Beana_5

Dear Spiral Notebook

I've had a little hurtin' in my heart with the writing about Miss Ola.  Not so much about her,  because goodness, she's been dead more years than I can remember now, but more in the way of realizing that I once was a little girl.  I had forgotten the little bitty things like being able to just flop down on a floor if I felt like it, or jump off a small porch without ever worrying about my old legs breaking.  Ya know, we didn't bath that much back then and it weren't odd.  Saturdays was bath time and believe me, if you were the youngest you were bathed in a wash bucket of cold dirty water.  I can remember Mama putting a dab of vanilla extract behind each of my ears so I'd smell good for church.  I don't know if that was just done in east Texas but  that weren't odd either.  My own remaining children are in their 50's and 60's now and two of them drank vanilla extract once they got the alcoholism sickness.  I reckon I'll get to all that.

We had secrets back then.  They was family secrets.  Secrets from neighbors and secrets inside the family.  Some secrets was known by every family member which means I guess that it weren't really a secret but if you never say it out loud is it still a secret?  It's like when Daddy would come home real happy for awhile even though everyone in the house knew he was drunk but acts like he's just happy, well that's like a secret that each person thinks they are keeping.  Enough.  I gotta finish my memories about Miss Ola but I'm spent out at the moment.

Beana_4

Dear Spiral Notebook

I seem to be stuck in my pre-shoes wearing days.  I'm supposed to be writing my life history down but I'm wedged into the piney woods memories, so back to Miss Ola.

She had a cast iron bed, one chair, one stool and an old trunk.  The trunk was flat on top and it was up on some bricks (I think it was bricks but I can't remember.)  On top of the trunk was a piece of wood and that was her table.  Every thing I just wrote about was painted white. She was right proud of that white paint.  There was also a black pot bellied stove with the big pipe that went up through the ceiling, but it seemed to match just fine.  I remember that she had four books.  I wished I could know now what they were but too many years have passed. I do know that one of them was a Bible of course.  This is in east Texas remember, so when you are born here, your cord is cut and then you are handed a Holy Bible before you've even been cleaned up.  During your first hour of life, you're told "here is your Holy Bible, you are a Texan and a Baptist, in that order."  Of course that makes you lucky since these two groups are Jesus' favorite two sets of people.

What made all her white paint look so pretty was all the stacks of colorful left over fabric from her many years of sewing.  Both little windows in her house were covered in a rainbow patchwork quilted curtains that reached all the way to the floor.  My own house back in Houston, and my grandparents house was just drab, drab, drab compared to hers.

During this time is when I heard the whole history of how she came to be half colored.  In those days, if you were half colored, then you was colored and there weren't no half about it.  I'll write about that next time.

Beana_3

Dear Spiral Notebook

Through the many years of my life, I have tried to put the feel of Miss Olas house in one room or another where I have lived.  Once, I was close but you can’t make a childhood memory come alive when there’s no child left in your body.  Anyway, you might not think it was so great that she had a little house painted white but no one had paint on their  houses back then except rich folks and certainly not an old half colored lady back in the piney woods of east Texas.  She told me once that her cousin Bug, had brung her three big buckets of creamy dreamy white paint that he says fell off a boxcar on a train. He said that he hauled it in the back of a wagon all the way to her house.  It was an amazing adventure to hear him tell it she said, but that Bug had such low moral character, you couldn’t believe anything he said.  All that aside, she was so happy to have all that paint so it was easy to let herself believe ol’ Bug’s story because it had such a happy ending for her.

Her house was almost the size of a one car garage I had back in the 1950’s.  It had a small porch that fit one stool and two steps down in front of that.  It was all white and clean.  The inside was painted the same.  The floors the ceiling the walls and both window frames.  It felt glowy to me, kind of like a moon house.  Many years before I was ever born, she had squished up some dewberries into the paint and it turned lavender, which she used to paint hundreds of little flowers on the white floor.  It was like fancy linoleum. I found out many years later that she kept two of the buckets buried underground in case some white folks stumbled onto her place and assumed she stoled it.  She had a wonderful old cast iron bed that had belonged to her Mama and it was puffy high with all her hand sewn quilts.  All the sewin' in my own quilts was learned from her.  I'm trying to write you about her house but I keep getting distracted by her feel, or rather how she made me feel.

Miss Ola was glad to see me every time I came walking up, she liked my company.  I had never been anyone's company that I can remember before that.  I was her friend and I felt the burden of it.  I felt I "owed her" from the moment she was nice to me. This owin' someone for their kindness stuck like glue on me for the rest of my growing up years.  It weren't a good thing to have stuck on you.

