Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.
[Oscar Wilde]

Rachel Misegades, my mama, made audio recordings of her childhood memories. A friend of mine transcribed the stories and digitized the audio files for me. I also have many old photographs. The one above was taken in the 1920s—Mama astride her pony, Lady.

I have launched a weblog just for Mama’s Stories. I’ll put both the transcribed version and the audio version on the blog along with a photo. Here is an example of one of her little stories:

I was born September the 7th, 1906, at Cherryvale, Kansas. My father was fireman for the steam boilers in a brick yard about two or three miles south of the city. A little village grew up around the brick yard called Corbin City. But we soon moved closer to town on 10 acres and had several cows, a team of horses, pigs, chickens and a huge garden. My grandfather, my mother’s father, lived with us and he had to have a garden. One morning, as my father came from work, he asked me to put my hand down in his overcoat pocket. I did that and felt something warm and fuzzy. He brought it out of the pocket and it was a yellow kitty. There were some kitties at the brick yard and he noticed that this one looked so hungry, and was in need of TLC, so he brought it home to me. I had a book that was The Three Kittens, and one of the kittens was yellow and named Mouser so of course that became my kitty’s name. Well we had Mouser sixteen years before he died.

The following is an MP3 audio file of Mama telling the same story as quoted above:
[Audio http://www.atimetoknit.com/mama/Story_1.mp3%5D