memory challenge prompts

Today’s memory challenge is inspired by the fact that I am trying to cram in all sorts of doctor appointments into my busy days while I still have the better health insurance.

So I am thinking about getting sick and going to the doctor when I was a child.

When I was sick, the throwing up kind, my mom brought out this small child-sized pale pink bucket. That was my sick bucket. Easy enough for me to carry around and small enough to fit next to me on the couch. I was sick a lot so that came in handy. Anyone who has read Hugging the Rock might remember that Rachel also had a sick bucket.

When I was sick, the next door neighbors would bring me fried prawns and fried won tons from their restaurant. It shoudl have be the worse thing in the world for my stomach but it always made me feel better.

I remember going somewhere when I was very young to get, what was it, the polio shot or sugar cube or something? I remember being held over my mom’s shoulder and waiting in a very long line.

I remember getting the measles and staying all alone in my room except for my deaf cousin Danny who was the only one who would come in and play games with me.

I remember the face of the pediatrician I went to but not his name. But I remember he had great vitamins he would give me when I went in for a visit. When he retired my mom made me go to her doctor, Dr. Byers. I hated him. I really did. He was a pear-shaped man with dark hair and dark glasses but that wasn’t why I hated him. I hated him because he always pointed out all the ways in which I wasn’t like my mom. And I really hated that he was the one that pierce my ears with one of the very early ear piercing guns. He marked my ears with a pen and he still screwed up and made them lopsided.

Okay, your turn. What do you remember about doctors and being sick when you were a child?

What I remember first about plants as a kid was that there were never any inside. There were a few potted flowers on the front porch but not much. Usually a Christmas cactus someone received as a gift or a pot of hothouse mums that were bright and cheery around Easter and looking dead by fall. In the back yard we had a fruitless mulberry that I felt sorry for every year after it received its annual pruning that result in a giant mass of knuckes, reaching for the sky.

In the backyard there were a few walnut trees that I loved. They were huge!

My rope swing was in one of them and I would climb on the fence, holding onto the rope, and then launch myself like Tarzan. When the walnuts would ripen we would spend a weekend gathering them and then laying them out on screens to dry. Peeling the skins would turn my fingers green. Later I would help my grandmother crack the nuts and freeze them.

There was an apricot tree in the very back yard. (We had two back yards.)

Along the side of the house were three orange trees.

In the parking strip next to the street there was nothing but Lippia, a flat ground cover that was covered with little white flowers in the summer and the little white flowers were covered with bees. Every bee sting I ever got was from going barefoot on that ground.

Out of all the plants in my childhood garden the only ones that were California natives were the walnut trees.

Your turn. What plants do you remember from your childhood?

Sorry I missed doing this last week. This week’s memory challenge is once again inspired by my dayjob and the fact that I have been let go but am on a delayed depart. I am here until the end of October which is weird, very weird, indeed. My friends here are a help with their smiling faces but a few other co-workers are acting oddly, like they could “catch” whatever I have. Some are downright rude, which I don’t understand and leaves me feeling a bit disappointed about my final days here.

So I tried to think of a time I was disappointed as a child. I’m sure there were many times, imagined or real, but the one that stands out the most was second grade in Mrs. Oswald’s class. For some reason I adored that teacher. I think it had to do with reading but I can’t remember the details. What I do remember is the mouse with my name on it. When we started school, the very first day, she pointed to a board with a bunch of little gray mice on it. She had cut them all out and dressed them in little red jackets. Each one had the name of a student. I quickly found mine and smiled. I had an imaginary friend at the time called Tommy the mouse so I easily imagined all the grand adventures we would have together. Mrs. Oswald explained that as long as we were good, our mouse would stay on the board. But if we were bad, the mouse would come down.

Days went on. People who had their mouse still on the board got asked to do all sorts of special things with a teacher that I adored from afar. They stayed after school to clean the blackboard. They got to take things to the office. They collected or handed out papers.

One day I was reading my book at my desk. There was a scuffle of noise beside me. I don’t remember who or what it was about. Mrs. Oswald heard and asked for quiet. The noise continued. I wanted to get back to my book. I went “Sssh!” just once but it was one time too many. Mrs. Oswald flipped out and ripped my mouse as well as I don’t know how many others off the board.

I promptly burst into tears. My mouse not only wasn’t on the board but when she took it off she really did rip it and it was missing an ear. I kept crying.

Mrs. Oswald called me a baby and got a piece of chalk. Then she walked to the back of the room and drew a circle on the floor. On the edges of the circle she drew a rattle and a baby bottle and a pacifier. Then she told me to sit in the baby circle. Alone.

