The house in Flower Mound,while modest by Texas standards, is big by any other standard. Following that rule that nature abhors a vacuum, we managed to fill up all the space of that Texas house. But we're moving to a much smaller house in Park City, which by the way already has stuff in it. So we really had to start "going through stuff." In doing so I found some surprising things I had forgotten all about.
Many years ago my Mom unloaded on me box with a lot of my old little kid stuff. I'm not sure I ever looked through the box, but just moved it from St. Louis to Flagstaff to Danville to Flower Mound. When I was little kid everyone had a collection, sort of memorabilia of trips and places, such as stickers for cars, patches for backpacks, etc.. You may remember Grandma Wendel collected refrigerator magnets of states. Janell I think collected little glasses. I collected pennants.Well, I finally opened it up and found my pennant collection from when I was around 8 years old.
The collection is "electic," but the more or less tracks the trips we made. There was a trip to El Paso, I think for Dorothy's wedding (I'm not really sure. At that age I didn't really pay that much attention to the reason for the trip). That trip took us through the Southwest: Zion's National Park, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, El Paso and Juarez, We also made a trip to the Seattle Worlds Fair that also included a trip through Oregon to San Francisco to see an aunt and uncle and cousins (the Baclawski's) who then lived in Mill Valley (North Bay, San Francisco) and of course trips up to Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, usually only when relatives came to visit. Really, how many people do you know with a 1958 Grand Canyon National Park pennant or an Afton, Wyoming or Pocatello, Idaho pennant?
My grandfather, George Brown (my mom's dad), known to us as "Pappy," was a cowboy's cowboy and spent most of his early live wrangling horses and cattle in northern Mexico and southern New Mexico. When I was little he sent me these spurs. I was never quite sure whether they were "real" spurs that a cowboy like Pappy would use or some toy spurs that you could buy at souvenir stores across the border in Juarez (actually probably the later). At that time we had just moved to Star Valley, Wyoming, and some of my best friends had horses, They didn't seem to use spurs much and those I saw didn't look like these. Nonetheless, these (along with a single shot 22 rifle he also gave me) were my only tangible connection to my cowboy grandfather.
I also found a very heavy box of vinyl records that I've been carrying around since college even thought since the 1987 when we moved to St. Louis I haven't had a turntable and no way to actually listen to them.
My record collection from my high school and freshman college days (after which cassette tapes began to replace the records as the favored medium) was pretty lame by rock fan standards, but at that time in your life music is important and some of those albums were dear old friends (which I suppose is why I hauled them around all these years even though I couldn't play them). Any way the husband of our real estate agent is a true vinyl fan and collector (and also repairs and sells old turntables as a hobby). In the crucible of moving those dear old friends became, via his real estate agent wife, his anniversary present (which I understand was very well received). Tough decisions needed to be made (but the pennants and spurs are still in a box somewhere. I think the 22 may still be in the house in Nampa somewhere).
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