Can you imagine inviting someone over to your house because you have a new microwave oven? That was an exciting event in 1976, I guess.
Friday (October 8, 1976)
Dear Robin,
I surely was glad to get a letter from you yesterday - it had been so long I was getting worried.
I have been at Lisa's all morning. I went over to see her new microwave oven and stayed to watch her decorate Karly's birthday cake. She is taking a cake decorating course at Scrivener's. The one she is making is Holly Hobbie and it is so cute. We went to a shop that sells everything you can imagine for cakes. I got a set that has a small Holly Hobbie pan, bowl, mix for cake and icing, pastry bag and tips, spatula and spoon for Karly's birthday present.
If the weather is good Monday morning I'm going to get Ben and we are going to Nora's to fish. We will take him home in the evening but I will probably stay all night.
The apartment idea sounds good as long as you realize how much more work it will be - like cooking, cleaning and washing dishes.
It really got cold here this morning. We have had some rain and also some beautiful weather.
I've got to go get some stamps and a few groceries.
Love
Mother
Do you know anything about Holly Hobbie? She was big in the 70s - there were dolls, greeting cards, books.... I just learned that the artist who drew the old-fashioned girl in the big blue bonnet and patchwork pinafore was actually named Holly Hobbie herself. Apparently there's a new version of Holly Hobbie - who knew? So now there's "new" HH and "classic" HH.
Mom made several of her granddaughters their own Hollie Hobbie dolls. I wonder if any of them still have theirs. She made me one, too, for my dorm room. I was supposed to imagine it telling me, "Study, study, study," every time I looked at it. In the mid 1980s we had a puppy who chewed on poor Holly's head and in 1996 my husband and daughter and I moved from Alabama back to Texas and it was packed in a box with a gallon jug of distilled water. When I unpacked the box I found that the water had opened and spilled and the doll was ruined by mold. I was devastated. I was able to rescue the dress and bonnet, though. I have the pattern she used and I keep saying that someday I'm going to make another doll, but...I don't know. It wouldn't be the same.
2 comments:
I hate that Holly Hobbie (or was it Hollie Hobby?) was ruined!! I love the letter from your mom!!
Hi Lisa! Thanks for the comment. Yep. I cried all day. It was just one more unpleasant episode in the whole moving-to-Tyler experience.
I love that I have most of my mom's letters to me in college and I am enjoying blogging them. I'm learning a lot as I revisit them. First, she got around! Later in her life (although not much later because she died in 1983), she became more reclusive, especially after she got diagnosed with cancer. Some of her friends didn't even know she was unwell until they read her obituary.
And I knew she loved to fish, but she seems sort of obsessive about it in the fall of '76! I have a picture in my mind of a tea-and-toast, sit-and-watch-tv-and-crochet granny puttering around the house, but that was not the case, apparently. Funny how our memories can be unreliable.
I just realized that in 1976 she was two years younger than I am now!
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