A Christmas party at an old folk's home is quite a sight. There is a new executive director here, though, and she seems to have given it a valient try. The band was actually pretty good - two guitars, a drum set, keyboard, and clarinet. They played all the s standard Christmas tunes and some folk classics. Last year all they had was one guy screeching out solos, accompanting himself on a keyboard.

Santa made his obligatory appearance. They need to either gert a new Santa suit and a new beard, though, or dry clean the ones they have, 'cause Santa was looking right scruffy.

The amusing part about this attempt at Christmas glee is the way the old folks react to it - or, rather, the way they DON'T react to it. They all just sit around in their wheelchairs and look at the band. They don't smile, they don't talk, they don't sway to the music or tap their feet or hum along - nothing. They just stare at the band.

Rain! What a pain!

Most folks do not like the rain,
In fact, they think it sucks.
I think NO ONE likes the rain,
Except, perhaps, for ducks.



“Never run in the rain with your socks on.”
― Billie Joe Armstrong

What did Santa Claus’s wife say during a thunderstorm?
Come and look at the rain, dear.

What kind of umbrella does the Queen of England carry on a rainy day?
A wet one

Why do mother kangaroos hate rainy days?
Because then the children have to play inside

There was a communist named Rudolph. One day he looked out the window and said, “It looks like a storm is coming.” “No it isn t,” said his wife. “Besides, how would you know?” “Because,” he responded, “Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.”


I think that maybe the rain has rotted my brain!





Hmmmmm... I just found a reason for hope!

Winchester, cont.

Back to Winchester...

Sue swears the parsonage was haunted. She was 2-6 when we lived there, and can remember sitting calmly on her bed and talking to two children with red hair that floated around outside her window. Not to put too much stock in this, but we WERE immedialely up the street from the hospital... and it WAS a really old house with lots of history...

But, come to think of it, both of her older siblings DID make her watch Dark Shadows every afternoon.

It was a pretty, nice, moderate sized house on a good street. The house had a great front porch, on which we played "Lost in Space"


I was always Dad or Don, because I was oldest. Ed was Will Robinson. Jennifer Costello was all the women. Sue, being youngest, was the robot.

Winchester

Back to parsonages-

After Roanoke, we moved to Market Street Church in Winchester. Market Street Church had been through the Civil War. Church ownership changed from North to South dozens of times - often even several times a day. There were bloodstains on the wooden steps up to the balcony, because the balcony was used as a hospital. The walls of one of basement Sunday School rooms wouldn't hold paint. Freshly applied paint immediately peeled off, because, during the war, blocks of salt were stored in the room.

The house was old. We had two stories containing 4 bedrooms and an unfinished basement.

The basement had two rooms. One was a big room with a tile floor. It was fairly dark and dingy. The other room had a dirt floor, and, according to my parents, had once been a root cellar. Considering the civil war history of the church, however, we children preferred to believe that it was a secret confederate cemetery. We dug for bones on many occasions, but never found any.

The house was fair sized. It had both a full formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen. There was room in the living room for my piano, which we bought with Dad's wedding money.

It was a nice old house. You could tell it was nice because it had cut glass doorknobs. It had 4 bedrooms, so we each had our own room. (Granny didn't live with us then.) Methodist parsonages are furnished. My room had a great big, antique double bed with a huge headboard and a huge old chest of drawers and a large bureau with an attached mirror. Having been totally self-absorbed at that age, I have no idea what kind of furniture my siblings or parents had.