Remembering our family cats

Over the past 50 years we have had several cats for family pets. I think the first one was a Siamese female we got from my sister Christine who sent it to Atlanta from Washington, DC in the early 1960's. I remember going to the Atlanta airport to pick up the tiny kitten and it was in a small cage, and frightened to death. I think the boys went with me to get the cat; can't remember that far back.

We brought her home and decided on a name. She was so happy to be held and started purring. The boys decided her name was going to be "Purry". And so that's what she was called. Most of the time she stayed inside or in the basement. We discovered she was going to have kittens just as we were getting ready to move to Paris, Texas in 1967. Jim, the 3 boys and I, and a cage with a pregnant Siamese cat set our for Texas in our station wagon. I think Purry yelled most of the way to Texas and if you've ever heard a Siamese cat "yell", it will drive you crazy. We gave her a tranquilizer but it didn't help much. Purry had her kittens and we gave them all away. i don't know if that upset her or if the move to a strange place was why she meowed all the time and didn't want us to pet her. We gave her to a lady in the country so she could get outside and catch mice and roam around.

Not much time elapsed before we acquired a solid black cat. I think one of Bill's friends gave him the kitten. He thought it looked like a black panther and decided to name the cat Malcom X, leader of the Black Panthers at the time. The cat liked to chase Bill through the house and he enjoyed him so much. Then we were transferred to Minneapolis and of course we had to take Malcolm X with us. Remembering the trip to Texas from Atlanta, I made sure we had tranquilizers for Malcolm. Once I thought he was dead he was so limp and sedated. He loved living in the cool climate after living in the hot Texas country. That is until it snowed. He did not like to go outside in the snow and would sit at the window looking out at the birds eating at the bird feeder. I'm glad he didn't like the snow! Once Sunday while we were at church, we left the cat in the garage and he ventured out and was attacked by the neighbors big Chesapeake hunting dogs. He died a few days later, just after Bill came home from Texas for a school break from college. He went to the vet to see him and made the decision to have his cat put to sleep.

We didn't have another cat for awhile until we were living in Winston-Salem, NC. James wanted a cat but we kept putting him off. A neighbor had a beautiful calico long hair cat and James would go up the street to their house to play with their cat. One day he came home and said they wanted to give him the cat since they were moving away. So that's how we became the owners of Pôpoki (POH' poh kee) which is Hawaiian for Cat. The little girl in the family had brought Poki home from Hawaii when she went to visit her grandmother. We shortened her name to Poki and when we moved to Haleyville in N. Alabama, Poki went with us. She was an outdoor cat and a great hunter. She liked to sleep on the carport on a table or on top of the car. One night she disappeared and we never found her. For days we rode about in the neighborhood looking for her. I think maybe somebody kidnapped her. She was so friendly and very beautiful.

Several years went by before we adopted another cat. We were living Albany, GA and traveling to our farm in AL on week-ends occasionally. My cousin who lived near our farm had 14 or more cats and James saw a white one he wanted. Betty gave him the cat and we took it home with us. He named that cat Poki, Jr., calling him Poki. When we left Albany and moved to the farm permanently, the cat didn't want to go with us. We had a hard time catching him to put him in a carrier and he was not very happy. Poki developed throat cancer a few years later and had to be put to sleep. He was a great hunter and kept down the field mice population as well as rabbits, chipmunks, and other critters. He stayed outdoors. We buried Poki under a big oak tree in the yard and put a stone on his grave. James was so sad when he died. He didn't mention wanting another cat for awhile.

Then when I was visiting our son Bill the next summer and returning with two of the granddaughters to spend a week with us, we brought their family cat back home to James.
They didn't want the responsibility of taking care of the cat and Bill wanted to get rid of the cat.
So they wanted to give the cat to James. We made the trip from SC to AL ok but it was rather noisy with the cat yelling a lot.

We named the cat Poki, Jr. and called him P.J. He was a great hunter also. He was also an outdoor cat and had a cat door so he could come and go to the back porch and sit on the soft chair cushions all day. I think this was our favorite cat or at least the most friendly. He loved to sit in your lap and purr. He would go walking with us and when we left home and returned, he could hear the car coming down the dirt road and would run out to meet us.

