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Show 27 Besides the gold-framed pictures of Mama and Papa, enlarged and tinted, there was a real painting, done by an itinerant painter with household oils in a few minutes on the back of some oil cloth for twenty-five cents. It was always a masterpiece, a blue lake, fringed by a brown road and feathery trees, to us children. When Macel came along I wouldn't give up the high chair, so my parents took a trip to Richfield and came back with a pretty red-painted replacement. I quickly relinquished the old one in favor of the new, but it went to Macel as a lesson to me. Macel was dainty and blue-eyed, and as independent as a cat. When people came up to speak to her in church she lashed out at them and scratched their faces, hiding her corn-silk hair against Mama's shirt-waist. Being the happy-heart, I always smiled at strangers. Macel was born September 19, 1905. Mama had a sewing machine by this time, but it was hard to treadle in her delicate condition, so Aunt Eliza, Papa's niece (Uncle Joe's daughter) who married Mama's brother Walter, came to work the machine while they hemmed diapers. They were living conveniently close, up the railroad about half a mile, and Grandma Rawlinson had come to live with them. Eliza was a fat girl, even in her teens, but a sweet and wise person. They had one girl, Ila. "You look nice in your new waist and skirt, Lizy, " Mama complimented when they came. "If only you had some corsets. " "Walter took me to Elsinore for corsets, " Eliza said. "But there were none big enough for me. They ordered some." |
