Clifton, Texas, a small farming town, is located in the beautiful Hill Country of Central Texas 35 miles southeast of the larger town Waco.  As soon as the school year ended, I left our small blue collar town of Grand Prairie and headed to my maternal grandparents farm in Clifton.

A vacation there was so different from the routine city life.  On that hot, dusty, dry Texas farm there were many new things to explore.  There was the vegetable garden many, many yards from the old white, frame farmhouse with its peeling paint.  I loved walking through the garden smelling the fresh dill growing tall along the border of the barbed wire fence. To this day the smell of dill reminds me of my grandmother and that garden.  The dill was used to flavor the cucumbers she picked and canned every summer. However I despised watering the garden for we had to fill large tin buckets with water and lug them to the garden. There was no irrigation to the garden; money was scarce in those post World War II days.  In the garden bees and other insects swooped past me emitting their unmistakable buzzing sound.  My short, quite round grandmother would say “Oh yea, oh yea, watch the bucket, you’re splashing all of the water out.” 

She walked with a pronounced limp, the result of an injury as a young mother she received when she was forced to jump out of a wagon that was being pulled by a spooked horse.  The doctor believed that she wouldn’t live so he didn’t bother to reset the hip bone. When she became overly tired which was often, she would say with a moan “Oh mein schmerzenden rucken.”  (Oh my aching back.)

During the day I would sit and listen to “Sparkey and His Friends” on the radio.  They had no television then and never had one throughout their lifetime. I remember one day in particular I was sitting next to the radio which sat on a spindle legged wooden table, absorbed in every word of Sparkey’s adventures when my grandmother barked “Shut that racket box off, nobody is listening to it.”   My grandmother would often reprimand my grandfather for clowning around with me by saying “Ah Joe, stop that foolishness.”  When she detected an offending odor she would say “Ah fooey!”