Family Stories with Ginny: Flowers and More Flowers with Sissy and Charley-man Sandifer

This is Bud, CD, and Doris Campbell

sitting in the midst of lush blooms
on a late-summer day in 1930.
How do we know the date?
CD is just a few months old, and
Bud remembers that Doris' hair was
cut this way just before her first year in school.

The children lived on a farm outside of
Crowell, Texas that we shall explore in other posts,
and loved when they came to town where they could
visit Aunt Sissy and Uncle Charley-man.

In shade alongside the house, they are lying on a rug Sissy has spread out;
the grass could be quite scratchy as many of us recall.
Bud's face is charming in the light, CD examines his right fist,
and Doris lazes with her ankles lifted toward the sky.

Sissy often hid little presents for them inside the Sitting Room. Playing in the yard was also a delight, and we have several more family photos of Bud and Doris playing amidst the flowers.

The yard was filled -- absolutely filled -- with flowers all the time. Here, Sissy and Charley-man stand near their house behind a sea of flowers. We all recognize what a gift it is to have such a green thumb, particularly in the dry heat of Foard County.

CD recalls that many of the flowers were larkspur, such as we see in the foreground. Below are some varieties of larkspur that he emailed to me; you might notice the resemblance to delphiniums. Larkspur are smaller and a bit more delicate than their stately-tall elegant cousins.

Here are Sissy and Charley-man many years later;

we still see evidence of those abundant flowers.

And don't you just love the suspenders and neck-tie

that Charley-man sports?

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Flowers and More Flowers with Sissy and Charley-man Sandifer