"Free Day" today

This morning I got up and looked at my desk calendar and it was blank, that is until church supper at 5:30 p.m. What a welcome relief! I needed a free day to just relax after my busy day shopping in Dothan yesterday (50 miles from home). I left home at 9 a.m. and got back at 3 p.m. I went alone and had so much fun going to Michael's, Party America, Office Depot, Big Lots, and a few others.


I had a picture framed at Michael's at 40% off. I had fun looking all over the store while I was getting the picture framed. I couldn't find a thing that I needed.


Then I spent over an hour at the party place, Party America. I shopped for decorations for the 50th birthday party for our son Bill  and daughter-in-law Cindy (Ron's wife)  on June 21. We should have planned a luau since that theme had tons of decorations. Someone said they thought several churches were using that theme for Bible School this year. They even had grass skirts. I wonder how I would look in one of those?? I'm not sure what you wear underneath. I decided to just stick with "Over the Hill"...... I bought a large helium tank that will fill 50 latex balloons. I didn't check out until I had seen every item in the store. What a fun place to shop!


I didn't want to take time out to eat so I ate my lunch which I had prepared and brought in a lunch box, along with cold bottled water, along with some snacks. I would snack between shopping.

I stopped at the Christian Mission store to see if they had a used movie screen, and they didn't. But I found a great bargain for $5 - a food dehydrator! It looks much like the one pictured here. It has several trays to hold the food and has an electric fan underneath to circulate air to the food. I want to try drying some small figs to use to make fig newtons like Mama Wilson used to make. I hope I remember how she made them. Last year I borrowed a dehydrator from my neighbor, just like the one I bought, to dry some oriental persimmons and those bright orange-red slices were so pretty. Not only good  to eat but to added to holiday wreaths. When Jim asked what I planned to do with this "gadget", I explained to him why every cook needs one of these!


Then I went to Office Depot to buy a pint can of rubber cement. You can no longer buy these big containers anyplace but in office supply places. I guess it's too popular for "glue sniffing" parties. Think of the "high" a group of kids could get with a pint. A can will last me a long time and I refill my small bottle to use for art projects. I needed the glue for 2 big photo posters I am making for the party.


I have learned to make posters and banners and it's really neat how you can print a big poster from a photo. The image is printed on 4 or 9 sheets of photo paper and you trim the edges and put it on a poster board to get the large poster. You can buy whole sheets of photo paper with adhesive backing but that's so expensive. I just use rubber cement on the back of photo paper and if I need to reposition it, it's easy to move around.


This all took place yesterday....on Tuesday.


Today - I went for a 30 minute walk in my neighborhood with my friend Pat. Then back home to read the paper, check my email, edit a membership list from DAR, and then it was time to make some lunch. After lunch, Jim went with me to the playground to water some of the 36 trees we planted over the past year. We could only water trees for an hour today. It takes over two hours to water all of them. Fertilizer is very expensive but it's worth the price. Those trees are full of healthy green leaves and growing so fast. There was a nice breeze and we had 2 hoses to use. Then we went to the old Folsom house to water flowers and fertilize 2 chiqueapin trees I planted in April. Then back home in time for me to bake an angel food cake (for us) and a coconut cake to take to a luncheon tomorrow.


Then at 5 p.m. we left to go to church supper. I stayed for Bible study and Jim and James came home. Then Jim went back at 7 for choir practice. We almost never miss going to church on Wed. night. We enjoy the food and fellowship with friends there.


What started out as a lazy day was a very productive one. But there were no scheduled times to do things and this I enjoyed. Tomorrow I will have to plant the palm tree I grew from seed. I kept thinking about that throughout the day. And I forgot to water my plants in the potting shed.


Oh, I'll think about that tomorrow. (Jim calls me Scarlet for that reason!)


P.S. Tomorrow is not a free day until after 3 p.m. I'll be up and running around 6 a.m.

And Old Mind in a High Tech World

For the past several days I have been working on a slide show to show photos of our youngest son Bill who will turn 50 in July. He did this for us on our 50th anniversary in 2003 and we marveled at the presentation, as did the rest of our relatives. 

I decided to do the same for him on his birthday, as a surprise. I started searching for old photos about a month ago and this took forever as our photos are stacked away in photo boxes, in no order whatsoever~ and the 35mm slides posed a problem. How would I get them developed into photos to use in the slide show.