P.J had a hard time adjusting to living in town when we moved to Elba in 2003. Other cats didn't want him in their territory and he was always getting in fights and having to go to the vet.
After awhile he too developed throat cancer and had to be put to sleep when he was about 15 years old. At the present time we don't have a pet and I feel so bad when James sees cats on TV and talks to them and tells me he would like to have another cat for a pet. Neither Jim nor I want another animal right now so we just keep putting him off. James and I are both allergic to cats and can't keep one inside. We'll just continue looking at them on TV for awhile.

Scuppernong Vine playhouse

Today when I was pruning our concord grape and bronze scuppernong vines, my mind drifted back about 65 years to when I was growing up on the farm and we were living with my Mama and Papa Wilson in their big farm house. In warm weather, mother would send us outside to play during the day .
One of my favorite summer childhood recollections is recalling times spent in our playhouse under our scuppernong vine. All of our friends had “scuppernong playhouses”. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see a large squarish or pointed framed-up scuppernong vine standing a little bit over 'head tall' in everyone's back yard. We made a playhouse under ours. The lovely thick-leafed vines made a perfect shade overhead and the long runners hanging over the frame offered a lot of privacy. Our playhouse had only one door (opening). It was dark inside. Our playhouse even had bench seats you could really sit on. Made with wood blocks or old bricks and old planks - our little tables were old buckets or pans that had holes in the bottoms or the handles torn off. With all of our ideas we'd furnish all the laid-off rooms and then we would make mud pies and “bake” them outside in the hot sun. We made brooms from straw to sweep the dirt floors. We would decorate our cakes (made from mud) with green china berries or little flowers we would pick. Or we would just play with our Sears-Roebuck paper dolls (individual dolls cut from the catalog and furniture made from paper). This occupied our time for hours.



'During the late summer, when the scuppernongs were fully ripe, we'd take our friends to our scuppernong vine for refreshments . Standing inside our playhouse, you could just reach up or out to the side and eat juicy fruit.


There was a major problem in the fall; in the form of winged creatures known as wasps. They liked to build nests in the vines and drink the nectar of the ripe scuppernongs. And when we would reach for the ripe fruit, we would get stung. Papa Wilson chewed tobacco and would apply some spittle to the stung area to “draw out the pain” so he said. Our grandmother lost her sense of smell when she was aging, and once applied Watkins vanilla flavoring to wasp or bee stings on my brother and cousin. She thought she was using linament instead. The bottles looked alike.


I remember how much cooler it was under the scuppernong vine and there were always gentle breezes blowing through the leaves.


No one ever seemed to know to spell scuppernongs, and I think it was because we called them something like "scupplins". I learned the correct spelling when I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" many years later. I wonder when school children read that book, if they have any idea of what a scuppernong arbor is.


Maybe I will go outside and “square up” one of our scuppernong vines to create a playhouse for children to play. Not a bad idea except it would ruin my carefully laid out landscape. I have to maintain my reputation as a “Master Gardener”.

Flowers I have propogated

Last fall I took a Master Gardener course for 10 weeks. I learned a lot and one new word was "propogate". And the correct way to prune, fertilize, plant, etc. In the past I just cut off small limbs and stuck them in the ground or a pot and rooted them. Now with my "new found" knowledge, there's no telling how many plants I will have this time next year! Jim is going to help me build a green house this spring. Actually we will enclose my potting shed and turn it into a green house.

Gladiolas

Lady Banks 

I am posting some photos taken in our yard this past summer. Some were planted from seeds from friends (pink and lavendar hibuscus). The glad bulbs were obtained from Fred's (our local department store). The bulbs fell out of packages and were scattered on the floor. I asked if I swept them up, could I have them and they said "yes". I had the most beautiful gladiolas last summer. I took several bouquets to church and to shut in's.


The yellow Lady Banks rose bush was so top heavy it fell to the ground last spring and we left it on the ground until it finished blooming, and then pruned it heavily. I rooted this rose when we moved to Elba. It was given to me by my cousin Joe and his wife Martha. She died from pneumonia soon after we moved here, so I call it "Mott's" rose.

The pink climbing rose dates back to Savannah, GA over 200 years ago. I have rooted so many from my root stock which I got from a friend in Albany, GA many years ago. The Autumn clematis came from a neighbor's yard.

The lavendar and red hibiscus plants came from seed I planted last spring. I have a bag of seed to plant this spring and share with others. The little yellow coreopsis are so easy to grow.

Coresposis

They come back every spring and bloom all summer if you keep them "dead headed".


