MRS BYRD

If you have read my journal through you will remember the lady I wrote about who lived in Denver, Colorado. She was 97 when I met her and we became close friends.
This is a picture of her with her arm through Sen Hardings arm, (She is wearing the plaid coat.) The other man is her cousin George Christian who was Hardings secretary when he was President. The girl is a friend of Mrs. Byrds and they were at the train station in Marion, Ohio, her and President Hardings home town. She told me many stories about her family's friendship with the president and how she had tea in the White House with Mrs Harding and threw out the ball at games for President Harding. She was a delightful lady and is my idea of a perfect lady. She died in 1994 at the age of 98. Her full name was Susan Garberson Byrd.

AOL COMMUNITY CHALLENGE/LOVE

Granddaddy and Nikki playing Barbies.

GREAT GRANDMA

My great grandmother is not quite as sophisticated looking as yours.
She looks as if she had a hard life. Don't know much about her.

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new beginnings

here is my entry for new beginnings.

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Thanksgiving

                                                                                                    Now my house really seems like a home. Had our first Thanksgiving here. My daughter and grandchildren came from Vermont and we cooked a turkey with all the trimmings. We even made a fire in the cookstove but it didn't get hot enough to cook anything. It felt cozy though. My poor little kitty was a nervous wreck from being loved on so much . He got to where he would hide everytime he saw Katie coming. The thing they enjoyed most was putting money on the railroad tracks . They left for home with a pocketful of flattened pennies, dimes and quarters. That week went by so fast we weren't able to do all the things we had planned. I wish they lived here so we could be together everyday instead of trying to cram so much into just a few days. They throughly enjoyed being with their uncle Troy.  They use him for a punching bag and a hair model. They gave him many different hair dos and complained because he was getting bald and they didn 't have much to work with. I played Barbies with them. They seemed very pleased with their upstairs " apartment." So was my daughter. It was a very nice visit, if only her husband could have left the restaurant for a while and come with them it would have been perfect.

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update

Well, it has been a long time since I have been here. I have been trying to read all my alerts but got so far behind I had to delete them for awhile.
One day my brother in law came to see us and he brought a real estate paper with houses for sale. There was one I liked and I showed it to my husband and he said, " That's the house Mama used to live in. And  I recognized it then and said "let's go look at it." We did and I fell in love with the house. It had been completely remodeled with an upstairs added. It has nine foot ceilings and wooden floors. There is a wood burning cook stove in the kitchen. A fireplace in the living room. A claw foot tub in the bathroom which is original to the house which was built sometime around 1939. My husband said no!! I sulked and argued and fussed and cried and complained to my daughter and she wanted me to have it as bad as I wanted it. Finally after a good fit pitching, we called the real estate company and at last I got my way and now my husband thinks it was his idea he is so happy. We have seven acres. Some woods and a pasture and best of all a natural spring that runs year around. We also have a big snake that lives there. We have two cows and just sold two calves, we had two chickens but something got them. A hawk maybe? And for the very first time I have an indoor kitten named Zippy. He is sitting in my lap now as I type. He is part siamese and something else. We have joined the church which is just across the road. I have always wanted to go to a  church that I could walk to. My mama and daddy went there when they were first married and returned to it later when they got old and both had funerals there and they, my little brother and my oldest sister are buried there. Also I was able to get the phone number that my mama had since we first got a phone in 1953. So I feel that I have come back home at last. I love my house. It has big pecan and oak trees all around it and there are sycamore trees around the spring. And water cress growing in the water. I discovered the snake one day when I almost stepped on it. I said a bad word and jumped backwards and it slid away. It was big but I couldn't tell what kind. Now when I go to the spring I wear boots. I have always wanted a spring of my own. When I was little I would find them in the woods and my aunt used to take her clothes to one and wash them when the wells went dry. Also the creek where we swam as kids runs behind the house over behind the railroad tracks. We also have trains that go by and I used to hear them in the night when I was little. This house is just a few miles from the one where I grew up. It is torn down now. I guess you can tell I am happy. Getting moved was awful and we had to buy a storage building for all our excess baggage, but my husband insulated it and put in an air conditioner and built lots and lots of shelves so things wouldn't ruin. I am going to try to add a picture of my house.

back home

I am back home in Alabama at last. The time spent in Baton Rouge was not as great as we thought it would be. The town has changed a lot since the hurricanes. The traffic is bad, people run lights and cut you off. There are so many more people there now.

I got a job with the state. I think I made a mistake. It  was with the Dept of Revenue. They hired over 200  temporary workers because of the delays granted in filing taxes because of the hurricanes. It was very high pressure, nothing like the state of Alabama.

I have my job back but I am having a hard  time adjusting to the laid back ways. I keep feeling pressured to  work, work, work even when the work is finished. Down in Baton Rouge the work was never finished. We even worked overtime a lot. The workers attitudes about that is very angry.

I hope I can start relaxing and get back to writing. I have had to delete journal entries when I got so many alerts I couldn't read them all. I was mostly go to bed get up go to work go to bed get up etc.

We did try to do things on the weekends like touring old plantation homes and attending festivals. But after a while they all run together. We started going to thrift stores and buying books so now I have five boxes of books and no place to put them. I really need to have a huge closet cleaning but I'd rather be on my computer.

Jane