Today Grant and I went to visit her, and I was telling her about how our family has had to go to the doctor a lot in the last couple months. She said, "You know, used to be, we never went to the doctor. We rarely saw the doctor, but when we did, he rode a horse to our house!" Grant thought that was pretty funny.
Then she told me about the day my Grandpa Carl was born. She said that morning she got up on a horse and rode out to the fields and worked in the fields with Hayden (Papa) for a couple hours before she started not feeling well. She rode back to the house and prepared lunch for him, still not feeling well at all. She went to bed, and that night Papa rode his horse to fetch the doctor and brought him back to help Grandma have the baby. She never saw the doctor the whole 9 months until delivery.
The world is such a different place now than it was then!
She's told us about picking beans in the field as a kid and getting sunburned over and over again (she was a red-head--no sunscreen back then). This last fall when we were telling her about the costumes the kids were going to wear for Halloween, she told us about how Papa scared her one time with a real-looking Hitler mask, scared her so bad she sat and cried and cried. He felt really bad about playing that trick on her, but it didn't stop him from scaring others with it. Another time when I telling her about the work holiday party Greg and I had gone to, she told me about the fancy dresses she used to wear to all the functions she and Papa went to when he was on the police force. I've heard stories about when they lived in Hawaii and stories about when they lived in Eugene in the "big house up on the hill." I loved the story about how she got back from a wedding once and realized she couldn't reach to unzip her dress. No one else was home at the time, so she called the next door neighbors. The wife was passed out on the couch (too much partying), so the neighbor husband answered, and they met at the back door. He asked her how far down he should unzip it, and she said, "Just far enough that I can reach it!" :) I've heard stories of when Jeri was little, as well. I like those because Jeri and my mom are close in age, so I get to hear stories about my mom, too. When I told her about our kids taking swim lessons, she told me how Jeri was scared of swimming because of the mean swim teacher who made her crawl on the bottom of the pool and scraped up her knees. I showed her a picture of Kari smiling with her new braces, and she told me about how Jeri cried when they took the braces off her teeth because she loved the braces so much. The stories from Grandma's years working at the Emporium are always funny. I've heard about when Grandma's boys, my Grandpa Carl and Great-Uncle Gene, were school-age and in all kinds of sports and activities, and how Grandma would make fried chicken and pack dinners on those nights. No grabbing "fast food" in those days.
I love listening to her tell stories. I really need to write more of them down, so I can remember.
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