Ah, Another Birthday….from Mrs. Crumly’s unpublished writings.

NOTE:  Today would have been Mrs. Billie Crumly’s 86th birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MRS. CRUMLY.  While I was looking for a new post, the second one I clicked on was this one. Oh how times have changed so much since that day she wrote this post. Mrs. Crumly often wondered aloud, “who is going to take care of us when we get old.”  I should say that she would say that almost weekly the last year and a half and all I could do is laugh as she laughed right along with me. She was 85 and Mr. John is headed toward 90 but kicking as high as a young mule. I am laughing as I as this comes to my mind. All these “young” people that like to walk the walking track, if you need a partner to go with you, Mr. John Crumly would love to watch you catch up with him.

So please have Mr. John, Donna and Beth in your thoughts and prayers today as I am sure today will be a very hard long day for all being the first birthday without the Grand Lady of the The Windy Knoll.

As you know both “girls”, Donna and Beth were born and raised in Georgia. Donna has a two hour trip over and Beth has a 4 hour trip over. I know you have read many many times here the last few months just how BLESSED Mr. & Mrs. Crumly were to have BOTH daughters here day and night since her surgery and a lot of times both at the same time here to take care of them “when they got old”. And that was the answer to her question and that is just what country families do in country living.

 

This octogenarian has celebrated another birthday and no two have been the same.  When I was a youngster I always had a white layer cake with seven-minute icing.  This is the time of year for the plant called “Touch Me Not” to bloom and there always Touch Me Not blossoms around the bottom of that pretty white cake.  Parties?  I can’t remember ever having one as a child; however, as an adult there have been a few.

This year when I got a long distance call to wish me  Happy Birthday, I told the caller I was cooking and she said she thought the girls should take me out to lunch.  I quickly told her it didn’t work that way in this family and she admitted it didn’t work  that way in her family either.  After all I know this sweet lady  is a wonderful cook – as was her mother.

Our eldest arrived in the afternoon and spent the night, and then the next morning our youngest and a great grand arrived.  I depend on the youngest daughter to get my computer re done or whatever.  With the new machine I had lost my recipes and that won’t work.  I wondered why I had put all these jewels on the computer anyway, but I never gave it a thought that they could be lost.  Well, they weren’t gone, but buried so deep I didn’t know how to retrieve them.  Being told that old program was not compatible with this new computer, I agreed to spend $35 to get a new program so I could read the recipes.  With the mission accomplished, we moved to the lunch table and with all the laughing and talking going on I could hardly have enough sense to put the food out.  I had never put it on the table and then have them load their plates and zap it in the microwave, but then I stated that I had never been 82 years old before either.

Daughter # 2 wanted us to make cheese straws and this required  John make a trip to Geraldine and the teenager went along.  You see, I don’t understand teenagers!!  With her being off with Pap, the girls had a chance to lecture me about what to say and not to say.  I can’t hear her in the first place and am not supposed to say “speak up” as that would hurt her feelings (?) and if she did speak loud enough she speaks a language other than Sand Mountain which I cannot understand.  In what I thought was a very quiet tone I said, “I’m so glad you girls came, I’m so much better informed” and one of them heard me!! So what?  That’s just the way I felt.  One smart-aleck daughter even told me that I’m aloof!  Aloof?  Me?

With the whole crowd in the kitchen doing cheese straws, I did get up enough nerve to ask the teenager if she wanted a piece of apple pie which she did.  Praise the Lord, maybe I did one thing right.  We figured out she is the fifth generation to enjoy an apple pie like my mother made.

So from this aloof, yet humble, writer this too is country living.