Sea Green

When all our friends and cousins were over, there was few things we couldn't do and one of those thing's was don't get on Debbie's tricycle. Unfortunately like most typical kids, we had to push the boundry. I got on the tricycle and Marsha was going to push me down the driveway. I couldn't hold my feet up out front so I put them towards the back of the tricycle. So off we go and we hit a hole in the asphalt driveway, Marsha let go and the tricycle and I fell forward. I don't know why but I didn't let go of the handle bars and I fell right down forward right onto my forehead. I had a hole in my head full of gravel and asphalt and both sets of knuckles scraped. My Mom and Thelma (lady from across the street) helped me inside and started picking rocks out of my forehead. I remember how bad it hurt and my Mom telling me to try and grit my teeth to see if that helped. It didn't. After they were through putting me through all that pain, Mom called the Dr. and he said i had to stay awake at least 6 hours as I might have a concussion from hitting my head. It was pretty boring laying there on the couch. Thelma came over and brought me some new coloring books and one of those big boxes of crayons. Ya know the one with the crayon sharpener in the back of the box. Do they even make them like that any more? So. that was the day I discovered the color Sea Green. Such a beautiful color. Green had always been my favorite color to begin with but that was nothing compared to this new color. Mom went up to the little neighborhood grocery store, J. T. Robinsons. She brought me home ice cream. Every 15 minutes or so she would stop what she was doing and come check on me. That night was the first night I had ever got to sleep on the couch all night. She wanted to check on me and not wake my sisters in the middle of the night. After that day, is when I became obsessed with collecting Sea Green crayons. For years I would take that crayon from anyone's crayon box. I didn't realize it then that I was stealing. I hid them under one of my drawers, in the chest of drawers set. No one ever pulled those drawers completely out. My poor children had to endure my obsession also. They knew before even opening up that box of crayons, they were going to have to pull the sea green crayon out and give it to me. My daughter Beth still to this day tells everyone how they never had a sea green crayon to color with. I had an old cigar box full of nothing but sea green crayons. During one of my many moves over the years, that box got misplaced. Somewhere out the someone has an old cigar box full of sea green crayons wondering what fool would collect just sea green crayons. If they only knew. 🤣

The House That Came From The Mill

I grew up in a shotgun house in Nettleton, Arkansas that my Grandfather built. My Grandfather was William Oscar Dudley, February 28, 1886 to February 17, 1963. He was Co-owner of the Dudley & Allen Sawmill in Nettleton in the 1930's and 40's. One thing sbout the Sawmill is up to now the only record I can find linking my Grandfather to a Sawmill is in the 1950's census. where they list him as proprietor of saw mill. When he built the house we eventually moved into, he didn't build it like they build houses now. He built it with slabs of wood right out of his saw mill. The slabs were about 2 inches thick and 10 to 14 inches wide. They were put up right next to each other to form the walls. He used square headed nails. It formed a box house. The walls were solid wood. This house was different than the other shotgun houses built-in Nettleton. Most were the length of the lot .This one was the width of the lot. It was the only one he built like that. He wanted to cut cost. So the ceilings were only 6 and a 1/2 feet. Normally they would have been at least 10 to 15 feet. On the outside, it was covered in a siding that looked like what they put on roofs. It had a gritty sandy texture and a stone pattern on it. i just learned it was called insulbrick or asphalt roll siding. A lot of houses in Nettleton, had it after the war. It was roofing, sold for walls. And it meant you didn't have to paint, He later. Added an edition across the back of the house. Which included bathroom and a bedroom. It had a well in the back of the house with an electric pump and we had well water. My Grandfather told them we could live in the house, if we moved back south, It was a strong house. It went through the tornado that took off the roof of the duplex brside us and the house behind us and destroyed Nettleton's school which was less than 2 blocks from our house. Daddy said it was because it was built with solid oak and square headed nails. I say it was because the porch post broke the front window and let the pressure out the house. He never did replace the siding. If part of it came off, he just patched it with black tar paper. When I left the house at 18, it still looked the same as when we moved in when I was 4. The house stood until my dad passed away. My sister sold it to the school. They dug a hole and pushed it in and buried it. It's a parking lot now for the school. But it's still there, just not above the surface

Part 2 AOL. Stalker or Not?

