I wrote this article for Lori’s Blog Corner…obviously for Halloween. See below for a little bit about my Nana, Mary Kathleen. http://lorisreadingcorner.blogspot.com/

When I was a little girl my Nana turned me into Little Bo Peep.

I don’t know why someone like myself, who ran around in ragged shorts and sandals, climbed trees, rolled on the grass, studied spiders, hid in bushes during Hide and Seek, and roller skated everywhere wanted, all of the sudden, to be a sweet and gentle Little Bo Peep for Halloween, but I did.

My Nana, Mary Kathleen, could sew anything.  The sewing machine and she were one and magic came out the other side.  I still remember a padded golden sewing kit and playing with a jar full of unique buttons.  From yards of white silky material and pink satin sprang the most beautiful dress and bonnet for me. I was a homely kid, and I knew it, but for once, in that soft white and pink material,  I felt pretty.  I was Little Bo Peep Cathy, complete with a wood staff.

It’s interesting what you remember about your grandparents, and what you wish you had asked them before they died. My elegant Nana died when I was in my mid – teens, long after Bo Beep, but before I was mature enough to realize that I should be sittin’ my ole’ bottom down in a chair with Nana and asking a bunch of questions.

I knew a little about my Nana, and much of it was heart breaking. Her mother died when she was four, a few weeks after giving birth to my Nana’s brother. She died of “blood poisoning,” their term then, which we would treat here immediately and the mother would go on home and put her feet up. After her mother’s death, Mary Kathleen’s father took off into the wild blue yonder. I do not believe that he ever returned from the yonder.

Mary Kathleen and her baby brother were then tossed around from family to family and, I heard, through my own mother, that my Nana never felt that anyone really  wanted her. She felt she was a burden. It was rumored that the son of a judge in her town in Decatur, Texas, wanted to marry her and would pay for her to go to college if she did, but that marriage was not to be. She politely declined,  a southern lady through and through.

Tall and willowy, she fell in love with my Grandpa, Thomas Cecil, a tough man from a tough background who loved her from the start.  Thomas Cecil was the son of an Arkansas farmer who, with three wives, all of whom died before him, had eleven kids. His, hers, and theirs. Thomas Cecil’s mother died when he was about four years old, also. His family had a farm and all the kids worked it, long hours, every day. You worked, or you didn’t eat. Pretty simple.

As he told me later, with some bitterness, “You don’t want a farm, Cathy, honey, it’s hard, hard work.”

Thomas Cecil and his brothers moved from Arkansas to California for a better life and built houses all over  Los Angeles.  He knew what being poor looked like, and he did not like it. He knew his way out was through endless hard work, long hours, long days, maybe a fight or two. He would swear up one side and down the other at other men in the rough and tumble construction business, but never at my Nana and never at my mother.

He went through booms and he went through busts, a pile of money, and no money. My guess is that his houses are still standing as the man believed in quality and craftsmanship.

Mary Kathleen and Thomas Cecil had a long marriage. Both lived into their seventies, though they each started smoking in their teens. It was stylish, it was cool. They didn’t know then what we know now.

They had my mother, who they adored, and she had four kids, one of whom was Little Bo Peep on Halloween because her wonderful Nana, who had survived painful hardship and loss, took the time to lovingly, carefully, make her the perfect Halloween outfit, a treat she has never forgotten.

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