I got this lovely idea from Paula

8093 were the last 4 digits of the phone # we had forever when I was a kid, we moved into the house when I was 2 & my mother still had that phone # when I was 23 & she sold the house, a few places later she had the same 4 digits rearranged, 8309.

$52.00 a week, that’s what the state of Wisconsin found my ex’s child support burden to be, back in 2003. When the paperwork came last summer for me to apply for a review & to try to increase what the kids receive, we were in our 7th or 8th consecutive month without child support, so I shrugged it off as in: Let’s try to get something coming in, then we can discuss increasing it, now I have to wait until 2009.

10 years after the death of my Grandfather I got my grandmother some really lovely yellow silk roses (what he always gave her) she cried & said that it felt like no one remembered him but her anymore.

‘They have to have signs to tell people that?’ -My first thought back in November 1987, after we got off the highway to drive to Floyd, where I live now  It was in reference to a very large sign which said ‘ do not pass when solid yellow stripe is on your side’ I know now that’s a plea, not a command.

Bark Brown. That’s the color of the new shingles I’m going to have on my roof if the contractor has his way & gets more money for the house repairs from the insurance agency.

I can still remember the place we lived before the house with the 8093 phone #. Just little things, like the big dark staircase & the window at the foot of my crib (yes, crib)

Renata was an older girl at the first school I went to, I always looked up to her, not sure why, in retrospect she seems to have been very needy & whiny. But of course, most hippie kids are or were.

13, the family lucky number, my Grandfather was born on the 13th, met my Grandmother on the 13th, they were married on the 13th, my mother was born on the 13th & he died on the 13th. (all different months of course)

I’m bringing you up, (on charges) throwback to the hippie school I went to as a youngish kid (started homeschooling when I was 10, so before that) instead of telling a teacher or someone about issues you had with someone you had to ‘file charges’ on people & go before a jury of other kids, great in principle, not so great in practice.

.20 cents, that’s what a Hershey bar, or a bag of M&Ms cost when I was 9 or 10, I remember because after church I’d be allowed to walk the block & around the corner to the store where I would pick up my Grandfather’s New York Times & along with the newspaper money I’d have been given a quarter, which I would use for a candy bar & save the nickel in my church coat pocket, so that every 4 weeks I could buy 2 candy bars.

The chocolate cake recipe that my family nearly always uses is one that my great grandmother heard on the radio in the 1920s, copied down & tried, everyone in my family thinks it’s great (me, I got bored with it years ago & branched out into all kinds of other wonderful chocolate cake recipes, one time, I made a cake & my mother had a piece, she took one bite & said ‘this isn’t the recipe is it?’)

It was 1979 when my Grandmother took it into her head to make an Easter tree, I helped, I have a couple of decorated eggs which are duplicates of eggs we made that year, I haven’t made a tree every year, but I’ve done one more years than I haven’t.