Skip to main content

Toilet Paper! (Jeanne)

 A few days ago, Louie and I were TPed. Whoever did it didn't do a very good job, though. It was enough to remind me of my own teen years and TPing our friends' houses. One time, my friends had hit our house on Aldrich Avenue really hard. My mom didn't like wastefulness and disapproved of TPing. She made me pick up as much of the TP as I possibly could. Stored in brown grocery bags, she made us use it in the bathroom before we were allowed to "get" rolls of toilet paper that were from the store.


Whoever TPed our house last weekend had left a 3/4 roll of paper by the garbage can. Louie asked me what I did with it. "Picked it up and put it in the bathroom upstairs." "You're going to use it?" "Absolutely! It was still dry." Then I thought of my mom and smiled. Perfectly good toilet paper - why throw it away?


I also remember my mom having all three of us girls come into the bathroom so she could demonstrate how to select paper for wiping after tinkling. She removed four - FOUR! - little squares of paper and said that was enough to wipe with. I don't remember exactly how we reacted, but I'm pretty sure we all continued to grab as much as we wanted / needed. Poor mother! Three girls with small bladders - we went through a lot of TP!


With Covid-19 and survivalist hoarders, it's been interesting to try to find TP products. It's easier now than it was in April, but 2020 has been a weird year, no question.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emergency Contact (Jeanne)

This is a sad story. I'm not 100% what year it was (2011-2013?) but I had to fill out the same old paperwork for work. Every year, the same stuff! Phone number, address, blah blah blah. (I was super tempted to write "Nothing's changed.")  But on the section where it asked for a secondary contact in case of emergency, I paused. And cried.   Louie is always my first contact. But my mom had always been that second one, just in case. And it must have been the fall of 2011, because I remember the struggle I felt knowing she wouldn't have the mental acuity to take an emergency call on my behalf. The realization that her role in my life had changed and I needed to be strong for her . . . rather than me being able to lean on her . . . that was hard.   I asked Morgan if I could put his name and number down in case of an emergency if they couldn't reach his dad. Of course, he said yes.    I am incredibly blessed that I had my mom around for 48 years of my life and that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Earthquakes (Jeanne)

With the news of the earthquake that hit Morocco last Friday (Sept. 8, 2023), I was reminded of a conversation I had with my mom many years ago. We were talking about things that scared us. She said she was most frightened of earthquakes. That surprised me, but as we talked she shared about her time living in California in the 1950s.  She said it was a terrible feeling to be going about her day and have things suddenly start shaking and rattling. She told me she never wanted to live in an earthquake zone again. I asked her if it was more frightening than tornadoes and she said absolutely. We talked about how we'd never experienced hurricanes or volcanoes. It was an interesting conversation that I just recently remembered. Actually, I think she may have been on the gulf coast during a hurricane after that conversation . . . but I wasn't there. That's a Louise story to tell!
Post a Comment
Read more

Dad Builds a Rock Garden (Tom)

Told by Tom: Grandma Somers wanted a rock garden in her yard. (According to our mom, going to St. Quentin back in the day was like going into the wild, wild, west with dirt everywhere. There were no flowers, no trees, no grass. Our grandma liked beauty and had the only house with greenery.) Dad didn't really want to build a rock garden, but he wanted to make his mom happy. He told grandma that he was going fishing with his brothers and then he had to go to work. He would pick up some rocks in the stream and put them in the trunk of his car. He got home from fishing and grandma had had a load of rock dumped off in the yard, but dad had to go to work. So grandma had our Uncle Al make her the rock garden. Uncle Al didn't care, and grandma knew it. She knew Larry would do a more careful job, so when she saw him again she asked him to come out and look at the job Al did. She asked dad, "So what do you think?" Dad didn't want to work on it, so he said, "I think h...
Post a Comment
Read more