Maibelle McCullough Mouton:
Remembering With Joy

I am not sure all of you will be interested in checking the places on the map I have loved making. Guelcksie's room (2) was built in the side of the store and opened into his office. Outside his room three big black walnut trees held the rope swing and sheltered the lawn swing. You can see it was no flimsy boughten one, but the sturdy product of the hammer and nail crew of our day! (6)

Down by the front gate you will find (5) two tall cedar trees. They were twin pointed beauties, but oh! the most painful walking for barefeet!

(7) Here stood the four post arbor, a place to hide and a joy to smell! Honeysuckle even tastes good if you suck the small end of the blossoms!

The house that papa built for the Clover Bend family became our playhouse and even Kathleen had one of the big wooden boxes that were nailed to the wall for our paperdolls.

I think I was seven the year cousin Lizzie Ferris came to visit us. She was on her way home for her vacation and came through our town. Her visit in our home was dynamic! She was a teacher in a Navajo Indian school in Arizona. She taught us to sing an Indian song. I am not the faintest idea how the words should be spelled but that this is how they sounded.

"Ah-m gee nopa lamina cota
Toe pas easup chappachella vota"

She designed and made the Piedough dolls. Not that they had anything to do with pie dough! That was a Bopeep's baby way of saying "Philipino" We incorporated them into our family of dolls and had endless fun with them.

I'm glad we had this picture made a few years later to record the array of dolls and the welcomed accorded piedough boys. This picture was made on the north porch, where we always made ice cream. On the left you can see the dark door of the sitting room and behind the gingerbread banisters on the out side you can see the window of the kitchen.

Only Gladys is with me now to remember that Cousin Lizzie took us for long walk into the woods beyond the church and showed us how to fold paper boats and propel them along the ditch with long switches! The way home was long and Gladys and I fretted. "I wanted a drink!" And Cousin Lizzie said "Chew your tongue, dearie, and you won't want for water!" We never forgot that and we used to this chant to console one another when all sorts of disappointments and frustrations plagued our teenage lives!

But the same Cousin Lizzie, aided and abetted by our sister Lizzie, persuaded our mother to take her four bright little girls and move to Little Rock for the sake of our education.

When I remember that she was only sixteen when she married, and had spent twenty-two years producing eight children (she lost her first boy at birth) and was left a widow at thirty-eight year of age, it amazes me that she had the courage and fortitude to buy a house in Little Rock (1022 Park Avenue) and bring her family of five daughters to live there.

This was high adventure for an eight year old girl, the excitement of train travel, and to have for the next five years, the best two worlds!!

In Little Rock we had disciplined grammar school education, concrete sidewalks for roller skates and jacks, a big graded Sunday school and a vested choir, soloists and an educated pastor in a lovely church, and streetcars for transportation!

Then every summer we returned to Alicia, to go barefooted, climb trees, crawfish and make mud pies! loving the warm dust under our bare feet!

In Little Rock I saw my first automobile and actually rode in it. Mr. Williams who had sold mama our house lived across the street. Three days a week he was the engineer of the three clock fast mail train that flies through Alicia as if the town didn't exist! He bought the first automobile I ever saw!

His wife would not ride in it! But we children would! What an adventure! Just like flying!

When Mr. Williams learned of our summer home in Alicia, he promised to blow his whistle down by the sandcut and we could wave to him! Of course, we made a game out of that. No matter where we were, or what we were doing, when we heard that whistle, we yelled "Fast mail! Front gate!" And raced to the fence to wave at our friend!

This is the house that mama bought for us to live in and go to school in Little Rock. The last time I was in Little Rock we went past the house, still standing. That is Mama in the porch swing.