Guess what! Last night I finished the slide show, even adding music from the 70's and 80's as background music. I am so proud of myself!!

I have spent many, many hours on a project that probably would have taken our computer savy sons about an hour or two.

I couldn't figure out how to add captions or titles to photos I was using as slides, so I turned to Power Point which I had used a couple of times. I had so much fun with transitions, sound effects, background colors, etc. that sometimes I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing.

Then there was the problem of music. I got Bill's friend Dorothy to download some music from the 70s and 80s (I had no idea what was "playing" back then). She send a CD with some songs and when I played them, our son James came running over to the computer and started singing along with the oldies. He knew all of the groups or singers and the songs. I recognized the music and the beat since I had heard it a lot while the boys were growing up.

Bill and Barbara 

I thought you just clicked on "Play CD" and then, voila! There was music in the air. But not so! There's a lot you have to program into the slide show to make the music play. Ah, so many trials and errors and now I have it all worked out. Maybe I can figure out a way to link this site to the songs so you can listen to them. That might take about a month to figure out.

I would love to take some computer classes and learn to work with photos. That's another story.

Jim and I each have a computer and we network. For awhile we shared a scanner but recently he bought his own and you can scan photos from 35mm color slides. Yeah! He made my copies for me to use in Bill's slide show.

Don't say you "can't teach an old dog new tricks"; we are living proof that it can be done, and we are still learning something new every day.

Mother's Day memories

Mother's Day has come and gone for another year and I am late posting this blog. I thought about it all last week, and even located the photo to post. Then I got busy and am just now writing a tribute to my mother.

Mildred Ruth Smith Wilson was born on October 21, 1914, to Oswald Cole and Bessie Jewel Mayberry Smith. She was their 2nd daughter. Mother attended schools at Curtis, Basin and Elba. She graduated at the top of her class at Elba High School in 1933 and got married that summer to my father, James Lawrence Wilson, a farmer from the Curtis community.

I remember mother talking about her classes at Elba High School. She loved her Latin class. Most of all I think she enjoyed literature. I remember when I was growing up, that we got the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in the mail and she loved reading the editorials. She would read the funnies to us until we were old enough to read them. I remember that she read to us "Tales of Marco Polo" and that's how I learned about China. (My playmates and I would try to dig a hole to China but we never could get through the center of the earth! Mother said China was half-way around the world.) On Christmas she gave me a book "At the Back of the North Wind" and encouraged me to read it. It was a big book and I thought I'd never finish it.

Mother enjoyed listening to radio programs in the evenings. One of her favorites when I was small was "Dr. I.Q" - a forerunner of game shows. You could send in questions and if they used your entry, you would receive a box of Milky Way candy bars. More than once her questions were used and we enjoyed the candy bars that arrived in the mail.

When I was 12 (almost 13) , and mother was expecting her 6th child, I remember how she loved listening to the Phil Harris and Alice Faye show on Sunday nights. I was not too surprised when our baby sister was born and she named her Alice Faye. Mother also had a sister named Faye. Alice was born on Halloween night, although her birth certificate has October 30 on it.

I remember that mother had a little white wooden chest that she kept the baby clothes in. As they outgrew the clothes, she folded them and put them back in the chest to use for the next baby. In between babies, she sometimes let us dress our dolls with the baby clothes.

Mother went to school during the Depression and there wasn't enough funds for her to go on to college. But she made sure that all of her 7 children would go to college.

She never worked outside the home until I started to Troy State Teachers College in 1953. Then she started to work at Covington Industries sewing factory in Opp as an Inspector. She was working there when she died 10 years later. She and daddy wanted to build a new house and she wanted to work to help furnish the new 2-story brick home.

Mother was an expert seamstress and made all of our clothes, including coats, and our panties when we were little.

She was a hard worker, always laboring at something. I remember that she always took about a 15 minute nap after lunch every day and would get up and get right back to work. She always had a big garden and we helped her plant, hoe and harvest it. How I hated picking and shelling butterbeans; didn't mind peas and beans as much. She never let anything go to waste.