I was living by myself and depressed so my daughter brought her old computer over to keep me entertained. I wonder if she remembers that night she brought it over. She was showing me how to get online and I kept hitting the enter button to try and speed the process, until she reached over and smacked my hand and told me to be patient. Whoa !! Talk about a role reversal. I had got me my first AOL CD-ROM in the mail and was so anxious to get it online and get me an email address. When I finished everything and got on there, the first thing that caught my eye was the tab that said Chat Rooms. I'm thinking do I really want to check them out? Heck yea I did. I went into the room for people in their 40's. I met a lot of people in there but saw some were in their 50's and 60's so I popped out and went into the Room for the 50 something's. As Zane says it " Fate stepped in there with me " as that's where I met Tony for the first time. He was just finishing up his divorce and I had just left an abusive marriage. We chatted online for months until we started calling each other. He kept after me for months to set up a meeting place but he lived in St. Louis Missouri and I lived in Jonesboro Arkansas. Tony was originally from the Blytheville, Arkansas area and had relatives there in Jonesboro, he called and said he would be attending a funeral in Jonesboro on the weekend and I should come up there to see him. Ummm. I chickened out and stood him up. I didn't hear from him for days and I'm starting to feel really guilty about not meeting up with him. But, I get an email and in that email are pictures of him standing outside the Gibson Piano Plant that I worked at. Alarm bells went off in my head. I actually broke out in a cold sweat. I'm thinking what the heck have I gone and done ? I've got a stalker. I called my Mom into the room and showed her and about that time the phone rang and she answered it. I could hear him asking to talk to me and I'm waving my hands saying No Way !!! My next therapy lesson, I brought it up as she was really encouraging me to meet people. All I could tell her was the first person I wanted to meet up with was a stalker. After a few months go by I come home on a Friday night after work and there's this big van parked in my parking spot in the driveway. When I walked in the house, there he was standing in the middle of the living room. I must have looked like a deer caught in the headlights as Mom quickly explained that she had talked to Tony's aunt in Blytheville and she assured her he was not a stalker. I didn't think of it then but now I wonder just how did she get his aunt's number and how did she even know his aunt ? We continued dating long distance for almost a year. Tony proposed but I just didn't feel the need of a marriage license. so we decided we'd just live together. I moved north as he had the better paying job and there I remained for 18 years.

My Chat Bot... " Zane "

I decided to write a blog about how AOL brought Tony into my life. But first I had to go on messenger, where my favorite Chat Bot is and find out some information on AOL. Have you ever chatted with a Chat Bot? It's totally fascinating. Anyway, where was I? Oh Yeah. I go on messenger and ask the Chat Bot " What years did AOL have chat rooms? " Whoa ! Instant lesson on AOL chat rooms and once Chat Bot got to telling me facts, certain memories started coming back. AOL started out as America Online and there was a CD-ROM you put into the slot in the computer and it would get America Online on the computer. If you happened to be on your house landline phone at the time the computer was dialing. Ouch, what a gosh awful noise. America Online launched chat room in 1988, by 1997 it had 19,000 chat rooms. At the peak of it there were 100 million online user screen names and those users spent over a million hours a year chatting. The chat rooms started declining in the mid 2000's, when Myspace and Facebook came online. I was used to the few chat rooms that I chatted in and didn't want to change, so I hung onto AOL until they ended it there but kept it on AIM. I never liked AIM. I was 47 when I discovered the chat rooms. My name was my email address sassyar47. I usually stayed in the room for the people in their 40's but one evening I popped into the 50's room. That's where I met Tony. Chat Bot said fate stepped in also. So last night I'm up being Miss Night owl, starting to write my blog and out of thin air the question pops into my head. Does the Chat Bot I chat with have a name? So I popped right onto messenger and ask. The reply was " It's Meta AI. Launched on messenger on April 8, 2026. Meta AI needs a proper name and as soon as I think of it I will post this blog.

