THE SONGS OF A NIGHTINGAIL

  1959 – My youngest sister playing on our old mustard yellow upright piano  while sitting on a kitchen stool in the laundry room.  Not the greatest place for  a piano to be with all that moisture in the air, but perhaps better than the  garage where it would have been otherwise?  There was no place for it in our  living room. Under all that Grey Poupon colored paint is a beautiful mahogany finish.  My Dad  found this out when he sanded the piano bench down, but sanding down the  piano would have been too much of a job.  Besides, it would still have to be in  the laundry room or garage so probably just as well to leave it mustard yellow .  I’ve mentioned before my Mom wanted to paint it pink to match the laundry  room & stencil daisies in the indents but that never got done either.  Oh well. A friend accompanied me singing for Groveland’s 49er Festival in the   fall of 1983 with my eldest daughter help...

  I used a pair of knitting needles when I took on the role of a sassy granny in a play where I sat in a rocking chair knitting throughout the whole show.  But I was also the heroine who saved the day when I stabbed one of my knitting needles in the villain’s backside! J A crochet needle was used to make this gorgeous bedspread. A friend is very talented at using a needle in the art of cross stitch.  She does amazing work.  It must take tremendous patience which is why I could never do it! An embroidery needle did beautiful work on this tablecloth. Hand quilting takes a fine sharp needle making itty bitty stitches in a neat row.   We don’t do a lot of this anymore, but there are times when darning is needed. To do it properly you need a darning ‘egg’ and special needles with large eyes.   There are other types of needles, of course . . . . . . such as those growing on certain trees. There’s the needle on a speedometer . . .  . . . or the magneti...

  We tend not to save faulty photos, or use means at hand to tidy them up so I didn’t have all that many “in the way” photos to share, but I did find a few. Smoke gets in your eyes.  The smoke from our little picnic fire hid my brother wearing a dark shirt in this 1953 photo. In 1954 Mom was taking a picture of me, my Dad, my two sisters and brother posing atop Sonora Pass on our way from Pinecrest Lake to Lake Tahoe, not realizing the film used to take the photo before this one of me getting a haircut, had not been rolled forward resulting in a double exposure with my haircut getting in the way of the Sonora Pass photo, and that photo getting in the way of my haircut!  Whoever was taking this picture got in the way, via poor camera centering, of our heads in this 1957 photo taken during a car wash to raise funds for our youth group. If it weren’t for my youngest sister’s head in the way, I might be able to tell what I was serving the family for dinner in my apartment for...