School Days at Curtis Jr High, Elba, AL

Curtis School, grades 4,5,6 in 1946. I am in second row from top, in the middle, in front of the principal, E. C. Griffin. I was in the 6th grade and my teacher, Miss Arvie D. Fuller, is on the top row, 4th from left. Fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Doris Pinckard, 3rd on top row from left. Next to Mr. Griffin is Mrs. Jean Johnson, 5th grade teacher. The two girls on my left side were my best friends - Janice Cowen and Evelyn Jones. We are still friends and see each other often.


Several of my classmates in this photo are deceased: Ted Cowen, James Huggins, Jean Johnson, Grady Blocker, Ronald Courson, Jack Foley, Jean Griffin, Annie Myrle Archie.


"Father time took its toll on Curtis Junior High School, as it did many other country schools. The rural population slowly shifted to the cities and small towns where the factories, mills and other industries offered employment for the parents. Farming had become mechanized and many of the farm workers were no longer needed. Modern transportation provided students the opportunity to attend larger, more progressive schools. All of this meant too few students left in the country schools.


Curtis Junior High School closed at the end of the 1966-67 school term. It was indeed a sad day. A few years later, the building was destroyed by fire completely erasing all visible evidence of the school. Nothing can erase the memories in the hearts and minds of the men and women who attended school at Curtis" - taken from History of Curtis School by Jimmie Lou Cowen.


I am standing on the front steps of the old school in 1976, about 10 years after it closed.


For the last 22 years, we have had a Curtis School Reunion even though the school closed at the end of the 1966-67 school term. We meet the 2nd Sat. of October each year at a pavilion we built behind the Curtis Baptist church a few years ago. My friend Janice Cowen Hudson and I organized the first school reunion and we have been in charge every year since. We held a fundraiser to get enough money to build the pavilion behind the church. Another fundraiser was held to get an Alabama Historical Commission historical marker to erect at the site of the old school.


We always have good attendance and honor one of the families each year, as well as an outstanding student.

Some childhood memories

From time to time I get emails that talk about things in the past and "Do you remember, etc." I enjoy reading them and remembering my childhood experiences. I read one today that jogged my memory and I decided to write down some of my early memories (before I forget them!).


About the only high tech thing I remember from the past was our battery operated radio! There were no portable radios or boom boxes in those days. This was before the internet, cell phones, CD's, DVD's, e-mail. It was even before electricity in our home, or air conditioners, refrigerators, electric irons - so many of those modern applicances.


We played outdoor games. Like hide and seek or going to the mill - playing in the front yard at dusk while our parents rested on the front porch. Then when it started getting dark, we would catch "lightning bugs" and put them in a jar with a lid and would take them to bed with us to see if they would light up the room. Out in the country there were no street lights to light up the sky and we enjoyed looking at the stars and finding the milky way and other constellations. It was so exciting to see shooting stars.


At school we would go outside at recess (morning and afternoon) and at lunchtime, and play games such as London bridge, hop scotch, jump rope, hot potato. Mother, May I?, Bum, bum, bum, Here I come, jacks, dodge ball, kick the can, and many more. I remember a game called "freeze". You were slung about and then when you were turned loose, you had to freeze in the position you stopped. We would also spin around until we got dizzy and fell down laughing because we were "drunk". We played these games at home when friends would come to visit.


We would save string from the fertilizer (guano) sacks in the spring and wrap a small rubber jack's ball, until the ball was large enough to use for a baseball. We also had a ball of this string to use to fly homemade kites, made from greased brown paper (to make it strong). I always wanted to make a long tail with pretty bows tied to it so you could see it sailing in the sky behind my kite.


Summer days seemed so long and we would be so tired at night (from playing so hard); and it would be too hot to go to bed early. We would open the windows and listen to the crickets outside or owls and other night critters. It was always damp and cool early in the morning, but this didn't last long after the sun came up.

We would buy penny candy from the rolling store and some of my favorites were peanut butter and banana flavored little square candies called "Kits", dum-dum suckers, peanut butter bars, BBats suckers, Jack's cookies, and many more. I loved to buy Cracker Jack to see what the prize would be in the bottom of the box.