I spent the rest of the day in that circle and even though my mouse went back on the board, ripped ear and all, the next day, it was never the same. I hated that class, that teacher, for the rest of the year.

Your turn. Write about a time when you were a child and someone or something disappointed you or took you by surprise.

How much do you remember of the neighborhood where you grew up? I decided to try this, not in any order, just writing down the memories as they came to me.

I grew up in Concord, California on Bonifacio Street at the corner of Grant. Back then it was a fairly quiet street. We were a couple of blocks from the Catholic church and a couple of blocks from the high school but as a kid, those things didn’t interest me much. I usually went the other way, toward town. My grandmother walked to the grocery store most of the time. It was a Mayfair market and it gave out Blue Chip stamps that we would lick and stick into books that would ultimately buy my grandmother a new sewing machine. I think the gas stations gave Green Stamps or some other places did but for some reason it was the Blue Chip stamps that my grandmother collected.

On the way home from the grocery store we might stop at Rexall drug store which had a section near the pharmacy of glass figurines, often the little Josef Originals.  Or we would hit the Quality Bakery where my grandmother would buy a loaf of dutch crust butter top bread. If I was really, really good I might get a tea cookie with a dollop of chocolate in the middle. I loved to stare at the fancy bakery cakes with the ballerinas in the middle. I was never allowed a bakery cake for a birthday – only the homemade ones.

There was a BeeDees (sp?) store that was general store of some kind. I remember that’s where we went for my grandmother to buy all her fabric and thread and sewing supplies to make most all of my clothes. There was a hobby section in there with trains and stuff but what I fell for were the collections of glass animals. I can’t remember the name of the company but they usually came in a set of three animals on a little piece of cardboard, a family of animals. I collected those for years.

I don’t remember many other stores downtown. Oh, there was a Rhodes Deptmartment store where we went for coats and underwear and shoes. Gas stations around town that gave out stamps of birds that I could lick and stick in a collector book. There was the Todas Santos Plaza which I think was called something else like Concord Park when I was a kid. We didn’t stop there too often as my grandmother always had a list of chores that needed doing.

The Sun and Moon Chinese restaurant that was owned and run by the Tuey family was near there. They lived next door to us.

I know on the way downtown was a little store on the corner, probably our version of a Quik Stop, that my grandmother didn’t like but eventually she would let me walk up there for emergency milk or butter. I had to walk past a long, dark alley where there was usually a drunk or two hanging out and they always scared me. There was an actual liqueur store around the corner from that but we always crossed the street so as not to get too close. In later years I used to sneak down there to buy my copies of Writer’s Digest magazine.

For a little while my mom and I moved out of the house on Bonifacio and around the block to Grant street. What I remember most there is that the backyard fence was the same fence for the Queen of All Saints Catholic school. And the kids from that school would throw their garbage over the fence all the time. My mom used to get so mad and gather up all the garbage and take it to the school but they never did anything about it. The convent was on the corner. As a non-Catholic I was fascinated by all the goings-on at the church and I used to love to hear the bells that seemed to always be ringing.

There were a few houses that stand out in my memory – the deBenedetti house across the street because the basement was ground level and the house itself up a steep flight of stairs that always scared me. The woman who lived there, Lisa, was my grandmother’s good friend. They were both in the local Druids organization and every year the Druids had a huge rummage sale to raise money. The rummage was dropped off in Lisa’s basement and I always got to pick through things early. I think that’s where I got addicted to finding gems at thrift stores.

Hazel and Gilbert Hills lived next door to the deBenedettis. It was a white house with the best front porch. Grandma Stotts lived with them too. Hazel had some sort of illness that had her in crutches for life. She gave piano lessons and I loved it in the summer time when she had the windows open and I could hear the music drift out and across the street. All I remember about Gilbert is that he was very tall and very thin. They were so kind to me. I found a black rabbit in their front yard one time, under the bushes, and got to keep it for most of a day before my mother did something with it.

There was a house on the corner that I don’t remember by who lived there but by the fact that I would always find spare change in the dirt that collected at the bottom of the driveway. On the other corner was where Bing Cuneo lived. I don’t remember much about that family except their name. Another block down the street was a house that was in an unincorporated section. They had a well, which I thought was cool and a goose which was very mean. I could never get close to the house because of that darn goose.

Whew – that’s a lot of rambling about the neighborhood but as always happens, one memory helps me remember another, and so on, and so on.