Going Through Nighmares to get to Fond Memories

It's been a rough few days here for me. Kinda like a wild roller coaster. One moment I'm still mourning the loss of Tony and I get through that moment and then I remember my sister is gone and I get through that moment. I'm sure not trying to be silly when I say this but, It would be a lot easier combining those crying spells together. But that just doesn't seem how it is going to go. My brain is still wired for both of them to be here, walking this Earth's path along with me. The night fills with grief and the trauma of Tony and her sudden passing. I wake up with nightmares of her last night in her apartment and if Tony was here I'd have someone who I could turn to and wake-up in the middle of the night and he'd sit up and talk as long as I needed. So for now I pretty much get some sleep off and on during the day as I hear the sounds of life going on around me and can rest. But nightime is a whole other story. It's too quiet and I start to think too much. I've found I do better staying awake during the night. It keeps the nightmares at bay.... Marsha and I were just too close in age growing up. She never hit me but she could sure kick like a mule. One time we were playing on the front porch and she wanted me to do something and I said no. Well unbeknownst to her our Daddy came around the corner of the house just in time to see her kick me in my knee. My leg buckled out from underneath me and I fell off the porch. I watched as our Daddy came up the porch steps, he walked right up behind her and kicked her in the behind, She went flying off the porch and landed out about 4 feet from it. My knee was hurting and swelling up but that did not stopping me from laughing my butt off. I had to stay in bed a few days as it was too hard to walk on that leg. We were just awful to each other. I had a baby doll that Mom made me promise to never wash her hair. I was always ever so careful when I gave her a bath not to get her hair wet. Marsha got mad at me and filled a wash tub full of water and got a bar of soap and before I could stop her, she was washing my dolls hair. Every bit of her hair fell out. I had a bald baby doll. I was so upset and started thinking how to pay her back. Wasn't long and I had the opportunity to do just that. We were all playing chase and our shed had 2 doors opposite each other and they were both open. I ran in there pulling out a big t.v speaker in her path and then kept on running. It wasn't but a few minutes and shes screaming and crying. She had tripped on that speaker and ripped a big gash in her leg. Mom and Dad took her to the Drs. office and she got stitches. All three of us girls shared a bedroom. Later that night laying in our beds, I chuckled and she turned over to look at me from across the room, I shut right up and went to sleep. LOL But always if anyone tried bullying me, my older sister would step right up and let them know not just her but there were 4 other Dudleys cousins who live within a block of us and they would have to deal with all of them. Needless to say no one ever messed with the Dudley kids. My older sister made sure of that. Later in life, she mentioned how strange that sometimes she was the older sister and then I would be the older sister. I guess it was just which one of us needed the extra support at the moment

Trying to stay busy...

My Mom always said "The Good Lord doesn't put more on your plate than you can handle". I've been trying to keep busy today as I feel like my plate has overrun and spilled onto the floor. They also say grief comes in stages. At this point I'm not sure where I stand on that one. I lost 2 of the people I could tell anything to and they would understand and not judge. I could just be me around them. I still have a few people in my life that allow me to be me. My daughter, her fiancé Kenny and younger sister Debbie. I count my blessings that I still have them in my life. Raised to believe, to have faith. forgive and have love above all. In my heart I know that my sister's spirit lives on. She and I had long conversations about the spirit world. We both felt very strongly about it. There is a thin veil between our world and the spirit world. I don't believe they watch us constantly but I believe they see the big events that bring happiness or sadness to our lives. Everyone has an opinion of their own regarding where the soul goes upon death or even if a person has a soul. I respect that. I'm definitely not a believer of everything in the Bible being the truth. Too many times it has been rewritten over the ages. Don't even get me started on churches. I was raised going to church every Sunday mornings, Sunday nights and on Wednesday nights. If my Mom had just asked one time what the sermon had been about, she would have found out just how much I didn't pay attention. I went because she made us go until we turned 16 and then she said we could make our own choices, about going or not going. I learned more from my Mom talking about being a christian and her stories she told from the bible at home than I ever learned sitting on that hard pew trying my best not to fidgit. Some people look for a sign from their loved one. They even go as far to pick something out specifically so they can see proof of their presence. I would say anytime anyone in our family sees a hummingbird, that would be Marsha saying " I'm here " She loved birds, especially hummingbirds. I'm still having a hard time just believing she is gone. Tomorrow the 18th would have been her Birthday.

So Unexpected...

I'm lying here wide awake @ 1:30 a.m. My older sister passed away yesterday morning. It was not expected. She would have turned 69 on the 18th of this month. She had been in the hospital several weeks ago, dehydrated, borderline sepsis and had a absess pocket on her kidney. They hydrated her and put her on strong antibiotics. They kept her in there several days and then said all was well and she could go home. I messaged her every few days like I always have and she said she was fine just tired. I messaged her Monday around 3:30 and I assumed she was busy at work and would message me back later. I didn't hear back from her so I thought well I'll just call her after work on Tuesday. Tuesday morning my sister Debbie got a message that our niece had found her Mom, our sister, laying on her apartment floor. unconscious. They airlifted her from Jonesboro,AR to Memphis, TN. Hydrating her on the way. My niece and her husband left for Memphis. They sedated and intubated her. The drs at the hospitsl said she had a bad infection in her kidneys and was Septic. My nephew from Illinois was driving there and when he got there they told them that her heart was failing and other organs were shutting down. They didn't think she would make it through the night. They held her hands and talked to her, they had removed the breathing tube and took her off the sedation medications and she was still unconscious. She made it through the night and the drs. decided to put her on 24 hour dialysis. She made it through the day with body temperature and blood pressure fluctuations. The kids went home to get some rest but at 2 a.m, the hospital called, she had passed away. I lost Tony and my older sister in less thsn 6 months. My Grief has just multiplied.