Just a Statement

Ya know.....I've had this blog for many years and the people who come by to visit are mostly the couple of handfuls that have been with me......always. Thank you for that.  I think my readers know that it is my life's intention is stay clean and sober and to help others to achieve the same.  But I've just got this strong desire to write the story of my Beana.......I don't know why.  I don't want to join some other group that writes about the imaginary characters in their head.......I want to write it in my safe little cocoon world of Sobriety is Exhausting.  Beana is eventually struck with alcoholism and drug addiction by family members and I guess when I get there we can hear her interpretation of things.  So I will continue to write out Beanas life as it unfolds to me, whether or not you are here to read it.  It feels right to me.  I will begin in earnest, tomorrow morning, where I left off.  Of course you know if something great happens to me like the lottery or something........I'll be telling you all about that !!!

Tuesday Morning

MaryinAfrica, if I knew where Beana came from I'd tell her to hush.  She writes her stories in a spiral notebook like a diary of thoughts and begins each entry as Dear Spiral Notebook:

Dear Spiral Notebook:

I wish I knew how far the walk was to Miss Olas house, but distance is a memory I can't conjure up in  my head.  It could of been a mile or ten for all I know.  Grownups didn't have a sense of worry back then about how far a kid had to walk.  Your legs were just what got you places.  I do remember pine trees that went on forever and there was always a pine cone to kick within toe distance.  It wasn't a road really, more of a path that was sometimes sandy and sometimes padded with pine needles. It always smelled good though, I can tell you that.  Miss Olas house was white, well no, it wasn't really a house but a room made to look like a house on the outside.  It made my stomach feel so rushed up when I would get close because it was just good there.  I think now that it was just good for me, but I know now that it weren't that good for Miss Ola or her sisters that lived in the little houses behind hers. I reckon I'll get to that though.  Beana.

• Hey today is my Wednesday because I'm taking off work on Friday. Yahoo.My neighbors went to a strawberry farm about 20 miles south of me and brought me back more strawberries than I know what to do with.  Yum. 
  DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY

Monday Morning

You'd think that as awful as Mondays are, we would have collectively done away with them by now.

Not enough sleep last night and too much sun over the weekend have left me grumpy this morning.  I spent a lot of time outside over the weekend but not digging and working.  I read two books in the pool.  Good living until it ends up being Monday morning.

When I'm sunburned, my mind is less cluttered because my mental focus is on the tenderness I feel when my clothes touch my skin.  Yeah, weird I know.

OK.  Taking the day as it comes but hoping it comes gently.

Beana - the old woman in my head

An old woman lives in my head and likes to tell stories.  I finally started writing them down.  Her name is Beana and I'm working on her telling her own story.  Let me know if y'all would like me to continue Beanas' stories from time to time.

I was born Wilhelmina Parker Richards.  Wilhelmina for my grandmother, Parker was my other grandmothers’ Maiden name, and Richards was my daddy’s name.  I started off living with a bunch of “everybody’s” stuck into one name.  I reckon that’s how I ended up as Beana.  To tell you the truth, weren’t none of them good people.  Well my Mama was good, but she never said too much so it’s hard to remember a lot about her.  I was the last of seven children, and my Mama was plum worn out.  She pretty much just let me follow one of my older sisters through childhood, since Mama had already had to teach her everything, I guess she just figured my sister could pass it on to me, and save everyone a lot of time.

In all my years growing up in that little old two bedroom house, with Mama and Daddy in one room, me, two sisters and four brothers in the other – I don’t ever recall anyone ever mentioning their feelings.  I’m guessing we had some, but I have no idea what any of my siblings felt back then.  Of course, we all knew how Daddy felt – about everything.  When he walked in the door at night, the floor was his.  He would start with what was wrong with our president and then work his way down the ladder until he got to our dog.  In Daddys’ eyes something was wrong with every body and every thing.  I guess he just took up all the room there was for family feelings, and there just wasn’t any room left for the rest of us.

I was eight years old when the depression came.  Our whole family left Houston, and went to East Texas where my grandparents lived.  That sort of took some of the wind out of Daddy’s sails.  These were Mama’s folks, and they didn’t much cotton to long speeches.  We all tended the garden and chickens, except for Daddy who had a job in town working for the city water department.  We grew stuff, tended to it, pulled it up when it was ready, cooked it and ate it.  I just don’t recall that being real hard times, though I know that it was.

My grandparents had a neighbor lady about a mile down the road, named Miss Ola.  I sure did love Miss Ola.  Because I was the littlest, I guess that I sometimes got in the way when there was a lot of harvesting to do, because they would send me down to Miss Ola’s house for the whole day.  She was a seamstress for some of the women in town who had money, which wasn’t hardly any since the depression came.  She was lots older than Mama, but we did not know peoples ages back then for some reason.  I remember my Mama saying that Miss Ola was half colored.  I still remember thinking that the colored half must have been under her clothes.