Mother died suddenly of a blood clot on April 28, 1963. We were living in Bremen, GA. We were all in shock. Our mother was never sick! She was a very kind person and people loved her. This was demonstrated the day of her funeral when school closed and the plant where she worked closed so people could attend her funeral. I never saw so many cars going to the church and cemetery. And even now, when I meet someone that she worked with as I did recently, they always tell me things that she said or did and how she always helped others.

On thing I remember was the time she made me a short, white corduroy coat with a flared back and mailed it to me at Troy State. I didn't have a light winter coat but knew there wasn't money to buy one so I just got by with what I had. I opened the package when it arrived and I don't think I've ever received a gift that I appreciated more. She made the coat and when I asked where she got the beautiful fabric, she said a friend had it left over when she made a garment and brought mother the scraps. Someone else gave her some cotton fabric that she used for the lining. My Aunt Barbara made large covered buttons for the coat. I treasured that coat for many years.

After I was married and living away, she wrote to us every week, telling us about what they were doing back home. These letters kept me from getting home sick when in college and when Jim and I were living in Germany for 2 years. I still have a letter that she wrote and put in the mail box the Sunday afternoon before she died later that same afternoon. The letter was in our mail box when we got back home in GA after attending the funeral.

Bill, Ronnie, and James Gilmer with grandparents, Lawrence and Ruth Wilson

Our boys enjoyed visiting mother and daddy at the farm in the summertime. She only had 6 grandchildren when she died; later there were 13 more.

Mother liked to can vegetables, make all kinds of jellies, jams and preserves and later when she got a freezer, would try to fill it during the summer. I didn't inherit her love for doing all of this but some of my sisters did. I like buying my frozen food in the grocery store, or getting fresh veggies at roadside curb markets in the summer, already shelled!

I think that if I could sum up how I remember my mother, it would be "a loving, caring mother who wanted the best for her children". She was a great encourager.

My brother Perry and his little red fire truck

Perry, Christine, Nell holding Judy, Sue

I came across this old photo of our only brother, Perry, when he was 2 years old. (He didn't like having his picture made when he was little.)  Santa brought him this red fire truck for Christmas and I think our daddy was more excited than he was on Christmas Day.

Daddy spent many hours repairing this metal toy and painting it. In 1944, you couldn't buy metal toys and he found this one that had been well used, and restored it. It was beautiful and Perry loved the bell that he could ring by pulling a string. We all took turns pushing him around in the fire truck when he got tired of pedaling.

This photo was taken in the front yard of Mama and Papa Wilson's house where we lived with them until the fall of 1944. We moved to a rental house about 1/2 mile away just before our sister Judy (shown here) was born on New Year's Day, 1945.

It was probably Easter 1945 when this photo was made. I'm guessing that we spent the day with Mama and Papa Wilson, even bringing Perry's fire truck so he could ride in in their big yard. 

I had just turned 10 in this picture and remember well the red and white stripe rayon dress I am wearing. Mother made it from a dress my aunt sent from Washington, DC. She would gather up nice clothing from her friends and send it to mother to use to make clothes for us. Fabric was not available due to war shortages. We always had nice clothes to wear because our mother was so creative and a very good seamstress.

My sister Christine is on the left side of the photo, I'm in the middle - holding baby Judy, and on the right side is my sister Susan (Sue). Alice and Carolyn came along later. Perry was the only boy in the family.

Only God can make a tree!

Our home when we moved in in Nov 2003

Our home 3 years later

I love trees and forests and lakes. When we moved into our present home in Elba, AL, there was not a single tree or bush or anything in our yard, just 2 acres of clay soil with wild grass and weeds. We had left behind 80 acres of pine trees, lots of hardwood trees in the woods, a lake and spring. We were so weary of taking care of our farm that we wanted to move to town and have a small city lot. But the only house we could find that fit into our plans was in the middle of two city lots! We moved into it in the winter of 2003 and in 2004 we began to landscape the new yard.

The bermuda grass lawn looks nice in the summer months but turns brown in the winter. We have a nice crop of weeds in the spring before the bermuda starts to turn green. We planted a lot of trees in 2004 and now 4 years later they look like they have been here forever. Some are now providing shade. Many of the shrubs I propagated after we moved here. It's exciting to watch them grow. Our only disaster was the banana bush that grew so fast and so big we had to dig it up. We put the big roots in a gulley behind our house and I expect any day to see a "banana forest" in that area!

back porch

I have a potting shed where I propagate plants and keep them watered. I have been giving away muscadine and concord grape vines this spring. Have lots of crepe myrtles to pass along.


