Pin ItAnyone who knows me well also knows this story. I bring it up each fall around beauty pageant season. It’s one of my first memories, and better yet, it’s my very first memory of being mad at my dad.
We used to eat all of our family meals at an olive green Formica dinner table. The underside of the table was ugly, cracked, unfinished particleboard which I recall well from all the time spent crouched underneath it, decorating it with my best artwork. I patiently scraped my scratch-and-sniff washable Crayola markers across the rough surface and I thought about what a better surface the adobe hallway walls would be for such a masterpiece.
Our house at the time was small, a hand-me-down home smack dab in the middle of the farm that had been my great grandparents’ then my great aunt and uncle’s. And just like the house, the table, the couch, and just about everything else in it was also hand-me-down. Including my high chair. So I sat in this high chair — just like my older cousins before me had — at this table — just like the wrinkliest people I knew at the time once had.
It was suppertime, and tonight we were having pork chops (yum!), mashed potatoes (yum some more!), and wait… what the heck were these green things…? Mom and Dad sat down around the table with me just like we did for all of our meals. Mom was probably asking Dad about his day… talking cattle, hot weather, the usual. And while they chatted, I poked, I prodded. I sniffed, and I sliced one of the mystery beans in half with my spoon. I smashed it around a little bit, and flicked it to the other side of the plate. Dinner moved along as usual – Dad got up for a bowl of ice cream, mom started clearing the dishes while I polished off the last bit of my taters.
“Eat your lima beans, sweetie,” Mom said. “The Miss America pageant is going to be on soon and you don’t want to miss it!” I shoved a spoonful of beans in my mouth as quickly as I could. I had been practicing my pageant walk in Mom’s pink and white polka dot strappy heels all week for this. But as quickly as the beans went in, they came right back out. These were bad. Something was wrong with them…
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This old abandoned cemetery is out on a farm road behind our house in Texas. It’s something I’ve passed by a thousand times and never really given much thought to. It’s run down, dusty, and the grave markers and headstones have faded, and corroded from the weather.
But something made me stop the other day and take these photos. It was something about the clouds that day that caught my attention, and I loved the way that they were framed by the mission arch in the black and white photo below.
