Tag: memories

The Day I Went to School With My Brother

brendast

January 5, 2026

I wasn’t school age yet. I must have been four or five — sometime around 1956 or 1957. After watching my brother get on the big yellow school bus every morning, my mother sent me along to school with him one day.

It must have been late spring because I don’t remember needing a coat, and I’m fairly sure I wore a dress—because girls wore dresses to school then. It was one of those mild, sunlit days. That’s why I’ve always thought of it that way. 

The teacher gave me a little chair to use beside my brother’s desk. I was the only “extra” child — for which I am sure the teacher must have been grateful, but I remember feeling like one of the big kids as I colored beside him.

Recess was quite an adventure for me. There were so many kids to play with where I normally spent most of my days playing alone or with my dog, Brownie, while my brother was in school.

When recess was over, the teacher rang the bell for everyone to come back inside. It was a handheld bell, not the electric kind schools have today.


I have often wondered what led up to going to school with my brother, and why it was allowed, but there is no one left to ask how it came about. It may have been one of those end-of-the-year “bring your sibling to school” days—but that’s only my best guess.

Brownie and Me

brendast

December 31, 2025

When I was about three years old, we lived on a farm. My playmates were the barn cats, my dog, Brownie, and my brother who was in school all day. 

Brownie was a mixed-breed dog, but to my young eyes he looked very much like a border collie. He was mostly black, with white boots on his feet and soft brown markings just above them, where the white fur met the black. His face was dark, except for the brown eyebrows that always delighted me—I had never seen a dog with eyebrows before. He was beautiful to me, and he was mine.

One day, Brownie and I wandered into the chicken yard adjacent to the house. The chickens were long gone, and my Dad had placed an empty rabbit hutch there. 

Curious, I walked over and opened the door, which was only latched with a scrap of wood and a nail. To lock or unlock the door, all you had to do was turn the piece of wood. 

I unlatched it and climbed in. As the door shut, the latch fell into place and I couldn’t get out. So, what does a little kid do when she’s scared? I cried. And cried. And then cried some more. 

The more I cried, the more agitated Brownie got. Soon, he took off for the house and started barking his loudest at the back door. Mom tried to make him hush, but he wouldn’t stop. She finally came outdoors where she heard  me crying. 

Still barking, Brownie took off for the chicken yard, stopping every few steps to make sure Mom was following. It only took her moments to reach me, but it was such a relief to finally be in her arms. 

Brownie was somewhat of a legend in our family. Mom knew he could be trusted to look after me. That wasn’t our last adventure, but it was the last rabbit cage I tried to crawl into!

The Patched Dishcloth

brendast

December 20, 2025

One day, long after I was married and had children of my own, I was at my mother’s house, cooking and doing dishes as we prepared for a family dinner. I reached into the drawer where she kept her dishcloths and towels. A scrap of multicolored terrycloth with white stitching caught my eye, and I reached in to pull it out of the drawer. 

I immediately started laughing. Turning without comment, I held it up in front of her. She recognized why I was laughing, then she began to laugh along with me.

What I held in my hands was a patched dishcloth. It was a solid piece of fabric, clearly made from two different cloths — one pink, one lavender — stitched together with white thread to form something new. It represented her life in so many ways — and how she cared for her family.

Both of my parents’ lives were shaped by the Great Depression and the years of World War II where they learned the value of taking care of what they owned and mending what was broken. In this case, a torn dishcloth, insignificant by itself, was made into something useful once again. 

I thought of the other things she mended without ceremony. Socks turned inside out and mended as she watched television with the family, hems let down or taken up as we grew, small tears stitched before they became big ones. She crocheted doilies to decorate our home, kept the house tidy, and somehow made ordinary days feel cared for. None of it was showy. It was simply how she cared for us. 

Everything that she did in life was to see that we were warm and fed and had everything that we needed and almost everything that we wanted. As a child, I may not have appreciated that fully. As an adult and the mother of four, I understood precisely where her heart was and what it takes to make a home.

After Mom passed away, I took that patched dishcloth and put it away as a cherished memento — not just of her life, but of the quiet, ordinary care she gave us every day.