Mom and Dad on the farm

This is a picture of my parents doing chores on one of the various farms where they lived and worked.

Mom said that my father spent most of his free time at his parents house and only came home in the evening to sleep and have sex.

His parents complained about the relationship and said that my mother needed to give up her stupid pursuits of art and literature and get a job to take care of her family.

My mother did have several jobs outside of the home but she finally threw my father out of her life when he refused to care about loosing a home they were purchasing in Milledgeville Illinois. They remained married but separated until I was fifteen. We had been going to craft fairs in Wisconsin and my mother and I needed my father to drive us to a fair due to a loss of Mom's transportation.

While Mom and I slept my father made a wrong turn and drove further into Wisconsin. When she awoke and discovered his mistake she began yelling at him at first and then as she cooled off she and I just began mocking Vernon in a way that I had been accustomed to doing. After this incident my father asserted himself by asking for and getting a divorce.

My sister's relationship sponsored her years of abuse against my dead mother and myself.

My sister was a mentally unstable person who tortured me as a child. Once before she "ran away" (a term that is not exactly correct since the man she married was clever enough to "make-it-legal" by having our mentally impaired and morally questionable father sign a parental consent for the marriage.) she was eating smelly cheese on a hot day in our truck while our mother was in a business and I complained about the smell. She took the obnoxious stuff and smeared it on me. I was fed up with her abuse and I told her that there would be an inevitable day of reckoning for her soon since I was ten years old, growing, and had a big grudge. Later the milk advisory board stole the idea for one of their ads.

My sister likes to lick her fingers and is a noisy eater

Our family has been uncouth in it's table habits for far too many years. At the present time my father is making my life unbearable by his industrial sounds that he can produce with a spoon, bowl, and raisin bran. He thinks there are too many raisins in the cereal and he hits his bowls with a sharp and frequent clack as he pushes them to the side. My mother could roast a chicken and consume the whole thing in an explosive mass of slurping and sucking that left her glistening.

My sister picks at her food with her fingers and licks them constantly. I have been told that I eat too fast.

Viola said 'gacters' for her eyeglasses and she hated Santa Claus

Mom liked to keep an oral history of ourselves a part of her regular routines. She would tell choice stories of herself as though it were new information and she would remember a current event about my sister or I if it had the right sense of artfulness to it. The stories could be funny or about an abuse by an authoritarian buffoon. They were always stories where there were some sort of triumph by one of us, even if it were only how obviously wrong the nemeses were shown.

Two of Mom's favorites were about my sister, Viola. One was how she would mangle words when she was much younger and she had glasses put on her face when she was just three or four. She would say "I've got my Gacters." Mom thought this was very cute.

The other story was about a time when a woman approached Viola when she was still very young at Christmas and sweetly asked "And what would you like Santa to bring you this year?"

Viola puffed up her chest and blurted "I hate santa!!!" The poor woman was reportedly discombobulated by the shock.