Neila had been Gold Star girl; Susan had been Gold Star girl. That was the top honor in the county in 4-H. But I just didn't have it in me. I thought about it. I really tried for a few years to get interested in all things 4-H.
One year Belinda and I did a demonstration of how to cut tomatoes and fill them with tuna salad. We must have cut up a hundred tomatoes, coring them, slicing them precisely, practicing how to do this neatly and perfectly without nicking our fingers. One of the few foods that I hated was tomatoes, so it was hard to get excited about it. I guess our mothers chose that particular food because there wasn't much we could mess up in demonstrating it.
Susan, on the other hand, made braided egg bread with a butter coating, blue Easter eggs nestled snugly in the heavenly smelling loaf. It was gorgeous, the beautiful perfectly browned crust contrasting with the bright turquoise eggs, and it tasted so good you wanted to eat the whole loaf, not worrying if you saved any for anyone else in the family.
Food Demonstration Day came and went. We won a red ribbon on those ghastly tomatoes, so the next year I decided to do safety. We pulled a lever causing a small plastic man to fly out of a plastic car that shot from one side of a board to another. Seatbelts had just come into our realm of knowledge, and we were showing the danger of not wearing them. I don't believe I knew anyone who wore a seatbelt at that time, and not many, if any, cars even had them.
4-H had been a big part of our lives when we lived in Purdon. Besides things at church, it was about the only thing offered for kids besides sports, and you couldn't play those until high school. But now that we were in Corsicana, I was getting bored with 4-H. I had joined Camp Fire Girls and found it socially more enticing.
I was even tiring of going to 4-H camp at Trinidad where we did educational things during the day and danced at the big pavilion at night, doing group dances like the Jesse Polka. None of my close friends went to 4-H camp because they weren't rural kids. All my best friends now were city kids. Not big city kids, but not rural kids for sure.
Toward the end of my 4-H participation, I agreed with Susan that I would help her and the assistant county extension agent, who got stuck working with all the 4-H kids, put some quail out in the woods near the house. We loosed the birds one pretty spring day, and they ran off to make a nest, I suppose. I never saw them again, and my dad said the wolves probably got them. He was never one to sugarcoat things for me. When I started crying, he changed his story, though, and said they were probably just hiding in the woods since it was quail season.
The last year I went to 4-H Camp, I had an unspoken crush on Bill, a raven-haired boy several years older than I who never gave me a second glance. The big deal there for the teenagers was walking the one mile back to the camp from the pavilion where we had night activities. They held hands, but there wasn't any real chance for anything more since two hundred kids walked enmasse and stragglers would be swept up by the agents who walked at the very back of the pack. I think Susan walked with someone a night or two, but she didn't want me hanging around, so for once I took the hint and went on with others my age.
The big dorms meant you had to take short showers, sleep next to people you didn't even know that well, and generally get along the best you could. But most of the kids there were good natured, and hardly any of them were spoiled, so there wasn't a lot of bickering or complaining. They were country kids, like us, who were pretty easily entertained.
One of the boys my age, Dave, who was sort of quiet at school, seemed to be a leader here. He taught us all to cast one day. I wasn't very good at it and had to pick a hook out of a screened door after one wild cast. He was a gentleman about it, didn't make fun of me, and helped me get it loose.
I remembered that the next year when we got to school and he was again so quiet. I tried to remember to speak to him every time I saw him and told him I'd been practicing my casts on a screen door. He grinned when I said that.
The camp, sponsored by Texas Power and Light, at their camp facility near the generating plant, had Reddy Kilowatt as the unofficial mascot of the camp. We got to wear little Reddy Kilowatt pins on our clothes, and his picture was on a lot of the papers we got and the little light green songbooks that were made for us.
Singing was a big part of things at meals and at night. Sometimes in the day sessions, we learned the songs we'd be singing that night. Most of them had motions, and by the end of some of them you'd be laughing, as the motions got faster and faster. I liked the eskimo song with its weird words. I enjoyed the way they seemed to be in a different part of my mouth than English words. Sort of guttural, like ack, ack, ack.
The year I turned 12 was the last year I went to camp. Several summers later, when I was 15, I briefly toyed with the idea of trying for Gold Star Girl. I thought I had a unique project. Each person who got that award had to perform a big project. I thought mine could be labeled "Home Improvement." My plan was to tear down several old buildings around the back of our house. They annoyed me because they looked so bad, their weathered wood unpainted and ridged by the elements.
