Our Families and their Untold Stories

I took this picture of my Momma last year, but I love it.

She is a wonderful, wonderful woman and words can’t even begin to express how much I love her.  I see her daily struggle with Alzheimer’s and it saddens me to no end.  If I could have one wish granted it would be to take this horrible disease away from my mother.  She has never expressed one worry about her herself throughout this whole ordeal.  She worries about being a burden and what she is doing to us.  I tell her and I mean it, she will never be a burden.  EVER.  We love her and we will see this through with her, together as a family.

These two boys, are the apple of my eye.  I love them to the moon and back and I am so thankful God chose me to be their mother.

Yesterday I called my Dad and asked him to think about a special memory of his mother and to ask my mother to do the same.  When I called back later in the day, they had some stories for me to share with you.

Dad told me that when he was about 5 or 6 years old, his momma played on the women’s Independence Basketball Team as a guard and they always played at the North Heights Gym in Texarkana. He loved to go and watch her play. This is one of his favorite memories of her. This is a picture of my Dad with his Mother, Edna Harris Higginbotham at an anniversary party for my Mom and Dad. It was their 25th anniversary. This year will be their 49th anniversary.

Here is a picture of Dad and Memaw from the way back files.

Mom told me that one day when she was a little girl she and her mother were walking down the street in downtown Texarkana and as they got closer and closer they could hear the radio playing over the loud-speaker at Hawkins Feed Store, and they heard the announcement that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. My grandmother grabbed my mother’s hand and they ran all the way home. Not long after that, my grandfather volunteered for the Army and ended up in Japan fighting. They lived with my great-grandfather Parks at the time in what my mother calls “The Big House”, on Walnut Street in downtown Texarkana. Granddad Parks took in women to live in the house whose men were away at ar, and my mother remembers all the good times she had with all the women in the house. After the war was over she and my grandmother went to Fort Chaffee to pick up my grandfather, and he was so skinny and worn down they walked right by him and didn’t even recognize him until he called out to them.

Here is a picture of my grandmother and grandfather Parks.

This is the house they lived in during the war, and until my Granddad Parks died in 1966.  My mother always lived here until she went to college.  She had a room in the big house with her grandparents, and my grandparents lived in the little apartment house to the side of the big house.  This house is at 406 Walnut.  A group of lawyers have it now and they have restored it beautifully.  They gave my mom and I tour of it one time.

This is a picture of my mom and grandmother, probably at about the time of the war.

One of my favorite memories of my mother and I (I have many though) is the time she, Addie and I went to Bethany, Missouri and found out all about her maternal grandmother’s family that she had never met.  Her grandmother died giving birth to her father so she had never known her.  Her name was Helen Roleke Parks and her father was the mayor of Bethany for 32 years!  Addie took this picture of Mom and I standing by a street sign for a road they named for him.

Well, that’s our walk down Mother Memory Lane, I hope you will take the time out today to think of your favorite memories and preserve them for future generations.  Had I not asked my father and mother for their memories to do this post, I would never have known my grandmother Higginbotham played basketball!

Susie