Tag Archives: #me

X – XMAS Memory – 1975

A-Z Challenge 2023, Christmas, Williams, ,

This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations. In a few cases I took an old post and updated it with new information.

Kristin and Jim

Christmas Trip From Mississippi to St. Louis – 1975

We moved to Simpson County, Mississippi in November of 1975.  Jim was in charge of the Emergency Land Fund’s Model farm.  Our daughter Jilo was 5 and Ife was 2.5.  I was 29 and six months pregnant with our third daughter Ayanna. Jim was just about to turn 31.  This was before we had goats, chickens or rabbits.  The greenhouses weren’t in production.  I remember several of the farmers Jim worked with gave him gifts of money for Christmas.  It didn’t amount to more than $30 total but it paid for all the gas we used.

Jilo, Ife and Deborah Williams.
Jilo, Ife and Aunt Debbie Williams.
Ife and Theola Williams
Ife and Theola Williams.

We decided to drive up to share the holidays with Jim’s family in Rock Hill, MO.  They lived at #1 Inglewood Court, right outside of St. Louis. 17 year old Micheal, 15 year old Monette and 12 year old Debbie were living at home.

A gift from my mother-in-law that Christmas.
A gift to Jim from his mother that Christmas

We made the 8 hour trip in the little gray Volkswagen bug that came with the job. We took food to eat on the way, left early and drove straight through.  I don’t remember anything specific about driving up. As I recall we got to St. Louis before dark.  Jim’s parents gave us their bedroom.  They were always so nice about that.  Jim and the kids and I shared the pushed together twin beds.  There weren’t presents for us but Jim’s mother looked around and came up with some. I don’t remember what she gave Jilo and Ife but she gave me two copper vases and Jim two glass paperweights. I don’t remember what we took as gifts.

Three of Jim’s brothers – Micheal, Chester, Harold. St. Louis 1975

I remember going to see Jim’s brother, Harold at one of his jobs.  He had several, just like his father always did. We also stopped by his studio where he made plaster knick knacks.  Or was it cement bird baths?  Or both?  There was a Salvation Army or Goodwill store nearby and we stopped and I got some shirts for the kids and a dress that Ife wanted.  Mostly we stayed around the house and visited.We stayed until New Years Eve and left in the evening.  There is never enough food or time to prepare it for the return trip. We stopped at Howard Johnson’s somewhere on the way home and I remember getting fried oysters. It was cold and dark and clear. There were stars. And there are always trucks. We listened to the radio and talked and maybe sang some.  The kids eventually fell asleep in the backseat and we welcomed the New Year driving through the night.

#AtoZChallenge 2023 letter X

U- ULTIMATE Eggnog

A-Z Challenge 2023, Cleages, Detroit, ,

This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.

eggnog
Pearl with an eggnog mustache, my mother, me posing with our goblets of eggnog about 1963.
eggnog recipe
.Detroit Free Press, 18 Dec 1977, Sun  •  Page 73 I can’t believe we used all that sugar!

This was the eggnog we drank during the Christmas/New Year holidays. I got the recipe from my mother. When I found it in the Newspaper, it is dated 1977. We were drinking it during the 1960s. I looked in my mother’s Women’s Home Companion Cookbook and found …

This recipe is what we must be drinking in these photos! There was no whisky or cognac brandy added.

Women’s Home Companion Cook Book page 95
My mother and me playing Stratego and drinking eggnog.
#AtoZChallenge 2023 letter U

K – KRISTIN KNITTING

A-Z Challenge 2023, Detroit

This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.

Knitting a scarf 1966.

The only thing I ever knitted was a pale blue very long scarf that I wore for years through Detroit winters. I don’t remember why I started knitting it and why I never had an interest in knitting anything else.

I’m wearing my scarf here in the winter of 1968/1969, between graduation from Wayne State University and my cross country trip. I am the tall one.
#AtoZChallenge 2023 letter K

G – GARDENING

A-Z Challenge 2023, , , ,

This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.

garden
My grandfather working in his garden with my cousin Dee Dee. 1945
My mother looking at her corn at the first Old Plank Garden in 1961.
Me in my garden 1994

The Real Garden

Kristin Cleage

Our garden this year has been great, best I’ve had in years. Jim Tulani, James and Cabral got up a fence in early June that keeps the dogs from rolling around in the beds. Jim brought several pickup loads of horse manure from a local horse owner soon after the fence went up. He also roto-tilled several planting beds that were over grown and made a large double bed for the corn.

I got it planted soon after, before weeds could take over again and mulched everything heavily…the hay was here on time. We got all of this done pretty much before I started working. The beginning of the summer was hot and dry, so I watered. It soon changed to hot and wet, wet, wet. Now it’s cooling off and raining pretty well.