The Autumn Clematis vine starts over every spring. I cut it back to the ground in the winter. The blossoms fill the air with perfume in the fall. The blue hydrangea came with us from Albany, GA. I have rooted so many from this bush. The white gardenia was rooted from a small limb I broke off of a bush at my brother's house in 1997. I broke a limb from the bush pictured here at our farm and planted it in our yard and it is almost 5' tall and so many blooms on it last year.

Gardenia

Autumn Clematis

Yes, we have no bananas!

Remember the Chiquita banana jingle of the 50's and the Banana lady? I love bananas and thought our banana tree would produce big stalks of the sweet yellow fruit. But alas, all we got were giant green leaves. We could almost see the tree growing as it towered over the porch this summer. We had to cut the lower leaves to walk underneath the bush. We planted it just 3 years ago from a small bulb that Mr. Lawford gave us. Banana plants look like giant onions with the same root design, just a lot bigger. The trunk of the plant is mostly water and can be cut across easily with a sharp knife. The giant leaves make a nice sound when the wind is blowing through them. I felt like I was in the tropics when I stood on our back porch and looked up at the giant banana tree. It made a nice shade underneath.

Today we decided to dig up the giant tree and replace it with a smaller plant that likes to grow in the shade and damp soil. Haven't decided yet what that plant will be.

Digging up the massive tree was not an easy task. We dug dirt away from the base of the tree but the roots were so intertwined we couldn't move it at all. Jim finally got an ax and cut the stalks apart and then we were able to dig them up. The stalks were killed back by the frosts we had this winter and we used a kitchen knife to slice them off to the ground. Then we piled the water filled "tree trunks" out by the street to be picked up by the city.  We placed the tree roots in containers and dumped them in a gulley behind our property. I tried to give them away but no offers. People pay a lot of $$$ for banana bushes at the plant nursery.

I think the secret of our giant banana tree was that the soil was always wet because there was clay soil underneath and when it rained, water drained on this site and the clay soil held water for a long time.


I lived out my fantasy of the little Sambo story of my childhood of tigers chasing each other around the banana trees until they melted into butter for little Sambo's many pancakes.  I have a copy of that book someplace. It was one of my favorites.

Flowers, and more flowers

Tomorrow I will be traveling with a group from Enterprise to the Atlanta Flower show at the World Congress Center. I have been to flower shows in other large cities, including the big one in Charlotte, NC. I am always amazed at how they can fill large buildings with so many beautiful flower designs and exhibits. I can hardly wait to go.

You see, I am a flower junkie. Even fake flowers are pretty to me. This started at a very early age. My grandmother had beautiful cabbage roses and they smelled so good. And the sweet smelling sweet shrub that she would allow us to pick and tie one of the little maroon colored blooms in the corner of a handkerchief that we could put in our pocket and take out occasionally to rub across our nose and smell the sweet smelling sweet shrub.

One of my favorite times of the year when I was young was to go to the woods to search for wild violets in the early spring. There were many little white violets near the creeks, but our goal was to find large, taller purple violets. We would pick a handful to bring home to our mother who put them in a tea cup filled with water.

When we retired in 1996 and moved to the farm where I grew up, I started looking for violets. In 2002, we cleared some land near a stream where I remembered seeing large purple violets, and the next spring I came upon this big bed of those beautiful little flowers. Immediately I took photos to send to my sisters to let them know what I had discovered.

Pizza Pie

Do you remember the first time you ate pizza? You might if you are over 60. Most people think pizza has always been around. Not so! I remember in the early 1950's hearing Dean Martin singing: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore". That song set America singing and eating pizzas. I had never heard of "pizza pie" and I thought he was saying "piece of pie" and I didn't know what "amore" meant. I liked the song and the lively tune. Then one day I discovered what he was saying and I laughed.

I remember the first time I ever had pizza. Some friends invited us to have dinner at an Italian restaurant in Wurzburg, Germany one evening in 1954. They suggested we try the pizza pie and I wasn't sure I would like it. I had planned on ordering Italian spaghetti. One bite of the delicious cheese and tomato mixture on hard bread was all I needed to get hooked on pizza.

We came back to the US in the summer of 1955 and soon we started seeing pizza on menus of restaurants in Kansas where we lived for awhile. I think maybe soldiers stationed in Europe, especially in areas near Italy, loved pizza and brought the idea back to the US. When our boys were small, we made pizza from Chef Boyardee kits. We would mix the crust and knead it out on the round pizza pan and add the sauce from the box. I always added extra cheese and sometimes cooked hamburger meat or sausage. When they were older, growing up in Paris, TX, there were pizza restaurants and I stopped making the box kind.

