Still Waiting

Still waiting for the "Buy Now" button to be fixed on the suesquiltshop.com site, so decided to re-adopt an old saying I've been living by for thirty years now..."Patience is finding something to do in the meantime"...as that one of 60,000 thoughts for my day went through my head, the next one said, "work on the Carr Women scrapbook".......so here I am in my studio working with a host of old pictures from my Grandmother and Mother's old picture boxes.....of course, I have to stop ever so often for a sneeze as the dust is literally flying all around.

My Grandmother was not good at labeling her pictures and my Mother probably only found the time for that later in life because nothing before the 1970s has a date much less a name. Gladys, my Grandmother was born in 1904 and by the time her first child was born there were four generations (see picture above) of women in her life...when I was born there were five generations of women alive in the family...when my firstborn arrived there were five again...so the book is really based on those five generations. By the time Debra's first girl was born we were down to only three generations still living...guess that is due to women walking down the aisle later in life as well as waiting to have children.

Grandmother was a big part of my life...we lived with her when I was born as my Father was over in Germany fighting in the war...she always found time to visit us regularly during my childhood and in her later years she came to live with us when I was a teenager and again lived with my parents after she became blind and until her death. She was literally larger than life for me...a woman who found herself divorced in the 20s with three children to raise and accomplished that feat quite well...in my mind's eye she will always be standing behind her saloon bar with a smile on her face and singing along with the jukebox...when Debra and I visited her 'ol saloon, White Leghorn Inn in Westhoff, Texas back in the 80s, one of the old gentleman sitting at that bar said, "I remember Gladys, she was the greatest hostess in the whole world"...wish that had been engraved on her tombstone as that one statement summed her up perfectly!

Now Grandmother's Mother was another story...she liked the feminine side of life...always baking, quilting, crocheting...my fondest memory of visiting her was her "button box" which I always sat down to and would string the buttons during the entire visit...sure she would take them all off the string when I left so I would have something to do next time I visited...being a quilter today I can respect her talent with a needle or crochet hook...however, she was an innovator as well, for most of the quilts that I now own of hers were quilted on the machine...image quilting a quilt on a treadle machine!

Of course, my Mother, Fannye Lee (L: she is second from left with her high school friends) went to college and wanted to be a modern, independent woman...uh, until Cecil walked into Grandmother's cafe one night in early summer of '43 and asked her to go bowling after she got off work...6 weeks later they were married and 13 months later Sue came into the world...after Dad returned from the war we moved around a lot...even finding ourselves in Westhoff living in one of the cabins at Grandmother's place for awhile when I was 5 years old...that was during my dance class days and my brother, Jarvis and I would dance to the music on the jukebox for the pennies the guys would throw from the bar...but, back to Mother who finally gave up sewing clothes for us out of feed sacks and twirling my hair over pencil sticks to make Shirley Temple curls before I went to school every day and went to work as a florist in my Aunt Hazel's flower shop and eventually took it over during my teen years...from then on she was in some sort of business or another when she wasn't bowling and taking care of the family.

Upon reflection these women ancestors of mine didn't seem to ever be waiting on anything...they were always busy when I was around...even to the point of giving me plenty to do in order to help out around the house, the shop, or the saloon!