Nearly vibrating with excitement, I climbed out of the family car Daddy had parked on a side street. My family lived on a farm near the village of Stratford and in the late 1950’s we didn’t visit the big city of Marshfield often. My being able to come along on shopping trips was even more infrequent since I’d started attending grade school four years ago. What little I remembered from preschool visits, served to fill me with inflated expectations.

Mom sewed all the dresses that my sisters and I wore, so I knew we would be visiting fabric stores, but those didn’t interest me as much as the drug, jewelry, stationery and five and dime stores. The first place my mother visited was J C Penney’s fabric section. I thought, “Good, we can get this part of our shopping trip out of the way first, then do the fun stuff.”

Looking at floral fabrics that Mom would sew into pretty dresses wasn’t so bad, but then she sat down at a table to look at pattern books. After what felt like hours I begged, “Are you all most done?” She wasn’t. We visited two other fabric stores. Finally, laden with packages, we visited a drug store for a special hair tonic to prevent Mom’s graying hair from turning yellow, a jewelry store to drop off a broken watch for fixing and a stationery store for a writing tablet. Continue reading →