There was an old chicken coop, out of use for years and a toolshed that was so weathered the wood had holes all the way through and one could see light coming in from outside, even with the door closed. An old garage barren of paint, with a dirt floor, and intriguing rusty iron things hanging on its walls, practically begged to be pulled down.
The dog pen looked bad, but it was still in use, a nice strong fenced area attached to an old beatup building that served the hounds well enough. Most of the time they just ran loose in the yard, at least the older ones did. The puppies had to be fenced.
One hot day, I tore all the sheets of tin off the chicken coop, then the chicken wire, and last the weathered wooden boards that formed the structure. It really wasn't too hard.
Next, I tackled the toolshed. I started tearing weathered boards off until the structure started to look unstable. I wasn't sure how to get the rest of it down without killing myself, so I decided to tie a rope around the wall. Then I went to the barn and saddled Sugar, our lazy quarterhorse. I rode her to the backyard, got down and picked up the other end of the rope and attached it to the saddlehorn.
Unsupervised teenagers are a danger to themselves and others, even the animals in some cases, but I got back in the saddle and clicked at Sugar, gouging her a little with my tennis shoes and she moved forward reluctantly. I heard a noise behind us and looked back in time to see the wall fall with a whoosh. Sugar had a slightly wild look in her eyes, but the noise was over quickly, and she settled down. I untethered her from the wall at once. I was pretty proud of having accomplished the destruction of the building. In a few hours, my pride would turn to terror.
I had to go put Sugar up and take the saddle off, a lot of trouble, but she had made short work of dismantling the last wall. After that, I spent at least three hours taking all the wood and piling it up. I'm not sure why I decided to pile it near a huge oak tree, the only one in the back of the house, but I did. Then, I'm not sure why I decided to set the wood on fire, but I did. And I really wonder why I decided to use gasoline as the accelerant since my parents cautioned all of us often about its dangers, but I did.
By the time Daddy got home from work that day, a huge fire was blazing beneath the oak tree, and it had quickly become scary. There was a water faucet there, but I couldn't get to it since I'd covered the faucet with wood which was now ablaze. I was frozen in place, staring at the flames, realizing for the first time that not only had I lost control of the fire, but it was starting to burn the leaves and branches of the oak tree, the 150 year-old tree that had been there for as long as anyone remembered.
Daddy saw the fire from the road as he drove in and came rushing from the house with a 5 gallon bucket of water. Then he sent me to get one myself and told me to bring the hose from the house. He didn't even seem mad, just shocked. It didn't help too much that Daddy was just three months out from his first heart attack. He wasn't supposed to have much stress.
It took both of us working hard for about 15 minutes, but we got the flames beat back so the fire was small and contained and the old tree was no longer burning on the underside of its canopy. I dreaded what Daddy was going to say once things settled down, but I think he was just so grateful I didn't burn the entire county that he didn't say that much. Just, "stay with the fire, let it burn on down and then we have to make sure it's out." and "why in the world did you set that fire so close to the big tree?"
My answers, "okay," and "I don't know." When you do something that's so stupid it defies logic, it has to be that you don't know why you did it. I know I didn't expect the fire to burn so hot or so high. First, I watched with interest as it withered the leaves, and by the time they burst into flame, I was incapable of action. I shudder to think what would have happened if he had not come home then.
Mother came out a little later while I was still tending the fire. She didn't scold me at all, just suggested that we could roast marshmallows if it was still burning after supper. "You may be out here a while. Can you still count all this as part of your home improvement project? Of course I guess if the tree dies, ..." she caught herself and didn't continue, seeing my face contort painfully and tears well up in my eyes. "I'll come and watch the fire in a little while so you can eat," she added helpfully, trying to soften what she'd said.
It was ten o'clock before the fire burned out, and we put extra water to make sure it didn't flame up during the night. I slept fitfully and realized that my half-hearted dream at competing for Gold Star Girl was officially dead, the post mortem written on the burned bark of the oak.
Somehow, the fire made me lose my zeal for the outdoor projects, which were supposed to include tearing down the old garage, but the next day, I had a new idea. What about home improvement on the inside of the house? I got some Home and Garden magazines and looked through them at small do- it- yourself projects. Two caught my eye. The first was simple. You simply glued two clay pots together, one upside down on the other. Then a large bottle with a long neck was glued atop the second pot. The whole contraption was painted with spray paint, and voila, a unique flower vase. I painted the two I made olive green, a popular color that year.
