A little slow getting this one ready,
but I have been tied up with the book.
When we were in school May was a great month, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and we knew that school was about to close for the summer. Then we could spend the summer months having fun with our friends. The last day of our school, which was always around the 15th of May, was a glorious day. We always had a school picnic in the park and I don’t think I ever thought about it also being my mother’s birthday.
In mid May the seniors, in our town, graduated and loaded onto the big Bluebird school bus and headed out for their two week senior trip. The class had been working and earning money from the time they started high school to help fund it. The school picked up some of the cost but the seniors contributed a lot of the money.
For my mother, her birthday was on May 15, May 2nd her middle sister had a birthday, and May 4 was her brother’s birthday. Yikes! That was a bad month for mother as it always had been for her parents. Also the graduation announcements would arrive in the mail. The announcements meant she needed to buy something for the graduate. Most of the time mother only bought something for nieces and nephews unless the graduate belonged to one of her close friends.
Early in May the wedding announcements would start to roll in for the June weddings that would occur. Again this would require a gift for the shower or wedding, or both if they were family. So May was an expensive month for my parents.
When I married my husband it became very expensive for us because his mother’s birthday was May 16th, one day after my mother’s. So that was an expensive week. Sometimes if my mother’s birthday was on the weekend or Monday, like it would have been this year if she were still alive, we would celebrate hers on the weekend of or before it and then celebrate my mother-in-laws on the next weekend.
This year would have been a mess because Mother’s Day was the day before my mother’s birthday. But every year it seemed to fall either right before or after one of their birthdays. So the week with the 15th and 16th of May in it was an expensive week for us. Instead of one gift for our mother’s it was two.
The end of May each year meant a trip with my mother to Medicine Lodge to decorate graves for Memorial Day. We would stop and decorate some relative’s graves in Medicine Lodge, then drive to Lake City cemetery to decorate mom’s grandparent’s graves and then on to Sun City to decorate her parents graves.
I enjoyed those trips because we always stopped to see mother’s oldest sister who lived just north of Sun City. She would either have lunch ready for us or if we didn’t arrive until after lunchtime we always had burnt sugar cake and a glass of iced tea. If I was lucky my cousin Terry would be there and we’d see if we could get into some kind of trouble, which usually didn’t take long.
While we were at Aunt Ruby’s house Terry and I would usually hunt horned lizards, when we ran out of trouble to get into. I loved to hold the lizards. The horny lizards look ferocious with the horns on their heads and back but are very docile when you hold them.
The trick is catching them. They are lightening fast, but if we worked as a team Terry and I could usually corral a couple of them and pick them up.
My Grandmother had taught me how to roll them over and rub their tummy until they went to sleep. Grandmother said she played with them all the time when she was growing up on the family farm. The horny toads, as she called them and the barn kittens were her babies when she was out in the yard playing by her self, because she was an only child.
May in my beauty shop meant Junior/Senior Proms. I always had a lot of girls wanting their hair styled for the prom, and of course they usually had long hair and wanted it up and didn’t want to look like anyone else.
There were many years that I did as many as 15 girls for the prom and it was a full day; sending the last ones out the door just in time to get dressed for their date.
May through the years has always been a busy and expensive month for my family. To contact Sandy: [email protected]
