Aunt Lorena Again

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I'm thinking about my Aunt Lorena lately because I'm going to the Creasy family reunion in West Virginia at the end of this month and she'll be there along with my cousins. She's in her nineties now and the last of my dad's 10 brothers and sisters. This is a great picture of her looking out over the hills of WV. What was she thinking about?

Aunt Lorena

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Happy Birthday to my lovely Aunt Lorena. Here she is as a young girl but she just turned 91 at the end of February (hope she doesn't mind my telling). She was a character in my novel Mountain Girl and has always been a favorite person in my life. One of her best qualities is her sense of humor - no matter what was going on when I was a girl on my grandparents' farm, she got a laugh out of it.

She was born on the last day of February in a leap year and so only has a birthday every four years. (How sad...I used to think when I was young.) She really looks like an Irish lass in this picture. The Creasys were Irish descendants and my grandpa "Bunny" Creasy had black curly hair and light eyes, which was called "black Irish" as opposed to those who had red in their hair. A grand lady!

Childhood in the Mountains

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That's me in the center at eight years old with my hand on Snowball's bridle and my arm around my sister. And those are the neighborhood kids, Becky and John Miller. This is what we did for fun on my grandparents' Nicholas County WV farm - hung out and messed around. No TV, no phone, no handheld games, no computers. Just us and 50 acres of rolling hills and farm animals. It was a ball!

Looks like today it's pony time and John gets the first ride. I'm guessing this was after church and we begged my mom and their mom to let them stop and play. My sister and I changed clothes but Becky's still in a dress and her good coat and it looks like it might be late fall but a sunny day. In the background, you can see the little house I wrote about last time.

This is childhood at its best. I'd love to jump into the picture for one more lovely day.

Little House in Nicholas County

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Look at this cute little house. One year when I was a girl, my dad built a house down in the low meadow on my grandparents' property. It was maybe half a block from their farm house. I say "half a block" because I live in Chicago but no one said that back then. Maybe they said it was "down aways" from the big house. Because I was a girl, I thought it was farther than it actually was, so I might have said it was a "fur piece" from one house to the other.

But imagine this, that my dad built this house on his own - wired it, put in the plumbing. Amazing! Just whipped it up. I remember it had a "breezeway," an open area between the main house and the garage where we had a swing and where breezes would actually waft through. And we seemed to always have kittens frolicking there too. Not to mention that I could go out the back, climb the fence, jump the little creek and go up the hill to visit grandma.

It's still there today.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Snowball and Me

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Here I am riding Snowball again. AND I've got on my Davy Crockett  t-shirt. I'm on Grandma's farm and having a great childhood. It went like this. I'd get up in the morning and get dressed and do whatever I wanted for the rest of the day on 50 acres of beautiful countryside. So I'd hop on Snowball and ride him around bareback wherever we decided to go. I always let him stop and munch grass whenever he wanted.

We'd play imaginary games (well, I would). One of my favorites was Annie Oakley and he was my faithful steed. (I never did know the name of her horse.) Other times I'd be a harem girl and he'd be a camel or a circus performer and he'd be an elephant. He was my best friend those days and in my memory, it's always summer.