The second project required more time and was more complicated. It was a door painted to look like a stained glass window. I carefully taped a pattern of rectangles and squares to the door with cloth tape. My door, at the end of the hall, was easily visible from the living room. I was satisfied so far.
The problem came when I went into the garage searching for paint. There were no colors. Only black and white. I gave it ten seconds thought and adapted the plan for a black and white stained glass door. I had it painted in about an hour. Not quite like the magazine picture, but it looked okay.
I did remember then that I forgot to ask for project approval, especially since it could be seen from other parts of the house. I met Mother at the back door when she returned home from work.
"Hey," I greeted her, kissing her on the cheek, "I made some stuff today."
"Oh, really? What did you make?" she asked amiably.
"Two olive green flower pots out of stuff I found in the old garage out back. And I changed my bedroom door. It was supposed to be multi-colored like a stained glass, but we only had black paint and white paint, so it's black and white."
"Hmmm," she said, following me. "Well, show me."
"Okay," I said lightly to hide my slight feeling of apprehension. "I think it would look better if it had been several colors, but these were all I had." We had reached the door at the end of the hall.
Mother surveyed it quickly and never missed a beat. "You must have worked really hard on that. I like it."
The rest of the family, including my dad, were not so enthusiastic. Some suggested I paint over it, Daddy just looked incredulous until he got a look from my mother that told him what he was supposed to think. I even wished I hadn't done it at one point, but it was too much work to change it.
And painting over the material I used to separate the squares and rectangles would have left the door looking even worse. Jan must have liked it or at least liked the freedom she now had to decorate her own door. She decided she'd decoupage a potpourri of pictures, depicting her life, into the three panels of the old door.
She painted the door a vivid red, and most of the things she put in the panels were black tinted, so it was even more bold than mine. She covered it all with a slick shiny coat of varnish. Mother expressed her support of Jan's door as well.
As we got older, we were a little embarrassed by our juvenile artistic attempts, but the doors stayed in place. I even asked Mother to replace them at one point, but she was adamant. "I like them," she now proclaimed. "We don't need new doors," she laughed.
By September, I was involved in high school again, Future Teacher's of America, student council, the horseriding club, National Honor Society, A Capella choir, and Blue Gold Brigade, the fledgling pep squad. My brief dream of being Gold Star Girl dissipated in the cool fall air. Somewhere out there was a girl who actually deserved it, one who could do things right, not make her daddy nearly have another heart attack.
One year Belinda and I did a demonstration of how to cut tomatoes and fill them with tuna salad. We must have cut up a hundred tomatoes, coring them, slicing them precisely, practicing how to do this neatly and perfectly without nicking our fingers. One of the few foods that I hated was tomatoes, so it was hard to get excited about it. I guess our mothers chose that particular food because there wasn't much we could mess up in demonstrating it.
Susan, on the other hand, made braided egg bread with a butter coating, blue Easter eggs nestled snugly in the heavenly smelling loaf. It was gorgeous, the beautiful perfectly browned crust contrasting with the bright turquoise eggs, and it tasted so good you wanted to eat the whole loaf, not worrying if you saved any for anyone else in the family.
Food Demonstration Day came and went. We won a red ribbon on those ghastly tomatoes, so the next year I decided to do safety. We pulled a lever causing a small plastic man to fly out of a plastic car that shot from one side of a board to another. Seatbelts had just come into our realm of knowledge, and we were showing the danger of not wearing them. I don't believe I knew anyone who wore a seatbelt at that time, and not many, if any, cars even had them.
4-H had been a big part of our lives when we lived in Purdon. Besides things at church, it was about the only thing offered for kids besides sports, and you couldn't play those until high school. But now that we were in Corsicana, I was getting bored with 4-H. I had joined Camp Fire Girls and found it socially more enticing.
I was even tiring of going to 4-H camp at Trinidad where we did educational things during the day and danced at the big pavilion at night, doing group dances like the Jesse Polka. None of my close friends went to 4-H camp because they weren't rural kids. All my best friends now were city kids. Not big city kids, but not rural kids for sure.
Toward the end of my 4-H participation, I agreed with Susan that I would help her and the assistant county extension agent, who got stuck working with all the 4-H kids, put some quail out in the woods near the house. We loosed the birds one pretty spring day, and they ran off to make a nest, I suppose. I never saw them again, and my dad said the wolves probably got them. He was never one to sugarcoat things for me. When I started crying, he changed his story, though, and said they were probably just hiding in the woods since it was quail season.