We’ve been eating summer squash, plenty of green beans (freezing some too.), collards, broccoli, swiss chard. The corn is tassling and there’s enough of it this year that you can hear it rustling in the wind. The pumpkins and winter squash may make it before frost if they hurry. Lots of green tomatoes, onions and red beans. The only down side so far is that the beans I planted with the corn (I even let the corn get up good before I planted them this year.) turned out to be bush beans and not Kentucky Wonder climbers. Looks kind of strange having those bush beans growing around the bottom of the corn.

I plan to put in lettuce, mustard, turnip and transplant kale as soon as the beans give out and by putting plastic over the pipes I bent over them, to eat from the garden up until Thanksgiving.

And next year with the fence already up, maybe I’ll really get some plants started and out early and have potatoes. The tomatoes Ayanna started this year look good. I did dream we had a killing frost a few nights ago, but I hope it was just a dream, I mean, it’s only August? No killing frost in August, even in the North woods, right?

The Ruff Draft May/June 1994 page 5

Today I did two G posts, unawares. The other is G- Glimpses in Detroit’s Mirror!

#AtoZChallenge 2023 letter G

F – FALL 1948

A-Z Challenge 2023, Photographs, Springfield, MA

This is my tenth A to Z Challenge. My first was in 2013, but I missed 2021. This April I am going through the alphabet using snippets about my family through the generations.

A page from the family album.

I managed to scan a few pages of the old album before they crumpled. My father wrote on brief descriptions. In the fall of 1948 I was two. My sister Pearl would be born in December of that year. One of my favorite activities was playing in the dirt. I remember watching the neighbor mother fuss at her little daughter, who was about my size, for playing in the dirt. Even at that time I thought that was sad. There were two sets of stairs, one on each side of the porch, so people did not have to walk through my kitchen when they came out of the back door.

fairy castle
Kristin and Barbara digging in Nanny’s and Poppy’s yard.
Digging on uncle Louis’ Idlewild beach with cousin Barbara 1956.
Still enjoying the dirt in my garden 2006.
#AtoZChallenge 2023 letter F

The Snake

Biography, Cleages, Photographs, ,

I used to like making small places outside. The first one I remember was under the back porch when we lived in a two family flat on Calvert in Detroit. The porch above wasn’t high enough up for me to stand up, but it wasn’t so low I had to crawl in. I found bricks around and built a two or three brick high wall around two sides. I don’t remember doing much out there after I got it together. I was about nine years old at that time. My sister remembers playing marbles there. I did make a nice, smooth dirt floor.

Me beside my quilt tent, held up on the former chicken house with bricks.

In Poppy’s and Nanny’s yard we made tents out of quilts. We would use them for the duration of whatever game we were playing. My Quilt Tent – 1958

Later when we lived on Oregon, I built a snow house against the garage one winter. Again, I don’t remember hanging around in it. After all it was winter in the 1950s when winter was freezing and snowy for months. I also cleaned up the garage and fixed it up as a place I could go. But it was a garage and I remember the smell wasn’t that pleasant. Rats around the garbage cans? I never saw any, but I gave that one up.

Building the stick and leaf hut.

At Old Plank, I made a stick frame and wove large leaves into it. As you can see I even built a campfire circle of stones and had a fire going at least once.

Enjoying a campfire in front of the hut.
Henry holding the long snake found in the hut

One morning I came out and found a snake curled comfortably inside. It was cool and the snake was sluggish. Henry did what he always did when coming upon a snake, he killed it. I don’t remember the particulars, did he beat it to death or did he shoot it? What sort of snake was it? Above he is holding it up for the photographer, probably my mother. I do remember an incident decades later in Idlewild when Henry did kill a snake at my Aunt Barbara’s with a blow as I tried to persuade him it was a harmless snake that ate mice. He paid me no mind.

A Buggy, A Visitor and a Mystery – 1950

Biography, sepia saturday, Springfield, MA,
The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts
Nov 04, 1947 · Page 13

We were living in Springfield, Massachusetts where my father was the pastor of St. John’s Congregational Church.

One cool day in 1950 my little sister Pearl and I were playing with our dolls and buggy in the back yard. Perhaps it was one of those in the advertisement to the left.

I was four. Pearl was about 18 months. An older girl appears on the scene. I do not remember who she was. A neighbor? The child of a church member? No idea.

