A ray of sunshine

It's a cloudy day, and chilly.  I can feel winter coming on, which is a little depressing.  Cliff isn't home today, so I don't have the usual meal-preparing schedule to distract me.  I was just feeling a little "droopy", that's all.  No big deal.  
The other day Jessica, my former co-worker from Kohl's, messaged me on Facebook to ask for my address.  She had found something that made her think of me, and she wanted to send it to me.  She warned me not to expect too much, it was just a small thing.  
Jessica, if you recall, was born and raised in Arkansas, and says she pays particular attention when I blog about her home state.  Recently I talked about Dogpatch, which is adjacent to Hub Motorcycle Resort where we camped recently.  I included some Youtube videos about the old theme park, now a ghost town.  
So I went to the mailbox on this dreary day, and there was a package for me.  The timing couldn't have been better.  That girl always did have a way of making me smile.  

Thanks so much, Jessica, for putting a bright spot in my cloudy day.

Real hippies, illustrated

I wrote here, not long ago, that I had hooked up with a favorite former co-worker, Jessica, on Facebook. We were both good, steady workers except on the days they paired us up together; on those days, we chattered like magpies and didn't get a lot done.

One day when we were together, Jessica started telling me about her past: How her family lived in a remote region of Arkansas in a home-made shack, keeping goats for milk, and living off the land. They'd left their well-heeled parents in the east, turned their backs on society, and headed for the hills.

"You're about the right age for them to have been hippies," I said.

Yes, she said, they were hippies.

Now,there had been a time in the sixties and seventies that the hippie life sounded adventuresome to me. That was when the back-to-the-land movement was in full swing, and Whole Earth Catalog was selling like hot cakes. I subscribed to Mother Earth News, which in those days seemed to be written mostly by hippies giving instructions on how to build a yurt, or construct a house from straw bales (that didn't work out too well for the three little pigs, did it?). There were articles telling how to make cheese, how to raise chickens, and so forth. My favorite section, though, was the personal ads in back of the magazine... mostly written by hippies.

I would never have had the nerve to smoke dope or live on a commune, nor would my redneck husband have considered such nonsense; but it was fun to read about.

So, years later, when I found out Jessica was the daughter of genuine hippies, I soaked up the stories of her growing-up years like a sponge.

She told me how glad she was when she started school and got to drink homogenized, pasteurized milk instead of the smelly goat milk they had at home.

They didn't have running water; they used an outhouse.

She told how her father died of cancer when she was six years old. And how she loved him and still missed him; she was a daddy's girl.

Without getting specific, I'd say Jessica's parents did most of the things associated with genuine hippies. Her mother is still a hippie at heart, although she isn't living off the land these days.

It's been several years since we worked together, but I still mention some of those stories to Cliff once in a while.

When we started doing the retro pictures on Facebook this week, Jessica asked a relative to send her some childhood pictures so she could share them.

All of a sudden, the stories she told that are still so fresh in my mind had illustrations!

This is little Jessica, inside the tarpaper shack her dad built.

Here she is with her older sisters; that's their house in the background.

Here you have it: A genuine hippie family.

Jessica with her dad.

One Christmas, Grandma sent them a bathroom rug set; since they didn't have a bathroom, Jessica's dad decided to wear the set for this picture. Nice pink hat and shawl, don't you think?

A big thank you to Jessica for giving me permission to share these pictures on my blog.

Facebook scores again

It’s so funny how it works on Facebook: You “friend” someone from your past and happen to notice one of their friends is someone else from the past, one of those “I wonder what happened to her” people.

Looking at a former co-worker’s profile yesterday, I saw she had recently added a Jessica to her friend list, and I recognized the name: she was one of the most interesting, fun people I worked with at Kohl’s distribution center... a woman about the age of my daughter who loved to tell stories about her past; and you know how I love stories. I told her a few of my own. We were both pretty hard workers, but not so much when we were working side-by-side; we were too busy telling stories to one another!

Back then, I was trying to write a poem every day, sort of an exercise to keep me creative, I guess. Sometimes I’d rhyme about people or events at work, and one day Jessica informed me she wanted me to write a poem about her. I ended up making it a song. If you read it as a poem, it’s hard to get the rhythm right, but take my word for it: it works fine as a mediocre song. Here are the words.

JESSICA’S SONG

Hers was the friendliest face in the crowd when I began working at Kohl’s.
I was so scared about starting that job, and her smile was a balm to my soul.
She spoke with a delicate Arkansas drawl, with a voice like a ten-year-old girl.
We ended up in the same department, and Jessica brightened my world.

This is Jessica’s poem; this is Jessica’s song.
She’s living proof that you can recover after a man does you wrong.
She asked me to write her a poem, but somehow I knew all along
That there had to be
A melody,
So now, this is Jessica’s song.

She was born to a couple of hippies one June, In the rock-covered Arkansas hills.
All they possessed were the basics of life, ‘cause they didn’t believe in the frills.
Jessica learned in her growing-up years that life’s best things are not always free,
But these days, the many hard times that beset her are only a grim memory.

I sat down to write her a poem, and somehow my heart heard a song.
So I only had to put pencil to paper; the tune was right there, all along.
If heaven’s a place for the child-like, that’s certainly where she’ll belong.
It was worth my while
To have seen her smile.
That’s why I wrote Jessica’s song.

This is Jessica as I remember her.

There’s one other thing that makes her really special: She’s the person who told me where to find a horse like I wanted, a horse gentle enough for an older lady, one my grandchildren could ride: that horse was Blue.