I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay -

With Photoshop CS5 you can stretch parts of an image and not change the rest of the photo.  Using the Puppet Warp command I distorted my boot so that it came out of the photo. 

This music festival was an EVENT!  I only remember going twice during my elementary years. 1952 was the first time. Several things indicate how special it was to Mom. She drove the sixty miles in an ice storm even though we saw several serious wrecks. We had our picture taken at the the event when our income was minuscule. I always wore long stockings and for this picture I have on anklets, new shoes, and a fancy red polka-dotted dress. I do not remember if we earned a ribbon for our performance but I do remember feeling like I was much more aware of the world because I had been in something outside of our isolated rural community.

The rose is for sale on Scrapgirls.com

Long Ago Birthday Cutie

Digging up old photos and remembering special events is vitalizing.

Alphabet, tack, and tag can be bought on Scrapgirls.com

Paper and embellishments can be bought on Scrapgirls.com

Mary Havran’s poem really captures their tenacity. I question if am I that steadfast?

The paper directly behind each picture and the white transparent papers are from Scrapgirls.com. I created the yellow background paper by blending several gradients with one of the crocus photos I had taken. The bright open crocuses were photographed on a sunny day. The closed crocuses were taken in the afternoon following two days of heavy snow and cold.

Tumbling

Background paper, wordart and gold chain by Scrapgirls.com

The church conducted basketball classes every Saturday the month of February. Then on the last weekend they held an open house for parents and family. Every child that had attended the classes played a half court game with kids of similar abilities. It was fun for the children and adults. Austin is excited about learning more.

First Doll

Some digital supplies was from Scrapgirls.

Dumped Again

As a child, I was never known as a girly girl. Being raised on a cattle ranch required skills that were more linked with strength and endurance than beauty and pampering. Of all the tasks we had to learn there was only one I could not master. I never learned to ride a horse. Nearly every time I tried I ended up flat on the ground.

Once when Lester came to the ranch for a visit he insisted that he, a city boy, could help me learn to ride a horse. I climbed on and waited for him to get on behind me. The horse waited and bucked us both off! END OF LESSON

Monument

Poor Boots

We rescued her, we thought

 But she did not understand.

 She ran from us.

Or froze at the sound of our voice

 Lost in a world of fear,

 Under a bed,

 Behind a door

 Like a shadow she lived.

 Lost to us

She, our love feared.

 Neither food nor petting enticed.

 Fear was her companion

 And our dog

Brush by rubina119

Pickett fence by Scrapgirls.com

First Driving Lesson

The summer of 1951 my Dad told me to drive the 1949 Ford pickup from the meadow where he was haying to the house. That would not be anything unusual except I was only six years old. The pickup was stick shift and I was not tall enough to reach the foot feed and brake without standing up and I could hardly see out when I touched the foot feed. He gave me a quick lesson, shut the door of the pickup and walked away. I slowly let up on the clutch and jerked, slipping the gears, stalled, and tried again. Finally after many tries I took off across the meadow toward the house. Somehow I managed to make it across the ditch and up onto the road. I even turned off the road onto our drive successfully. The problem came when it was time to stop. My little legs were not strong enough to depress the brake far enough to come to a complete stop. I knew I did not want to smash into Grandma’s house so I aimed toward a tree. The tree was just what I needed. I parked in among several 50 gallon barrels and with the bumper crushed against a large elm tree. Dad was upset with me and Mom was angry at Dad. The pickup and I were not hurt but Dad did not ask me to drive again for quite awhile after that.

I blended one sheet of Scrapgirls paper with my photo of the pickup and added one grasshopper embellishment also from Scrapgirls.


BMU_FTDO_Paper_Thoughts


ABL_Prairieland_Emb1_Ghopper-Brown

Adventurous Spirit

She has an adventurous spirit but she also knows to yell for help when she has extended herself too far.  I found that out when she tried climbing up the outside of the banister to the second floor of my house.


I created the birthday cake. The parenthesis and pink cording along the bottom and down the left side are embellishments from Scrapgirls.

Happy Birthday

The gift and candle embellishments are from Scrapgirls.

Fastball Short Distance

It is important to learn how to throw fast even if it is in Grandma's kitchen and only from one hand to another!