Now we are living in a small town without a pizza restaurant and I have resorted to buying frozen pizzas, and again adding extra ingredients. Our favorite is Tombstone pizza.

And everytime I start to take a bite, I can hear Dean Martin singing that song "When the moon hits your eye, etc." and I chuckle.

Aunt Bob

My mother had 4 sisters and 2 brothers and a half-brother. She was one of the oldest. Her older sister was named Mary Barbara Smith, and we called her "Aunt Bob". Here is a photo of the older children. Standing next to my mother Ruth, in the back row is Aunt Bob (on the right). The boy in the middle is William Joseph (Joe Bill, who died May 2007 at age 90), on his right is Ida who just turned 89 and the baby is Nellie Faye who died in 1985. Younger children were Amos (Pete) who lives in Elba and the youngest was a girl, Martha Ann (Polly) who died in 1992.


Now back to Aunt Bob (Barbara). She is probably the one we all remember best because we saw her more often.


At an early age, she started staying with our Papa Smith's sister, Daisey Winston who was an invalid following a stroke.


My earliest memories was of Aunt Bob was when we would visit her at Aunt Daisey's house and observe how she cared for Aunt Daisey.


I couldn't understand anything Aunt Daisey said, but Aunt Bob knew exactly what she wanted. They lived in a big house with a porch across the front where Dorsey Trailers now has a paved parking lot. Aunt Bob and Aunt Daisey spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch every morning and afternoon. There was a vine creeping up to the roof that provided shade from the sun. I remember that it was called a coral vine and had pretty pink blooms. I have a vine just like it and it brings back memories. Aunt Bob lived with Aunt Daisey for many years, until Aunt Daisey died in the 1950's.


By this time Aunt Bob was in her early 40's. She moved into a house nearby that Aunt Daisey's sons gave her, and her parents (my grandparents) lived there with her. She decided to become a nurse and entered nursing school in Dothan to be come a practical nurse. She graduated from nursing school and went to work in a Dr's office in Elba.


Then she decided to get married to someone she had known all her life, Roy McDowell. He was in WWII in the Pacific and when the war was over he came home and started working for the Ala Highway Department. We all thought it was neat that Aunt Bob had a boy friend. Neither had ever been married. So in their early 50's they decided to get married and the wedding was held at Aunt Daisey's son Roger's new brick home. In the meantime, her father had died from a heart attack and her mother was living with her. After Aunt Bob got married, her mother (my Mama Smith) went to live in the new Elba nursing home and she loved it there. She had friends around all the time. She lived to be 91.


Back to Aunt Bob. Uncle Roy died in 1975 with leukemia, a few years after their marriage. Aunt Bob had become friends with his sister MaryMcDowell Newton and the two of them became very close friends and where you saw one, you saw the other.

Aunt Bob loved to do handwork. She could crochet and knit and made all of her nieces sweaters and doll clothes. She made dresses for me and my sisters. I'll never forget the dresses she made for me to take to college. She helped me make my formal for the prom one year and for that I was so happy. We lived in the country and rode the bus to school. Sometimes I would walk to Aunt Bob's house after school and spend the night, especially when there was something taking place in town that I wanted to attend. My friends would come by and pick me up.


After we all grew up and moved away from Elba, we would always go to see Aunt Bob when we came back home to visit.


Aunt Bob checked herself into the Elba nursing home one hot day in August in the early 1990's when her air conditioner stopped working. She just packed her suitcase, called a taxi and never came back. She called to tell me her new address and new phone number.  She asked if I would come to Elba (from Albany, GA) and clean out her refrigerator!  Of course I did, and cleaned her house.  I thought she would be coming back soon, but she never did.  The house was flooded in March 1998.  


Several years later, Aunt Bob began to have heart problems and in October 1998, her heart just stopped beating one Sat. afternoon. I was with her at the hospital and left to go to a Grimes family cousins' dinner, to see everybody and told her I'd be back later. She died while I was gone, with my sister-in-law Carol in the room with her. She just closed her eyes and went to sleep, without a sound.


Aunt Bob was buried beside her husband in Evergreen Cemetery in Elba.