Happy Birthday Rachel!

I have decided to do a "memory blog" for each person in my close family as they have their birthday. Today the lucky winner is my Aunt Rachel!

Rachel is a little more than three years older than I and thus made a wonderful playmate! Daddy is a pastor and in the church we were in that meant moving every few years. Mother will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe we moved into the trailer at the end of Grandmother's driveway when I was four or five.

Mountainburg did not have kindergarten at that time so I started first grade while we lived there. School was fun - I don't remember a single child in my class, but I can tell you that Rachel and I often had the same recess time together and she always seemed to have candy! Especially bubble gum cigars! AND she shared them - always! I am sure it must have greatly impressed the other first graders that little Naomi hung out with a big third grader - I know I was! I can still remember the sweet, tart taste of that voilent purple cigar in my mouth after she broke off a hunk big enough to choke a horse, for me to enjoy.

Uncle David was in high school already and he had regaled us with stories of the electric paddle kept in the principal's office. I had visions of an electric ceiling fan-like contraption into which a child would be strapped and the beating would commence! Rachel reassured me that he was only pretending - but I still spent first grade being VERY good! I didn't want to take any chances! Hmmm..... I wonder if my boys would fall for the electric paddle story?

Sometime before that year was over we moved to the red house just up the mountain from the school. Now I couldn't even ride the same bus with Aunt Rachel! But sometimes.... Mother would call the school and tell the secretary to have the Ezell girls ride home with Rachel so we could spend the afternoon with Grandmother! Oh how we all loved those days! We had no idea we were being babysat - we just thought we were getting a treat!

Apparently Rachel got lonely one fine day. She came to my school bus and hollered through the window "You are supposed to come to my house!". I hollered back: "Did Mother call the secketary?" Her reply: "Let me go check..." She trundled off and came back a very short while later and told me "I think she forgot, but you still need to come". So I climbed off the little tiny bus tha drove to my house and boarded the really long one that went to Grandmother's. (I have no idea where my sisters were that day - sick maybe?) Now, it takes a great deal longer to get to Grandmother's house in the big woods than it did to my little red house just up the mountain from the school. And in those days there were no cell phones to contact a bus driver to see if he has a stow-away! Needless to say, when Rachel and I climbed off her bus an hour later, there were so not-so-happy relatives there to greet us!

I remember the summer she made sandals for all of us from the naugahyde she found in Grandaddy's workshop. They were SO totally cool! Mother thought between-the-toes sandals must surely be bad for growing feet so she never bought us any, but Rachel could make them and we loved them even if they weren't all that durable!

I still smile when I think of this episode and many like it - it always seemed to me a bit of an awesome thing that Rachel, my aunt, would choose to spend time playing with her younger niece! We had such a great time making red clay animals to bake in the sun, picking up rocks for Grandaddy, hiding under the upstairs bed to listen out the front window when when we were big enough to know better, playing in the creek, and eating popcorn with a piece of Aunt Esther's fudge hidden at the bottom! I remember being there when she met the man she would later marry and being so pround of my pretty, popular aunt!

Now I don't get to talk to her enough or see her anywhere NEAR enough, but I still enjoy every minute I get to spend with her. Happy Birthday Aunt Rachel! Enjoy your day so much that you have to crawl across the floor and flop bonelessly into your soft bed to enjoy sweet dreams!