I remember the first day of school was always so exciting. My feet always hurt from wearing my new shoes (I went barefoot most of the summer). I remembering wanting to wear a new dress on the first day of school and usually it was too hot, but I would wear it anyway. We weren't allowed to wear shorts or pants to school.


Other memories include climbing trees and I was never a good climber. Once I climbed my Uncle Clem's ladder to the top of the windmill and sat there and cried until he came home to help me down. I still don't like heights. I get dizzy when I look down below.


I remember swinging as high as I could go and try to reach the sky. Friends would push each other until the swing was going very high, and then they would run underneath the swing.
We would swing from vines in the woods, pretending to be Tarzan.

Christine, Nell and Sue

Rainy days meant we would have to play on the porch or in our bedrooms. We would put on plays, or play with our paperdolls we cut out of the Sears catalog. Or play school, and since I was the oldest, I was usually the teacher. When the weather was nice outside, we loved to make playhouses, using boards, etc. to outline the rooms of the houses. We sometimes got into trouble when we used eggs in our mud cakes. I am pictured here with younger sisters Chris and Sue. Notice the bandage on my left hand. I almost cut my finger off with an ax, driving stakes for our play house. Mama Smith put coal oil on the wound and wrapped it tight with some clean white cloth. I have a scar on my left index finger from this mishap.

Back to front:  Sue, Nell and Christine

If someone had a bike, they would give their friend a ride on the handlebars. I remember my first bike when I was in the 6th grade. I had "wheels" and could go places and not have to walk.


I remember going to Bible School every summer and we always had Kool Aid to drink. We didn't have this at home very often so it was a special treat.


When we were in fear for our lives, it wasn't because of drugs, gangs, shootings, etc. We just didn't want our parents to be mad with us. I always wanted to please my parents and tried not to disobey them.


We made decisions by counting out "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" - there's more to this rhyme that we used to say but I don't use that word anymore!


I remember in the summer when I was a teen ager, we would go to "singing schools", staying all day for a week or two at each school we attended. Our teacher, Mr. McKinney, was very strict and you didn't misbehave. We would sing gospel songs and take turns leading the singing. I wasn't very good at being a song leader. I love lunch time when we sat around eating our lunches we brought from home. They sat all morning inside the building and were soggy. I still like soggy tomato sandwiches which were my favorite, with salt and black pepper on the tomato. I guess we had water to drink. I don't remember having soft drinks. And there was always a piece of homemade cake or cookies with our lunch. Sometimes we would have a banana or pineapple sandwich.


This is enough "remembering" for one day. Times were simpler in those days but I really wouldn't want to trade them for more modern times. I love my central heat and air, electric applicances, hot water, refrigerator and car! I even learned to use a computer in my old age and digital camera. I don't care much for today's music and haven't asked for any devices to download music to listen to while I am out walking

Handmade Quilts - Warm Quilted Memories

When I was growing up, we all had handmade quilts on our beds in the winter. We didn't have warm blankets until much later. Mother would order a bag of cloth scraps and use that material to make quilts. Her sister, Aunt Bob (Barbara) loved to piece quilts by hand. I remember my grandmother Smith usually had a quilting frame hanging from the ceiling in one of the bedrooms and she would sit for hours, quilting. Ladies would get together and have a "quilting bee" and help each other complete their quilts. I can remember mother attending a few of those when I was little. We would crawl underneath the quilting frame and play with our dolls or take a nap on the floor.


When I left home in Sept. 1952 to go to college at Troy State College, I bought a nile green cotton thermal  blanket to take to school. I really did miss my quilt I left at home. It was too large for the twin size bed in the dorm.


When Jim and I got married in Oct. 1953, my Aunt Bob gave us a quilt top that she pieced for me, using scraps from dresses she had made for me over the years. I recognized the fabric the minute I spread the beautiful Dresden plate quilt out on the bed to look at it. She told me to put it away and someday I could quilt it. Unfortunately I never learned to quilt (and didn't try because I don't like to thread needles!).


Thirty-five years later when we were living in Haleyville, AL , Aunt Bob came to visit us. She asked where the quilt was that she had made for me. I took it out of my cedar chest and she was disappointed that I had not quilted it. She took it home with her and got it quilted by a group of ladies at a church in Elba.