Your turn – what do you remember about your neighborhood growing up?

Since we are still very much in the midst of summer I decided that this week’s memory prompt would be anything I could remember about summer vacations when I was a child. What follows is in no particular order, just as they pop into my head. This is a great way to prime your own memory pump – give yourself a category such as this – and then just brain dump everything that comes out. One memory often leads to another.

When I think of summertime back when my grandfather was alive it always had to do with fishing and going out on the boat and skimming along though sloughs out on the delta near Antioch. We’d stop at his duck pond first, where he and my uncles had their duck blinds, and Papa would rack a bucket of clams from the clam bed that we could use for bait. Then off we’d go to some semi-secluded beach. My mom, my grandparents and sometimes my uncles and their wives/girlfriends, but often just us. I would divide my time between trying to sit still to fish, following my grandmother and my mom went they collecting berries, or playing in the water.

Summertime meant the PowWow parade that marched right down the corner of my street, just a few house away, so we always had the best view. And it would end up at the high school with the Boy Scout Jamboree. Fireworks were watched from the roof of the shed.

I remember hot tar bubbling up between the cracks in the sidewalk between the street and our front porch. I remember the bees that swarmed daily on the Lippia grass. I would often get stung because I would refuse to wear shoes.

I remember swimming lessons in some guy’s backyard pool, I think his name was John. I hated him, hated the lessons. When I was older (and could actually swim) I remember going to Meadow Homes pool and spending the day hanging out by the pool. I could get an ice cream sandwich from the vending machine and for some reason they always tasted better there than anywhere else.

At home summertime meant sleeping in, unless my grandmother had chores for me and she ALWAYS had chores. Summers were usually a lonely time for me when I was little as there were no kids in our neighborhood at all. (We lived in the grandparents part of town.) My mom sent me to the city day camp and I got ribbons in fire building, archery, potato peeling and lots of them for running. What I remember most about daycamp was that it was the only time I got to have Kool Aid. The counselors would mix it in these tall old milk jugs and we would get to drink some on the way from camp to the swimming pool.

After my grandfather died my mom, grandmother and I would go on vacations for a week or two. Every other year it was a kid-friendly one like Disneyland. The other years it was an adult one where I could guarantee I would be bored. We also took day trips to Frontier Village and Santa’s Village and the Nut Tree.

Since my mom worked and my grandmother was always busy with chores, I spent a lot of my summertime on my own. Often this meant doing reading or doing craft projects. On rare occasions my aunt Pat would actually allow me to spend a summer day with my cousins at their house in the county. I remember catching lizards and thinking that was some of the very best fun of all.

Toward the end of summer my grandmother and I would walk to BeeDees where she would pick out material and patterns that she would use to make my clothes for the coming school year. A trip to Rhodes department store for my winter coat and I was usually ready to go.

As I got older, tween and teen years, summers just meant more time with the horses or at the skating rink.

Your turn. What are some of your childhood summertime memories?

Today’s memory challenge is brought to my mind as we begin training our new dog Cassie. There are limits to be set and boundaries to be pushed. It is all a part of growing up and being a part of a family.

Kids get in trouble. It happens. I was such a nervous child that I didn’t get in trouble very much. I was always terrified that something really, REALLY bad would happen to me which was all in my head. My mom or my grandparents could say good morning to me in the wrong tone of voice and I would burst into tears. The strain of trying to be perfect and of course never succeeding took its toll on me from childhood into adulthood.

I can only remember three instances of actually getting in trouble though. One, I don’t know what I did but I had to have been 10 or 11, but I made my mom so made that she threw a couple of pillows at me. I think she must have wanted to do more but didn’t. And as I write this I am remembering more – the one thing I did wrong all the time and probably was what made her so mad – was not clean my room. In her younger days my mom was a real clean and neat freak. The vacuum cleaner never cleaned things good enough for her so she would get down on her hands and knees after vacuuming and pick things up off the floor. I never kept my room clean. I mean, we are talking disaster zone. And like most kids I didn’t see the big deal since I could always find what I wanted and she could always shut the door. But she didn’t like to do that. She wanted it clean. Many a time I would come home from school to find out that she had cleaned my room for me. It was the only time I ever got really really angry. I would have a full-out temper tantrum and throw things around the room and make it even messier than before. That was probably what happened the day she threw pillows at me.