The last year I went to 4-H Camp, I had an unspoken crush on Bill, a raven-haired boy several years older than I who never gave me a second glance. The big deal there for the teenagers was walking the one mile back to the camp from the pavilion where we had night activities. They held hands, but there wasn't any real chance for anything more since two hundred kids walked enmasse and stragglers would be swept up by the agents who walked at the very back of the pack. I think Susan walked with someone a night or two, but she didn't want me hanging around, so for once I took the hint and went on with others my age.
The big dorms meant you had to take short showers, sleep next to people you didn't even know that well, and generally get along the best you could. But most of the kids there were good natured, and hardly any of them were spoiled, so there wasn't a lot of bickering or complaining. They were country kids, like us, who were pretty easily entertained.
One of the boys my age, Dave, who was sort of quiet at school, seemed to be a leader here. He taught us all to cast one day. I wasn't very good at it and had to pick a hook out of a screened door after one wild cast. He was a gentleman about it, didn't make fun of me, and helped me get it loose.
I remembered that the next year when we got to school and he was again so quiet. I tried to remember to speak to him every time I saw him and told him I'd been practicing my casts on a screen door. He grinned when I said that.
The camp, sponsored by Texas Power and Light, at their camp facility near the generating plant, had Reddy Kilowatt as the unofficial mascot of the camp. We got to wear little Reddy Kilowatt pins on our clothes, and his picture was on a lot of the papers we got and the little light green songbooks that were made for us.
Singing was a big part of things at meals and at night. Sometimes in the day sessions, we learned the songs we'd be singing that night. Most of them had motions, and by the end of some of them you'd be laughing, as the motions got faster and faster. I liked the eskimo song with its weird words. I enjoyed the way they seemed to be in a different part of my mouth than English words. Sort of guttural, like ack, ack, ack.
The year I turned 12 was the last year I went to camp. Several summers later, when I was 15, I briefly toyed with the idea of trying for Gold Star Girl. I thought I had a unique project. Each person who got that award had to perform a big project. I thought mine could be labeled "Home Improvement." My plan was to tear down several old buildings around the back of our house. They annoyed me because they looked so bad, their weathered wood unpainted and ridged by the elements.
There was an old chicken coop, out of use for years and a toolshed that was so weathered the wood had holes all the way through and one could see light coming in from outside, even with the door closed. An old garage barren of paint, with a dirt floor, and intriguing rusty iron things hanging on its walls, practically begged to be pulled down.
The dog pen looked bad, but it was still in use, a nice strong fenced area attached to an old beatup building that served the hounds well enough. Most of the time they just ran loose in the yard, at least the older ones did. The puppies had to be fenced.
One hot day, I tore all the sheets of tin off the chicken coop, then the chicken wire, and last the weathered wooden boards that formed the structure. It really wasn't too hard.
Next, I tackled the toolshed. I started tearing weathered boards off until the structure started to look unstable. I wasn't sure how to get the rest of it down without killing myself, so I decided to tie a rope around the wall. Then I went to the barn and saddled Sugar, our lazy quarterhorse. I rode her to the backyard, got down and picked up the other end of the rope and attached it to the saddlehorn.
Unsupervised teenagers are a danger to themselves and others, even the animals in some cases, but I got back in the saddle and clicked at Sugar, gouging her a little with my tennis shoes and she moved forward reluctantly. I heard a noise behind us and looked back in time to see the wall fall with a whoosh. Sugar had a slightly wild look in her eyes, but the noise was over quickly, and she settled down. I untethered her from the wall at once. I was pretty proud of having accomplished the destruction of the building. In a few hours, my pride would turn to terror.
I had to go put Sugar up and take the saddle off, a lot of trouble, but she had made short work of dismantling the last wall. After that, I spent at least three hours taking all the wood and piling it up. I'm not sure why I decided to pile it near a huge oak tree, the only one in the back of the house, but I did. Then, I'm not sure why I decided to set the wood on fire, but I did. And I really wonder why I decided to use gasoline as the accelerant since my parents cautioned all of us often about its dangers, but I did.
By the time Daddy got home from work that day, a huge fire was blazing beneath the oak tree, and it had quickly become scary. There was a water faucet there, but I couldn't get to it since I'd covered the faucet with wood which was now ablaze. I was frozen in place, staring at the flames, realizing for the first time that not only had I lost control of the fire, but it was starting to burn the leaves and branches of the oak tree, the 150 year-old tree that had been there for as long as anyone remembered.
