This photo is my mother's family. Left to right are: Bonnie, Ethel (holding Dan), my mom Juanna Beth, Dick, and Jimmy.

I don't know very much about my grandfather Dick Carson, because he died in an accident at age forty. I know that my grandma Ethel was teaching school and she saw him ride up on his horse and get a drink at the old pump. She told a friend, "I'm going to marry that man." She had never met him, but she did end up marrying him.

My grandma was one of 12 kids, and grew up in the Great Depression. The whole family left Nebraska and traveled on an old truck with a house built on the back of it, out to Oregon. After a time of not finding work, my grandma hitch-hiked back to Nebraska, because she had a teacher's certificate from the state of Nebraska, and knew she could get a job there. Without that decision, I would never have been born in Nebraska, if at all.

Grandma lived in her own house on the ranch until age 88. She would drive her Plymouth Belvidere the thirty miles or so down to our place on Saturday evening. My mom would set her hair in rollers and she'd stay for church on Sunday and enjoy the afternoon with us. Grandma was a singer and a song-writer. She wrote over 80 original songs and would sing them in church for specials occasionally.

When she could no longer remember how to get to our house (she ended up in Burwell one time, and a guy called mom to come get her), she moved in with us. It was fun to have her help us with things like cutting up beans from the garden for canning. She would have liked to fold the laundry, but I remember she always folded the underwear in quarters instead of halves. My little sister Karmen proclaimed herself the laundry-folder and would not let Grandma help, because she put the clothes on the wrong stacks and folded them funny.

Some of her frequent sayings were: "Ooh, what are we havin'?" when it was time for a meal. She would ask if there were anything she could help with in the kitchen, and then say, "Oh, well. I'll just set the table." She liked to drawl, "Well, I'll be horn-swoggled!", she called our couch the "davenport", and our vacuum cleaner was the "sweeper". She loved to eat, and loved church dinners. She would always bring tuna-salad sandwiches and Chips Ahoy cookies and crunchy Cheetos. She would take some of everything, especially the desserts, but she always stayed trim and very healthy. In later years, she started to hunch forward a little bit, but she always got around pretty well, and never complained about much. I think she had worked so hard her entire life, she was all grit and muscle.

Grandma's favorite color was blue. Our hired hand wore a baseball shirt that was white with blue sleeves and a blue number on the front and back. Grandma was eyeing him across the table one night at supper and said, "Glen, when you don't want that shirt anymore, you give it to me. I just love that color." We all laughed, but the next day he showed up with that shirt all washed and neatly folded in a bag for her. Mom was chagrined, but he insisted that Grandma should have it.

Grandma loved to cut up and have fun, and never got past the age of flirting. She would make faces and say funny things just to get everyone to laughing, and was always the life of the party. In church, she always sang alto and never missed a note. In her eighties, she could pick out the melody of any song on the piano, playing all by ear.

Grandma was wonderful and I miss her very much.