didn’t really believe in vets, although yes I did take Sunny when she really needed it. But the fact that my dog got bitten by a copper head twice and we didn’t take her to the vet Daddy never really got over and made sure to tease me on a regular basis. But when you live in the woods you kind of get used to the survival of the fittest kind of mentality. I had all kinds of crazy pets. Bunnies ,two, Salt and Pepper and Rosie I believe, a calico cat that supposedly got lost in a storm one night but I suspect she ‘disappeared’ due to my allergies as I have one picture of her sleeping with me. An armadillo that had dug a whole under our steps that my Dad decided to try and catch and had a pretty long fight with holding onto it’s tail while it tried to burrow back under the ground. I guess my Dad had more stamina than that armadillo. We kept it in the dungeon. Yes, dungeon. While I think the original idea was for storage he filled it with water and put the Armadillo in there. Clearly I didn’t get to play with it but I fed it hot dogs regularly until he deemed it time to set it loose. I also had possum which I think he found abandoned (or not who knows) that I got to keep for a short time until it started getting big enough that those teeth could do damage. I remember the night I had to let it go. I’ll try an attach a picture here later but I got to put it on the tree off the balcony of the newer house he built adjacent to the castle. I loved that house. The top floor was just my parents bedroom with a spiral staircase but the pine trees were so tall and when you went outside on their balcony, with no fencing or anything from keeping you from falling off, you were literally at the tip tops of those old pines. It was an incredible view. By the way, that’s where I had my first cigarette while the 4 year old was supposedly babysitting. My guess it we weren’t even supposed to be up there either. I went back to look at the houses in my high school years. It was strange. They had painted the castle white and there was a golf course on the other side of Cypress Creek. And their were horse stalls where they kept horse between the stilts of the new house.

I have more memories of this place probably than any other time of my childhood. Perhaps because it was the happiest, I don’t know. I remember my Dad telling me the fairies came out to play only when there was a perfect ring around the moon. I looked every night. Eventually it came. (Remember my father was an astronomer) The next morning I found shreds of tiny sparkling clothing, silver dollars and a tiny camp fire that had been extinguished. He taught me skeet shooting, yes at age 5 and I think the same day he let my 2 year old brother try a sip of beer, which he liked. Not good. Thank goodness neither of us turned out to be drinkers. I had a heck of a bruise from that shot gun but I was really proud.

to be continued… it’s late