Daddy saw the fire from the road as he drove in and came rushing from the house with a 5 gallon bucket of water. Then he sent me to get one myself and told me to bring the hose from the house. He didn't even seem mad, just shocked. It didn't help too much that Daddy was just three months out from his first heart attack. He wasn't supposed to have much stress.
It took both of us working hard for about 15 minutes, but we got the flames beat back so the fire was small and contained and the old tree was no longer burning on the underside of its canopy. I dreaded what Daddy was going to say once things settled down, but I think he was just so grateful I didn't burn the entire county that he didn't say that much. Just, "stay with the fire, let it burn on down and then we have to make sure it's out." and "why in the world did you set that fire so close to the big tree?"
My answers, "okay," and "I don't know." When you do something that's so stupid it defies logic, it has to be that you don't know why you did it. I know I didn't expect the fire to burn so hot or so high. First, I watched with interest as it withered the leaves, and by the time they burst into flame, I was incapable of action. I shudder to think what would have happened if he had not come home then.
Mother came out a little later while I was still tending the fire. She didn't scold me at all, just suggested that we could roast marshmallows if it was still burning after supper. "You may be out here a while. Can you still count all this as part of your home improvement project? Of course I guess if the tree dies, ..." she caught herself and didn't continue, seeing my face contort painfully and tears well up in my eyes. "I'll come and watch the fire in a little while so you can eat," she added helpfully, trying to soften what she'd said.
It was ten o'clock before the fire burned out, and we put extra water to make sure it didn't flame up during the night. I slept fitfully and realized that my half-hearted dream at competing for Gold Star Girl was officially dead, the post mortem written on the burned bark of the oak.
Somehow, the fire made me lose my zeal for the outdoor projects, which were supposed to include tearing down the old garage, but the next day, I had a new idea. What about home improvement on the inside of the house? I got some Home and Garden magazines and looked through them at small do- it- yourself projects. Two caught my eye. The first was simple. You simply glued two clay pots together, one upside down on the other. Then a large bottle with a long neck was glued atop the second pot. The whole contraption was painted with spray paint, and voila, a unique flower vase. I painted the two I made olive green, a popular color that year.
The second project required more time and was more complicated. It was a door painted to look like a stained glass window. I carefully taped a pattern of rectangles and squares to the door with cloth tape. My door, at the end of the hall, was easily visible from the living room. I was satisfied so far.
The problem came when I went into the garage searching for paint. There were no colors. Only black and white. I gave it ten seconds thought and adapted the plan for a black and white stained glass door. I had it painted in about an hour. Not quite like the magazine picture, but it looked okay.
I did remember then that I forgot to ask for project approval, especially since it could be seen from other parts of the house. I met Mother at the back door when she returned home from work.
"Hey," I greeted her, kissing her on the cheek, "I made some stuff today."
"Oh, really? What did you make?" she asked amiably.
"Two olive green flower pots out of stuff I found in the old garage out back. And I changed my bedroom door. It was supposed to be multi-colored like a stained glass, but we only had black paint and white paint, so it's black and white."
"Hmmm," she said, following me. "Well, show me."
"Okay," I said lightly to hide my slight feeling of apprehension. "I think it would look better if it had been several colors, but these were all I had." We had reached the door at the end of the hall.
Mother surveyed it quickly and never missed a beat. "You must have worked really hard on that. I like it."
The rest of the family, including my dad, were not so enthusiastic. Some suggested I paint over it, Daddy just looked incredulous until he got a look from my mother that told him what he was supposed to think. I even wished I hadn't done it at one point, but it was too much work to change it.
And painting over the material I used to separate the squares and rectangles would have left the door looking even worse. Jan must have liked it or at least liked the freedom she now had to decorate her own door. She decided she'd decoupage a potpourri of pictures, depicting her life, into the three panels of the old door.
She painted the door a vivid red, and most of the things she put in the panels were black tinted, so it was even more bold than mine. She covered it all with a slick shiny coat of varnish. Mother expressed her support of Jan's door as well.
As we got older, we were a little embarrassed by our juvenile artistic attempts, but the doors stayed in place. I even asked Mother to replace them at one point, but she was adamant. "I like them," she now proclaimed. "We don't need new doors," she laughed.
By September, I was involved in high school again, Future Teacher's of America, student council, the horseriding club, National Honor Society, A Capella choir, and Blue Gold Brigade, the fledgling pep squad. My brief dream of being Gold Star Girl dissipated in the cool fall air. Somewhere out there was a girl who actually deserved it, one who could do things right, not make her daddy nearly have another heart attack.
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