1-21-2012-we just po folks

    this is Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens Visit- click on link to visit. and no they are not po folk, we all are in comparison to the seiberlings at their time. stan hywet hall is a nice place to visit on a one tank trip loaded with history. needless to say i think we all secretly wish to have grown up here. in stead  we lived in an old farmhouse along rt.800 as it is called now and rt.8 then. it was my grandpas and grandmas house and they lived in a house trailer beside us. he was a farmer and worked in the woods as we called it. he worked for the forestry service as a supervisor . grandma worked for u.s. ceramic tile corporation and when she retired she had 28 years in at the tile plant as she called it.

     mom was milking six cows by hand , and we had a mean ass bull also. one old cow called sally was especially nice. i was able to start milking her at 5 years old , and would milk straight into the glass from the cow's teat , shooting a stream of milk into a pile of nestles quik in the bottom of a tim glass i would keep in the barn for this purpose alone. i would grab a one legged stool and sit down and grab those big old faucets, and squeeze . a frothy chocolate warm milk was really good when you were able to do it yourself. old sally was a great old Guernsey cow . something you hardly see any more. great butter and cream cows. 

      it wasn't probably the safest way to drink milk from a cow but then again how many times is milk handled before you see it on your table. i am 6 ft. 4 inches and i attribute at least 2 inches to healthy farm food. we didn't have a lo0t but always had something to eat. 

     my first dad had left and this left mom struggling to make ends meet. my brother was gave a shirt that had patchwork print and was nowhere close to being patched , but none the less was representative of one, and some kids  said he was poor and refused to wear it, so he gave it to me. he wasn't going to have anything to do with being poor. this was a term that was new to me and i hardly understood the meaning of it then. when i was old enough to go to school i wore it and proudly i would say, suffering no real percussion's of being poor as my brother was. and one day i was in the hall with my first grade teacher miss armstrong and she introduced me to the second grade teacher, miss dolly, and she said,"this is jims younger brother kevin, you remember Jim don't you miss dolly? his daddy ran off." 

    she says" oh my you poor boy!"and i knew right then i was poor , never knew for sure before, but when miss dolly said it i knew it was true. and i didnt even have the shirt on. what she said in comfort i had taken wrong. not knowing what poor was , as we had lots but not money. i ate a lot of vegetables and plenty of cream of tomato soup , and potato also as well as all kinds of milk . helped churn butter,and bread was always baking in the kitchen. mom made us toys for christmas. we didnt really want for anything. but we were poor. poor in comparison to some peoples standards. when she said i was poor i just jumped to the conclusion that it was so, whatever it was.  

    and we not nearly as poor as a friend of mine who once described her childhood in the bayou in louisiana as a child . she would play on a bicycle that was up on blocks and daydream of visiting people and places she knew. i will include a drawing of that remembrance she had. they lived in a shack and her mom would always dress her neat but it was a hard life , and she had scars. not visible but more of the heart kind.