In Junior High I had a horse named Sparky. We boarded him a ways from home and one day my mom and my grandmother came out to watch me ride. There were a couple of cute teenage boys working at the place and I was trying to show off. I tried to jump on Sparky bareback without using the step I usually used (He was huge. I was short.) I missed and fell off into the dirt and halfway under him. I said “damn” and my grandmother slapped my face right there in front of everyone, including the cute guys.

But the time of getting in trouble that I remember the most was with my grandfather. My grandfather was my world (until he died when I was 10.) He taught me how to play cards and I wanted to play with him all the time. Even though he was tired after work he indulged me a lot. He never “let” me win and I got tired of losing all the time. So one day I cheated. I was so sure that I had been sneaky enough to not be caught but of course he knew. He just said “you cheated” and packed up the cards. I remember very well that sinking feeling in my stomach that I had done something unforgivable, that I had disappointed him, that I had broken something that couldn’t be fixed.

Your turn. Can you remember a time you got in trouble as a kid?

Today’s memory challenge is random due to the overwhelmingness that is my life right now. (see previous post – basically I am here, will try to keep up with these posts, but am not able to get around to read and respond much anywhere else. I apologize in advance. Both my kids are in their own respective rough patches of life and I can’t do a darn thing to help except for love them like crazy. If you’re a parent, you know what I am going through. It hurts to watch them hurt and not be able to do anything to change it.)

Random memories from my childhood.

I remember having one of the very early Barbie dolls that looked like this:

and when the new Barbie came out my mom took me down to Rhodes Department store to trade it in. We traded in my old Barbie and something like $1.00 and we got the new one in exchange. She had an orange bathing suit with some kind of netting over it and her arms and legs bent. I never ever liked it as much as my original one.

After Barbies, I went on to Little Kiddles and I really liked these guys. I had pretty much the whole set and figured I’d grow up to date a blonde-haired guy named Biff. (I didn’t.)

Also big were these Kiddie Kologne dolls that had strange perfume smells.

There really weren’t any kids in the neighborhood where I grew up so I had a lot of dolls and a good imagination.

I never had a shower in the house where I grew up so it was a bathevery night before bed. My mom used to give me bubble baths with soap that came in these dispensers like cartoon characters. I must have had 50 of them lining the bathroom wall.Much to my grandmother’s dismay.

And of course snack time was big after school and I would often opt for a space food stick

and wash it down with some Hi-C. Mmmm….good.

I also remember when the telephone company first came out with the Princess phone. My mom got one in her bedroom and I got the little mini phone on a keychain. When I got older and started dating, my mom got me my own Princess phone with my own number (mom was single and dating too) and we used to call each other from our bedrooms to say goodnight.

What would I find if I followed you down your memory land?

I’ve been MIA for a bit while the major driveway/patio overhaul has begun. Update on that soon.

Today’s memory challenge is inspired by the work being done outside our house. Setting is important to our stories and often we can take pieces of our past to help us ground the settings in our book. Think about just one yard from your childhood.  What stands out most in your mind?

For the first few years of my life my mother and I lived with my grandparents in the house my mother had grown up in.  Back then it seemed huge but when I go to Google Maps now and look at the picture of it now, it looks so small. The two big trees in the front yard are gone. (I remember standing against one of them when I got hit in the eye with a softball.) It’s still painted yellow and the big front porch is still red. We used to have lots of grass up close to the house, perfect for doing somersaults and cartwheels and standing on my head It was an oversized lot so the backyard had plenty of room for adventures. Closer to the street there was a long patch of lippia that made a flat mat of green with little blue flowers that were always covered in bees.

It was the backyard though that I loved best of all. Going out from the washer/dryer porch there was a long porch attached to the house. From there you could go down to the scary basement. There was a door from my grandparents bedroom to go outside and there was even an outdoor bathroom. Not an outhouse but an actual flush toilet in a tiny closet on the porch. It was great when you were out playing and didn’t want to run in the house.

Tight off the porch there was a huge in the ground clothesline, stationary, not one that spun. The metal bars holding it were fatter than the bars on the playground I still used to try and spin myself around on them.

There was a huge two car detached garage, one half had my grandfather’s boat and the other my grandmother’s seldom driven car. Some car repair tools and I don’t know what else was in there. The big place for tools was the huge shed (the size of a garage) behind the closeline. It had an old roll-top desk that was filled my grandfather’s woodworking tools and various nuts and bolts. It was always dusty and filled with cobwebs but I didn’t mind. There was a small hole in one side, a couple of feet square, so Gippy, my grandfather’s hunting dog, could get in out of the rain.

