Sunshine and Flower Sack Dresses

Sunshine; the growing up as kids kind of sunshine. More ferocious. Hours on a red dirt hill blistering your feet kind of sunshine. Sunshine oozing through the flower sack dresses mother used to make for us. Sometimes she would let me pick the 50 pound flour sack with a floral patten that I liked and it would become my romper after mom had completed baking all those pies, cakes, cookies, and bread we grew up with.

Growing up poor. Coming in the front door after school if there wasn't any pie, cake or cookies waiting for us we would just peel a potato, salt it and head out the back door into the fierce Oklahoma sunshine. Off we would go to an abundance of youthful treasures; food to eat, acres to roam, and lots of red dirt hills, red dirt roads, red rock sandstone, tree houses, canyons and bugs, all complimented by dusty back steps and deep well water.

Bugs and such came with Oklahoma sunshine like mud after a rain; June bugs, fireflys, mosquitoes, hornets, wasps, tarantulas, scorpions and eight inch centipedes -- the ugly kind with shiny black bodies and neon yellow legs -- dropping off of door frames or crawling out of rocks. I hope they are still thriving somewhere but I'm glad I don't have to face them anymore.

Mother didn't have much of a green thumb, but she always had zinnias. She would plant the seeds and the Oklahoma sunshine would do the rest. A garden of jewel toned colorful zinnias as hardy as the red dirt they grew in and all of us red dirt children. Tough climate, tough flower, tough kids growing up somehow, surviving somehow. Surviving bar ditches, Johnson grass, crawdad hunting, summer roaming; thriving somehow.

It is strange to imagine that old intense heat of distant summers waking up to the Puget Sound fog hugging my back windows so thick I can't see the school just across the way.

Summer heat, summer play, summer dresses, summer sunshine, summer bugs. Waking up hot, playing hot, and going to sleep hot. Drifting off to sleep absentmindedly scratching the chigger bites on your ankle during those long ago summer nights.


Hey Tal, how are you feeling? Are you out shuffling along yet? It you walk to the end of your townhouses I'll walk to the end of my condos. If you make the loop to Jeff's and back I'll make the loop around here. It will do us both good, but it is still yucky.

Here is a story: Roger never remembered my birthday before he got married, after he got married he never forgot my birthday, so the joke was always marriage worked wonders for the memory. Well, Christian called me up the other day to ask me out to dinner -- huh -- you heard me right. Christian called me up and asked me out to dinner. He wanted me to join him and Bo at a Korean Barbecue restaurant. I thought Bo would be a new favorite, but after I spilled about a quart of salad dressing all down my front and apologized to Bo for being such a mess, she informed me that elders can do no wrong. If an elder does it it is right. So now I have moved past the favorite part and catapulted right straight to being in love.

In spite of the fog the last couple of mornings we have had sunshine for seven days in a row with more to come. It's summer here in the Pacific Northwest and I am in love.

I asked Ian for a word to write a blog about and he said sunshine. You see sunshine is on our minds here in the PNW. Thank you Ian for the inspiration. I love you too, more than sunshine.

Keep the sunshine in your life one way or another.