The digital elements are from Scrapgirls.comhttp://www.scrapgirls.com/

Broken Axle

The 1953 Broken Axle Accident

Dad decided that I was old enough to take the tractor after the milk cows in the evenings. This particular day, my little brother, Dan, chose to ride along. He had taken a few rides with our older brother so he was full of information on how I should drive the tractor. My mistake was that I listened. The cows were on their way down hill in the trails they had made during many pervious such walks. Just as I started to drive down the hill in the picture to the right, Dan said, “Bill always take the tractor out of gear and lets it coast.” I did. As the tractor sped downward I tried to brake, put it into gear, and everything else I could think of that might stop the tractor. Before long Dan who had been standing on the tractor hitch was thrown off. About half way down the steep hill the tractor hit a cow trail and snapped the front axle. It stopped! I was thrown into the steering wheel but managed to hang on. Just one bloody nose for me and Dan was fine. Guess who was in trouble, not Dan.

The rope and leaf are from Scrapgirls.

 

Not all of my brother  Bill’s wonderful ideas turned out quite the way he planned. The day we met the skunk I did exactly as he told me to but the skunk must not have listened. It decided not to turn and run from him toward me. While I stood quietly waiting for the big event, the skunk planned and executed her own strategy. She stood her ground and showered Bill with a spray of horrible scent. Bill screamed and started running the half mile toward the house. By the time I caught up with him Mom had Bill in a galvanized bathtub in the middle of the yard and instructed me to get tomato juice from the cellar STAT! After a dozen or more jars of juice were scrubbed over his body he did smell better, BUT for several days he still did not smell human.

Boy was he mad at me. I guess it is easier to be angry at your little sister than a skunk...

Niobrara River Experience

The summer of 2008 I spent five weeks out at the ranch getting the house emptied, sorting through over a hundred forty years of family archives, trash, and other interesting things. Labor Day weekend the rest of the family joined me. Kelby said that he had never been down to the river to swim and since this was the last time he would be there let’s all take a break and go swimming. Hayden and Austin loved it. Tam and I sat on the bank and enjoyed the kids while Kelby and Lester waded and kept watch over the boys. Terrill, Kelby’s dog was crazy about the water but Maxwell, my little schnauzer was very frightened. He jumped out and ran through the sandburs. Then he was in worse shape, POOR THING! That was just the beginning. When the men went to leave they had a flat tire and could not get the tire off. I went eight miles back to the ranch for better tools. When I arrived back at the river they had the tire off and were in route to the closest gas station, twelve mile away.


The tire could not be fixed. We ended up having to buy two new tires. So much for a break from our labor...

The digital leaf design on right hand side  behind the building is from Scrapgirls.

TinyTown USA

My childhood home was a small cattle ranch in the Nebraska sandhills. Our closes neighbors were the residents of Eli a tiny town two miles through the hills on the original US Highway 20 a washboard gravel road or four miles around on paved US Highway 20. In Eli there were two general stores. One sold cattle feed and other needs for our animals. The other store was the grocery store, the post office, gas station, and telephone switch board. Along that same sandy street was the community hall used for dances, funerals, wedding receptions, and elections. At the end of that street was the parsonage. There was another street that ran at a right angle to the business street and another that ran parallel. The church was on the parallel street. Across the street from the stores was a large two story unkempt building that once housed my Uncle Frank’s hardware store and gas station. The back of that build and the second story was their home. When I was quite young there were four or five other homes along those three streets and down the quarter mile gravel road to the two-roomed school house. There was one more group of buildings about 1/8 mile north there was a train depot, remains of a lumber yard, and stockyards for shipping cattle out on the Union Pacific train.

Sometimes I tend to grow tired of the same routine, so instead of letting it become a tedious responsibility I look for beauty. This picture is of dried up foliage but it is beautiful against the field of snow along the much traveled road to the airport.

Some Memories Bring a Giggle

Memories
These glasses reminded me of my Dad. His ophthalmologist told him that wearing BIG dark sunglasses whenever he went outside would prevent cataracts and glaucoma.
One time when he was visiting us he happened to get into a different car than Mom. She insisted that he had to have his glasses. So we tried to get to a place to stop. We could not find one so we decided to toss the glasses from one car to another at a stop light. We missed getting beside the other vehicle several times. Finally, I opened the window and tossed his glasses to the other driver. They flew nicely toward the drivers hands. He missed! There on the street were my Dad's glasses smashed into a thousand pieces...

Digital Scrapbooking Supplies:
Scrapgirls

I took a vacation in Greenbelt, Maryland the first week in February. I spent four days down in Washington D.C. BUT then it snow! I was lucky enough to fly home before the next storm hit.