Next to the shed there was a fenced off section that I wasn’t supposed to go in but of course I did. There was a giant pile of bricks left from whenever they took out the fireplace (before I was born.) I used to try and stack them up to make a fort. The weeds always grew tall in here. I don’t know what kind of weed it was but it was the one that had 5 or 6 long needle – shaped things that we could use to spear flowers for making flower necklaces.

Beside that section was the back back yard. Or the way back yard. The incinerator was back here and the fence dividing our property from the neighbors was just a wire fence with a grid of about 4″, big enough for me to get my hands through to pet the dog on the other side.
An apricot tree was back here too and I would forever get in trouble for hammering nails into the tree so the sap could run and I could watch it dry to shimmering golden teardrop on the trunk.

We had giant almond and walnut trees (taking care of them was always a chore) and one of walnut tree had a rope swing. I could climb on the fence and jump off with the swing and feel just like tarzan! I had a basketball hoop (no net) on the side of the garage with a dirt court. I couldn’t wait for my grandfather to get home from work and play HORSE with me.

There weren’t many plants growing other than the fruit and nut trees (oranges, apricots, lots of walnuts and almonds) so I don’t know where I got my love of gardening.

The yard, like the house, was old and run-down and more than we could take care but my happiest childhood memories are playing in the backyard.

Your turn, tell me about one of your favorite backyards.

Last week was all about the smells of childhood. (Okay, of my particular childhood.) This week it is about the sounds. Sound isn’t used as often as smells in sensory description but it should be. I have heard it said that if you can put a sound in the scene it will stay with the reader long after the smell has faded. But sounds are hard.

My grandmother whistling. She whistled all the time. When hanging the clothes out on the line, cooking, cleaning, she loved to whistle and was good at it. (Me, I never learned how.)

Church bells. We lived just a couple of blocks from Queen of All Saints church and the bells were a part of growing up for Sundays and holidays. Each time they surprised me as though I had forgotten them from the week before.

A doorbell that buzzed. The doorbell on our house was one of those round domes (rusted) that you pushed and it let out a long BUZZ.

Slamming of the WOODEN screen door.  We didn’t have a fancy door with one of those air thingys that let it close slowly. We had a wooden door with screen inset. It slammed great! I know the screen on the back porch was forever having to be tacked back in place because the dogs would poke holes in it.

The sound of sprinklers. We had one sprinkler that twirled in circles and another that moved side-to-side that we would try to jump under.

My grandfather sharpening his razor. He still used a razor strap.

My grandfather sharpening the carving knife. I don’t know what it was called but it was a long-handled thing that he would use to sharpen the big carving knife, sliding the knife up and down several times.

My grandfather sharpening other things. There was a small gray sharpening stone that lived in the kitchen junk drawer.

The slap of cards on the dining room table. My grandfather and I played a lot of cards together. I wish I remembered the name of the games we played. I do remember the sound of the cards against the polished dining room table.

Opening the garage door. We had a detached wooden two car garage. The doors slid from side to side on little metal wheels. One half of the garage had the boat and the other half was mostly junk. I can’t remember there being a car in the garage until after the boat was gone.

Closing the shed. The shed in our backyard was big, bigger than a one-car garage. I don’t know what it was used for originally in the house but it was my grandfather’s workshop and storage place. It had a set of doubledoors that we had to open to let in all the light. But to close them there was a big wooden arm that swooped down from the inside. I was always afraid of catching my fingers in it.

Sheets snapping in the wind as they hung on the line. My grandmother always preferred the sheets hanging out on the clothesline to dry in the sun. I remember the sound of her snapping them as she folding them too.

Knocking down the walnuts and almonds. In the fall we would use the long poles to knock the walnuts and almonds out of the trees.

The hammer cracking walnuts and almonds. After they were down, and dry, we could eat the nuts. We’d sit at the table with a tiny little hammer and crack them open.

The boat engine starting up. Summers were spent fishing or at the beach so I remember a lot of sounds associated with putting the boat in the water, getting it back on the trailer again. The sound of it starting up the first time of the day.

The sound of the water slapping the boat. Fishing from the boat meant finding a quiet spot and sitting there (often for longer than I could sit still.) I remember the sound of the waves hitting the boat while we waited for the fish to bite.

TV Shows. Lawrence Welk and The Wonderful World of Disney. Gunsmoke, The Real McCoys.

Filling the dog’s water dish. My grandfather had a hunting dog that was an outside dog. His water dish was metal and it was bent funny so it didn’t sit level on the ground. I can still hear the sound of the water (no hose) hitting the pan.