I proudly display my "patchwork" heirloom quilt, folded at the foot of our bed on top of a chest. I have shared with our grand- daughters the history of the quilt. I've even helped some of them make small quilts, using the sewing machine to piece the fabric.


I made James a quilt for his 50th birthday in 2006 and it is now a wall hanging in his bedroom, over his bed. I used the computer to copy pictures and transfer them to the cotton squares. Then I put the squares together with solid strips of cloth. I threaded about a dozen needles at the time and stuck them in a pin cushion and set about "quilting" around the squares. He loves his train quilt (most of the squares relate to his hobby of trains.


When I get too old to drive, or work in the yard, I will take up quilting. I might have to get someone thread my needles for me. You can purchase quilt pieces already cut out and ready to sew into a pattern. It's much easier now than when Aunt Bob made my lovely quilt. And you can have yourquilt quilted on a quilt machine these days. No more quilting frames hanging from the ceiling!  

Sights, sounds and smells

Today I was thinking of certain things I like to smell. What brought this to mind was when a neighbor told me his native azaleas (honeysuckles) were beginning to bloom and immediately I remembered the sweet smell of those honeysuckles that grew in the woods when I was growing up on the farm. In the spring we would gather some and bring inside and the house smelled so good. Soon after the honeysuckles bloomed, we would go back to the woods and get limbs of wild sweet shrubs with the tiny little brown flowers that smelled almost as good as the honeysuckles. We would wrap one of the little sweet shrub pods in the corner of a handerchief and tie it and then put it in our pocket and take it out during the day to smell the sweet scent.


There were also wild honeysuckles vines that grew along the fences. I can remember coming home from church revival meetings in the summer, riding on the back of our daddy's big truck, and the heavy damp evening air would smell so good as we passed the honeysuckle vines on the way home.


I think my favorite "smell" is when I put fresh linens on the bed and turn back the covers at night and I am greeted with the smell and feel of the fresh linens. I miss my outdoor clothes line at the farm where I would dry bed linens and they would flap in the breeze and feel so good when I put them back on the bed.


I love the aroma of pies and cakes baking, especially if they have spices in them. Nothing can beat the taste of good gingerbread. I even like to smell onions and green peppers cooking, and bacon.


Years ago I remember opening up the new Sears catalog, and how the new pages smelled. And I remember how new leather shoes smelled when you took them out of the box. I am having difficulty smelling things during the heavy pollen season since my sinus passages are clogged.


Some of the sounds I like are trains in the background. When we lived in Minnesota, the sound of the Burlington Northern train coming around a curve back of our house, blowing the whistle at the crossing at the end of our street. I especially loved this sound when it was snowing and blizzard weather. I felt that everything was going to be ok if the train was still able to get through all that bad weather! I love the sound of farm animals late in the afternoon and early in the morning. We never needed an alarm clock since the roosters started crowing at daylight. I love the mourning dove calls and the whipp-o-will calls. And the sounds of little biddies (baby chicks) when they arrived in big boxes in the spring. The mailman delivered them and we placed them in the brooder until they were large enough to be outside.


And perhaps most of all, I love soft pretty music.


My favorite time of the day is late in the afternoon when the sun is sinking and the air becomes hazy or in the winter observing the purple and orange sky in the west. Sometimes I say to myself, another day has come and gone and let us rejoice that all's well with us.

Elba Town Square and Court House

Driving up a hill and getting to the top and looking out over valleys is another sight I enjoy. I have this feeling every time I come into Elba from the east and come down the steep hill into town. You can see the little town nestled at the bottom of the hill along Pea River. The church steeple and clock on the court house tower welcome you to our sleepy little town.


I like the sight of new crops coming up in the fields in the spring, remembering how excited my dad would be when his peanuts, cotton and corn would push up out of the dirt every spring.


I'll probably think of more to add later. I hope my sinus problems clear up before our roses start blooming. I would hate to miss that sweet smell.