My Master Gardening knowledge is so helpful.

Autumn Blaze Maple 2004

Autumn Blaze maple fall 2005

swing arbor we built 2005

Swing Arbor 1 year later

Welcome to my garden!

This morning when the early morning sun was shining on the dew laden flowers in our yard, I went outside and took some photos to share. I tried to capture the pink climbing roses on the wooden fence but you can't see the overall beauty in a photo. Nor can you smell the sweet fragrance of the antique roses. I like to cut them and make bouquets for church, friends, etc and keep some on our breakfast table to enjoy. I also root these roses to give away.
(Click small photos to enlarge)

Sweet Shrub bush

I planted a sweet shrub near our outdoor swing so I can smell them. But there's a problem with this bush. It is not from the wild, but given to me by a friend who bought it a nursery, and it doesn't have the sweet perfumey smell as those taken from the woods. I might replace it or add another variety nearby. At least the tea olive bush (tree) fills the air with the best smelling perfume around, several times a year. We are letting it grow into a tree.

The purple blooms of the clematis welcome us as we walk out the back door, as it climbs up a post on the corner of the porch. It blooms most of the summer, a few big blooms at the time.

The purple iris have had a good spring. Once there were over 2 doz blooms in the corner of our back yard bulb flower bed. I guess the gladiolas will be blooming next in that flower bed.

The geranium on the back porch was purchased this spring for $10 and I've never gotten such a bargain! It has been blooming ever since March. Might be because I feed it Schultz bloom fertilizer.

Near the geranium is a flower bed of hostas. They love the shade along the porch and add texture and color to the cement porch.

Our window boxes are filled with old fashioned petunias from the yard of my friend Glenda Williams. She gave me these before she moved to Geneva this spring. I put pots of plants in the window boxes so I can take them out and replace them when they begin to look bad.

The little yellow coreopsis are blooming all over the yard. These hardy perennials come back every year and are drought resistant. The bees and butterflies love them, as do the hummingbirds.

I hope you have enjoyed a tour of flowers blooming in our yard on May 1, 2008.

On the Sidewalks of Elba

Elba will soon have new sidewalks and underground utilities (telephone, electric and cable wires will all be underground and new lighting on the streets around the court house area. It will be beautiful when this is completed in July 2008. Construction began mid April and they have 90 days to complete it - which is mid July. I am posting some photos takenMonday (April 28); one side of the sidewalks has already been taken up and just today they put the utilities on the ground and covered them with cement. I guess tomorrow they will put more cement and finish up the north side.

The old sidewalks were high off the street and you had to take steps to get up to the sidewalk. Car bumpers were always hitting the high sidewalk bank. With the new sidewalks, a section closest to the street will be lowered to avoid cars hitting them, and then you step up one step to the sidewalk near the buildings. In the center of each sidewalk, near the street, there will be small green spaces with shrubs and flowers.

You can see in the photo here of the old Elba Exchange Bank, that the old sidewalks were one width, dropping down to the street at corners and with steps in between. This will soon be changed. By the way, this old bank has been converted to a beautiful town house for a family that lives in Elba during the week and at their home on Gantt Lake at other times. You can see how they covered some of the large windows with plaster but leaving the arched outlines and the front entrance on the corner which has beautiful patterned glass on sides and over the front door. The old bank vault was torn off at the back and a garage with room overhead was added plus a penthouse on top.

Others have built apartments downtown and more are planned. When the US 84 bypass is completed around Elba, downtown will be a beautiful place to live, work, or to just stroll around and enjoy the park, courthouse square, shops, restaurants, and take walks on the levee trail.

When all of the overhead wires are gone from downtown and new lights installed, it will take on an entire new look. The new coffee house/theater "Just Folk" at the site of the old Claire Theater (next to the Jewel Box which is now closed) is almost finished and I'll post some photos soon of the interior of that beautiful place. I'm going to a concert there one night next week.

Our little town has come a long way since the two floods in the 1990's. The new levee is supposed to protect us for years to come.