The Pow Wow parade. We only had to go to the corner and we had a front row seat to the parade every fourth of July.

Fireworks. We could sit on the roof of the shed and see and hear the fireworks being set off at the high school just a couple of blocks away.

Football games. Because we lived so close to the high school and because back then it was a small town, we could hear the games, the crowd, the announcers even, right in our backyard.

The drop of the door to the basement. We had a good-sized basement (unusual for California) with steep stairs. My grandmother’s canned goods were kept down there. Once I was back up topside I could release the basement door and it would thump loudly back into place. I had many a nightmare about being left on the wrong side of that door.

My grandfather’s radio. He had a transistor radio that he kept in the kitchen so he could listen to the ball games. I remember the sound of the static as he rolled the dial, trying to get a station to come in a bit more clear. I knew it was a single that I would have to be quiet for a while.

My grandmother’s sewing machine. It seemed like the sewing machine was going all the time. For many years my grandmother made most of my clothes. She made all my costumes too.

Duck calls. The night before going hunting my grandfather would practice his duck calls with the wooden duck whistle.

Your turn. What sounds do you remember from your childhood?

Food is such a powerful memory magnet.

Much of the food around our house, until I was ten-years-old, was dictated by my grandfather. He was a meat and potatoes kind of guy so we had a lot of meat and potatoes. Roast beef every Sunday with mashed potatoes. Fried catfish that absolutely melted in my mouth. Duck he had shot himself (and we would pick the BBs out while we ate). Shepherd’s pie which I remember only because it usually meant I would go to bed hungry. (I am not a person who likes their food all mixed up and I would usually only eat the crust.) About once a month my grandmother would make corned beef and then I would beg for a bowl of cereal or something else to eat. I have never acquired the taste for it. Creamed tuna on toast was a fallback when nothing was available or she didn’t feel like cooking.

My grandmother made grilled cheese sandwiches in same grille she used for making waffles – you could flip the irons over and use the flat side. It squished the sandwiches really flat and all the cheese was melted. It was a long time before I could eat a grilled cheese sandwich that wasn’t smooshed flat like a pancake. Cheese was Velveeta. I loved fried bologna and grilled Spam. In my lunch box I took bologna sandwiches (mustard only) with the crusts cut off and Ding Dongs or Ho Hos or Hostess cupcakes.

There was a lot of Bisquick used for waffles and pancakes and biscuits. We had turkey for Christmas and ham for Easter. Always. It wasn’t often but sometimes I got Kool Aid or Hi C or Tang. Carnation made this chocolate breakfast bar that I remember liking a lot.

My grandmother had a yellow cake she made from scratch and timed it so that it came out of the oven just when dinner was done. She’d make a single layer and then serve it with giant globs of butter. I loved Bosco syrup on my ice cream and loved to whip the ice cream until it was a soup I could drink with a straw.

My all-time favorite sandwich was (okay, still is) creamy peanut butter on soft white bread with slices of sweet pickles.

What about you? What foods stand out in your memories from childhood? I know I’ll remember more once someone else chimes in.

When I was a child the purses I remember my mother carrying were always big with one of those snap closures at the top that could pinch the skin if you weren’t careful. No over the should casual bag for her. The outside might change, I don’t recall her having a large collection but perhaps a navy blue or black for fall/winter and a white or tan for spring and summer. The insides though, they were almost always the same. 

– – – A wallet, as I remember a fat one that held the checkbook too. 
– – –  A coin purse, one of those squeeze to open kind. 
– – –  A keyring that wasn’t a ring. It was a crossed teardrop sort of thing and you unscrewed one knob in order to slide the keys on. The top of each knob was a green stone. 
– – –  Lipstick in a gold colored case/tube. Why the different case for the lipstick I have no idea. 
– – –  Compact, or pressed powder as I believe it was called back then. 
– – –  A plastic rain bonnet, one of those little folded up accordian pleated kind. 
– – –  A silk scarf – one that was big enough to cover her hair (often raised high on her head) and protect her stylish “do” from the wind. 
– – –  A few bobby pins, safety pins and BandAids 
– – –  A pen that was usually one of those plastic ones that had advertising on the side
– – –  One of those fold-up/collapsible cups 
– – –  A small package of Kleenex 
– – –  A few doses of Mylanta tablets that she always carried for me 

Edited to add:

Gum. How could I forget that she always had gum? Wrigleys or Dentyne.
Dental floss.

Your turn. What do you remember? What was in your mother’s purse?

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