New Geranium

My 10-year-old geranium 

When we moved to our present home in Elba in Nov. 2003, I brought a geranium with me that I had at the farm for 6 years. It bloomed all summer and I would move the geranium inside a storage building in Jan and Feb when we would have freezing weather. When we moved to Elba it occupied a place on the front porch and got afternoon sun from the southwest. Last summer during our drought, the high temperatures and dry weather conditions caused the plant to deteriorate before the end of the summer and it died. I had to throw it away in November 2007.

Red-orange blossom on my new plant

Today I stopped by a local nursery for their plant sale and guess what! I found another geranium just like my old one and I only had to pay $10 for it. I'm going to repot it in a bigger pot and keep it in partial shade on the back patio. One thing about geraniums, they are almost drought resistant and not like petunias and impatients that have to have a lot of water. The plant I bought today has 7 big blooms and about 20 buds ready to open up soon. I am so proud of my new plant. It is sitting on the outdoor table, right outside our breakfast room table where i can see it at any time.

Getting such a big plant home was no easy task since we were in the family car and not the van. I suggested James hold it in his lap for the short ride home, and he refused to have a flower pot in his lap! So... I put groceries in the floor of the back seat and put cereal boxes on top and used the "shelf" to place the pot in the back seat. We made it home without any problems. It was too tall to put in the trunk of the car, and besides I already had 2 big bags of potting soil in the trunk.

My new plant

I love to go to plant nurseries. We're lucky to have a nice one in Elba. I had to fight the urge to buy lots and lots of plants today. Beautiful hanging baskets as well as potting plants. I'm sure I'll be going back in a few days to take another look, and go in the van with plenty of room to haul anything I might not be able to resist!

Antique Roses in our yard

This photo was made today, March 27, 2008, after I weeded the flower bed and added pine bark mulch.


This antique rose can be traced back to Savannah, GA, in the early 1800's. An 80-year-old friend in Albany,GA gave me a cutting from her rose bush to root in 1992, and I have rooted dozens and given them away. My friend said she got a cutting from her great grandmother's homeplace in Savannah many years ago. That's how old it is.


I rooted 5 rose bushes when we moved to our present home in 2004. Can you believe these 5 big bushes were 12" cuttings only 4 years ago. They are just beginning to leaf out.


In this photo you see the same bushes in bloom on May 1, 2007. They look like cabbage roses when they open up, and smell so sweet. The stems are covered with "fierce" thorns that can really stick you.


The third photo is a close up of the flowers in bloom last May. I like to cut bouquets and give them away and also place some inside our house.


And the nicest part about these roses are that I am reminded of my friend Sara who is now 96 and living in Jupiter, FL. We got to know her very well during a flood in Albany, GA in 1994 when we were assigned (by our church) to help her with her flooded house, etc. Her husband had died just 3 months before the flood and they had no children. We spent about a year helping her get her beautiful home restored, filling our paper work, etc. She was a golfer and played regularly until the flood and the death of her husband.


So you see why I smile when I look at the roses in bloom and memories of my friend come back to me.

Weeds are popping up all over!!

I don't know how they manage to grow and survive the cold, freezing temperatures but we have a "bumper" crop of weeds this spring. Jim sprayed with weed killer to try to rid the lawn of some of the weeds, but new ones have come up since he sprayed. I took advantage of the nice, cool weather today to divide hostas, pull weeds in flower beds, and prune some vines that died during the winter. Jim thinks it's remarkable that I know where every flower in our yard came from, when and where I got them and all about the characteristics of each particular flower or shrub. After all, I am a certified Master Gardener!

We got rid (dug up) our monster banana bush and planted an azalea in its place. Planted an Orient pear tree in our "orchard" at the back of the yard. Cleaned the bird bath and added water. It was a sunny warm afternoon and there were so many birds splashing in the bird bath today. It's fun watching them and there were so many different ones. My favorite is the little blue bird and we have some nesting already in the back yard.

I bought a "weed book" to help me identify weeds. Now I have go find out what to put on them to kill them and when to apply the chemicals needed. Mostly we just mow them down. Our bermuda grass lawn is so late turning green that we need the weeds to have green in our yard.

I wanted to share something with you tonight so I will post some photos of weeds in our yard. See if you recognize any of them.  

#1 - henbit
#2 - wild onions

#3 - dandelion
#4 - wild geranium