November 19, 2020

In the last few months, I’ve experienced what I called a miracle day. 100,000 miracles. But so many things have happened to friends and family in the last four months or so, and yet there’s always the gratitude that someone has gotten well, that someone has found a home, that people have recovered from whatever major illnesses they have, that people that have lost others…

So I’m grateful and full of gratitude for all of the things in my life each day. And I feel that when we mentioned the talk about the family tradition, I always remember that my sister, Ginger, I called her Gingerbread. She would always have with her husband at the farm, the annual Halloween get-together where the whole family would dress up, including my mother.

And we had a wonderful time with shows, and we would sing and dance, and people would not recognize us because we would have such wonderful homemade costumes. But this was a family tradition. They’re no longer at the farm and Gingerbread is in heaven now. But those memories, especially with this past Halloween, are always with me for a beautiful tradition.

My mother, she was always dressed up as a witch to receive the children. She would get about 100 children. And we were so poor, they thought the house was decorated. But that’s how it looked all year. One time she didn’t even drink, but she dressed as a Budweiser beer. She was really creative, and she would put an old girdle on and a slip over it. And she really was a lot of fun for all the neighborhood, and for all of us children. We were so many, but she always dressed up every year.

And this was something that happened every single year. In a gigantic barn on the farm where my sister lived. And we really looked forward to it even dunking for apples in big tubs, the old fashioned tubs. And my brother Ramon, who we call Raymond Armando, would always take the coarse, the little things, the spindles off the apples. And when I would dunk, there would be nothing for me to get up and grab the apple with, and he would laugh. He’d do this to me all the time. Yeah.

Sometimes my older brother, Chris, would dress up and lie outside in the yard. And we would think it was, like, just one of the things they created, and he would jump up and scare us up. He would do that, especially in the dark. But so, we would have lots of food because everybody cooked, or they bought things if they couldn’t cook.

And it was just a wonderful, wonderful celebration actually of the night before All Saints’ Day. You know, so it was really, really exciting to have my eight sisters and four brothers, mom, and dad, everybody there at the parties every year. You see, Dad died in 1968, so he wasn’t there for the majority of the parties. But we always did remember all the fun we had when he was alive.