Me and my doll.
Pearl joins me.
Showing the guest my doll.
The guest looks suspicious while I explain things and Pearl looks on.
Uh oh!
Pearl is pointing at something in the guest’s hand. Are my fists balled up? My doll watches
Looking for …

For more posts about me and my family in 1950 go to this link- My family in 1950

For more Sepia Saturday posts, click picture

Riding the Clairmount Bus – 1969

Biography, Detroit, sepia saturday

Oddly enough, I do not have any personal photographs of buses. I do have an ancient journal entry chronicling a very bizarre bus ride I took in Detroit down Joy Road on the Clairmount bus in 1969. I had just graduated from Wayne State in December of 1968 and I was enjoying my freedom. I was living in my own apartment and working at the Black Star Clothing Factory. My cousin Barbara was living in New York City, the East Village. at the time and I was plotting and planning a visit with her. I did make it later that summer. I turned 23 that August.

Kristin and Barbara 1969, at her sister Dee Dee’s house.

I didn’t capitalize anything in the journal so I just left it like that.

journal entry

June 25, 1969

I don’t know what is going on, it isn’t good though. i was leaving friday for new york, but i don’t think so soon. i need a bit more time (for what?) i been listening to new leonard cohen record.  two days over and over at first it was tired, but now i really like it, after the old revolution, i liked best the partisan song about coming out the shadows. i am so sleepy .

everybody is mad/crazy, and i really don’t understand at all. i need pearl’s youth card so that I can leave, go to NYC.

 yesterday on the way to a photo show, I was on the clairmont bus on joy rd.  the driver was crazy, he acted like he was taking a pregnant woman to the hospital, he was weaving the bus in and out between cars.  that was bad enough – old ladies rocking, weaving and falling, when suddenly a red light backs up traffic, or just stops it. he pulls belligerently into the lane of oncoming traffic (which lucky for us was empty at the time) and raced two blocks in the wrong lane to pull and bully his way in front of some poor car when the light changed. I was cracking up. the people weren’t, just me.  I couldn’t control myself laughing, mouth open etc. they probably thought I was crazy or something. so ridiculous, can’t even imagine a regular car doing that shit. I just don’t know, I really don’t. some lunatic jehovah’s witness knocked on the door to give me a bible study tract. says god’s kingdom is eminent. we should be so lucky.

Click to see other Sepia Saturday posts

Y – Youth & a Mop

1950 Census, A-Z Challenge 2022, Springfield, MA,

This is my ninth year of blogging the A to Z Challenge. Everyday I will share something about my family’s life during 1950. This was a year that the USA federal census was taken and the first one that I appear in. At the end of each post I will share a book from my childhood collection.

Youth with a mop. Sunday school? My birthday? August 1950.

Why were we all sitting on the stairs in our dresses? I have no idea. It was during my cousin’s August visit from Detroit. Maybe it was my birthday and I had turned four.

Why didn’t the photographer notice that mop propped against the wall and move it? I understand that. I’ve taken many photos and never noticed the distracting bottles on the table.

I do recognize about half of the children. Taking the front row from left to right – unknown girl with purse, Sherrie Johnson looking mad, unknown girl with a doll, Pearl eating something. Second row: unknown smiling girl, my cousin Dee Dee looking peeved, my cousin Barbara looking worried, me saying something to Barbara “Don’t worry Barbara.” On the top step, unknown girl looking at the camera and Lynn Johnson (Sherrie’s sister), also eating something.

The Springfield Union February 7, 1950
My mother – Doris Graham Cleage
Mrs. Cleage Speaker

“When the St. Paul’s Youth Fellowship gathers in the parish house Sunday evening at 7, it will hear from Mrs. Albert Cleage, Jr., of Springfield on the subject “What it means to be a Negro”

Mrs. Cleage is the wife of the minister of St. John’s Congregational Church, Springfield. A graduate of Wayne University, Detroit. Mrs. Cleage has done social work for the American Red Cross in Detroit and Los Angeles”

The Springfield Union February 7, 1950

A Poem From Today’s Youth

After posting this, I found that my thirteen year old great niece Bailey Tucker, had written a poem that could have used the same title as my mother’s talk, except we don’t use “Negro” today. I am adding it to the post. I know my mother must be smiling to have her great granddaughter following in her footsteps.

Black by Bailey Tucker. Transcribed below.

Black

It’s not fair we get shot at.
It’s not fair we get pulled off a bike at 8.
It’s not fair they yell because our skin tone.
It’s not fair they’re mad because our hair.
It’s not fair they call us ghetto because our voice.
It’s not fair we can’t walk with our hoods on.
It’s not fair we can’t walk with our head down.
It’s not fair they call us thugs for having tattoos.
It’s not fair we get stared at.
It’s not fair they call us fatherless.
It’s not fair we are treated different.

IT’S NOT FAIR IT’S NOT FAIR IT’S NOT FAIR

_________________

Little Galoshes

Unfortunately they don’t share the pictures in the book, they just read it. You can see some of the illustrations here -> Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves