Every year my good friend Becky sends me a Mother’s Day card with pictures of her three sons who were a major part of my healing process when my mother passed in 2012. My Mother’s Day card this week shows handsome teenagers who still make me smile when I see them.
Pretty and I bought a house in Montgomery, Texas, in 2010; and I lived there off and on from 2010 – 2014. Pretty’s job in South Carolina made her visits to Texas less frequent than we had hoped so I was grateful for the Fabulous Huss Brothers (and my other neighbors on Worsham Street) who entertained me when they ran past the two houses down Worsham Street from their house to ours for visits. They brought joy with them.
The Fabulous Huss Brothers in our homeon Worsham Street
Now that I’m 80 years old I find myself brimming with advice for my readers in cyberspace: in a world dominated by useless noises from every direction, take time to talk to children before we teach them to filter their thoughts.
Happy Mother’s Day to every mother on the planet – we all owe you.
Onward.
P.S. Top two photos and card design by Becky Huss.
Just when you think you’ve had all the fun you can have with a new decade of life, two creative friends who weren’t able to come to my surprise 80th. Birthday Party on March 20th. (celebrating my actual birthday on April 21, 1946), contacted me about bringing gifts by the house in the past week.
My friend Saskia found this window on her street, placed there by a neighbor who put several on their street after replacing his old windows with new ones. She rescued two of the windows and decorated one for my birthday. These are her photos of “before” and “after” work on her Elmwood Park originals. She brought the finished project over today, and I swooned.
Before…
…After
The card that accompanied this awesome gift read, in part: Dear Sheila Rae, To celebrate and remember a pretty epic birthday month, I made you something a bit funky (for a funky lady). It’s a bit fragile and it may not last very long, but hopefully it will bring some smiles for the time that it does. (this window is about the same age as you 🙂 Too true.
I am still smiling over my new art created by my friend who thinks I’m a funky lady. That’s a huge compliment from this younger woman who immigrated to the USA from the Netherlands more than twenty years ago. Funky – I like it.
I also loved another gift made by the artist Donna Magrath who brought it by the house last week . Donna has birds and squirrels that frequent her apartment balcony where she feeds and pampers them. She’s recently begun taking their pictures and making postcards from the images.
the concern by the bird on the far right seemed sensible
(I love to see the well-fed birds enjoying a chat)
This gift was made by Donna for not only my birthday but also for Pretty’s birthday which is May 21st. so this was a clever way to bridge two dates with three birds. Donna’s work is always clever.
From the Birthday Bash on March 20th. to a Feliz Cinco de Mayo and all the festivities in between, turning to face a new decade has been a special time because of the love shared by family and friends at home in South Carolina, across the USA from California to Pennsylvania and New York via Texas, and across the pond to dear friends in Europe.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone. I’m happy, grateful, astonished by the generosity of your spirit and kindness to a funky old lady who grew up in a tiny town in Grimes County, Texas, in a different century.
With the exception of a few years in my seventies when arthritis limited my ability to git up and go on my own, I have always been committed to a morning walk. As a Taurus, I have also been committed to the same one-mile walking route day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, for the past nine years we’ve lived in this neighborhood. If you ask my wife, Pretty, my resistance to change is not always a virtue. Please don’t discuss it with her. I’m begging you.
Last week a woman who looks to be about my age, a woman who lives in a house along my regular route was outside in her front yard putting an envelope in her mailbox. I had seen her a few times, and we always waved to each other but had never spoken. She stopped this particular day to have a word with me.
“Hello,” she said. “I’ve seen you walk past our house every day for many years.”
“Yes,” I said. “Your house is at the top of a hill that’s hard for me to pull so I usually stop here to catch my breath.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask you if you’re following orders?” she asked.
“Following orders? I’m not sure what you mean,” I replied.
“I’m talking about doctors’ orders. Is there a doctor who’s making you walk every day?”
“Oh, no one’s making me walk,” I said and smiled. “I just do it for myself.”
She nodded, turned to walk back to her house, and said with a friendly wave, “I’m going to my sofa and watch tv, but you keep going.”
I laughed, and kept going.
Upon reflection I remember a doctor who did suggest walking would be good for me when I was thirty years old and had developed high blood pressure. That was several lifetimes ago – so long ago I can’t remember if that’s the original doctor’s orders which inspired my daily walks for the past fifty years or whether I connect my walks now with the memories of those long walks with my daddy at our hundred acres of pastures and piney woods just past the Grimes County/Montgomery County line in rural southeast Texas.
My daddy loved a long walk, too. We had the best talks when we were together in that place. Sometimes I see him and hear him as I walk through the neighborhood I call home in South Carolina today. No orders necessary.
Next Tuesday, April 21, 2026, is my 80th. birthday. Thank you very much for your well wishes, dear cyberspace friends, but let me say you would be late for that party – no, seriously, really late to that party – because I have family and friends who gave me a fabulous Surprise Birthday Party on Friday night, the 20th. of March. Well wishers from every decade of my adult life, well wishers galore.
Despite several hints that appeared by mistake in my text messages, speaker phone in our car, and confirming to me that they wouldn’t miss my party several weeks before the actual event I had no knowledge of, I never suspected a thing when Pretty insisted we go to a “pop-up” for our daughter-in-law and her twin sister on a Friday night in March. I am always reluctant to participate in activities away from the comfort of my recliner, or my “happy place” as Pretty calls it. At the same time Pretty knows I would do anything to support Caroline and Chloe’s business venture into the world of selling their delicious goodies. Yummy.
When we entered the large venue at 701 Whaley Street in Columbia at 7:00 o’clock, I stopped at the door of the ground floor, peeked inside, and told Pretty I thought this was the wrong place. The room was full of people who apparently were having a meeting of some kind as all were looking expectantly toward the door. I assumed they were waiting for a speaker until Pretty nudged me in.
The room erupted in Happy Birthday singing which I later learned was led by our six-year-old granddaughter Ella and four-year-old granddaughter Molly. They had microphones, but I couldn’t hear them above the adults who had chimed in. I recognized all of the people who were standing closer to the entrance, but it honestly never dawned on me that this was a party for my birthday until Jo Ann, one of our California Tahoe Ten friends, came up to hug me and say Happy Birthday! Jo Ann was as happy to see me as I was to see her!
Six women flew from California to surprise me for a birthday bash.
four of them were new friends from our Tahoe Trip in 2023 –
(Audrey and Debra were with Pretty and me for my 60th. birthday!)
Tahoe Ten in Tahoe in August, 2023
(l to r) Debra, Pretty, me,Audrey, Jo Ann, Chris (back row)
Angie, Joan, Nekki, Francie
me, Chris, Nekki and Francie
Every great surprise requires inspiration, planning, and execution. The California girls stayed for the weekend, and I found out Audrey, a South Carolina native who has lived in California for most of her adult life, provided the inspiration when she called Nekki and Francie to suggest the California contingent of the Tahoe Ten would head across the country for a birthday celebration if we could celebrate in March?
Francie and Nekki jumped on board and generously offered their home as vacation quarters for the trip. Pretty, of course, had to be part of the planning, but I understood she was in charge of security which had several breaches that she miraculously used her powers of spontaneous fabrication to cover up. Finally, someone had to be in charge of “memories collections” and presentation. Enter Rob, a great friend in Columbia, who had the tedious chore of sifting through eighty years of memories to create the following presentation I finally managed to enjoy last week. I invite you to watch if you want to make the journey with me. And have a few minutes to spare.
I tried to speak and take pictures with everyone who came, but that was impossible. The party co-conspirators said more than a hundred people came to surprise me on a Friday night in March. I was overwhelmed by the decorations, fabulous music played by a great DJ, tables for everyone who wanted to sit to enjoy the incredible food and adult beverages – no stone left unturned for fun together in the salute to my Texas heritage with a Rhinestone Cowboy theme.
Nekki, our head wrangler/emcee, encouraged people to give “testimonies” and share memories. Dick Hubbard, Linda Ketner, and Carmen Del Valle were among the speakers – I had known them over several lifetimes in my South Carolina adult life, and they were all very kind. Who was this person they remembered??
I was especially stirred with feelings of love and gratitude for not only the words Drew and Caroline, Ella and Molly spoke that night in front of the large gathering of people who knew our family mostly through Facebook pictures, but also their smiles. Memory makers. When T spoke, she had to know the happiness we shared during our twenty-five years together. These smiles are our dream keepers.
Drew holding Molly, Caroline, Ella
who knew four-year-old Molly would love a microphone?
Thank you, thank you, thank you – a thousand times thank you to the friends and family across the years who took the girl out of Texas to give her a forever home in South Carolina. I have a grateful heart and understand the meaning of feeling blessed. Whether from near or far, your presence was a gift at 701 Whaley Street on a Friday evening in March, 2026.
*********************
Bonus Pic nothing to do with anyone’s birthday – just a favorite of mine
My final post for this Women’s History Month is a reprint of portions of a piece I posted in November, 2016, saluting the Queens of Country Music I will always love, thank you very much, Dolly. So many conversations recently about the Man Who Would Be King in the USA – my thanks to those who organized and marched against him yesterday from sea to shining sea. Let me close the month on a more positive “note” to celebrate Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Anne Murray, and the power of storytelling in song.
When I was a little tomboy growing up in Grimes County, Texas, which was one of the poorest counties in the rural southeastern Piney Woods side of the state, my dad’s brother, my Uncle Ray who lived in the big city of Houston, was a huge country music fan…and when I say huge, I do mean huge. He was like the most faithful Saturday night radio Grand Ole Opry and Louisiana Hayride kind of country music fan.
The rest of my family was luke-warm to what are now considered the country music classics because they were all gospel music folks, snow white Southern Baptist church music kind of folks: quartets, singing conventions on Sunday afternoons with dinner on the grounds, Baptist Hymnal songs played on the organ and piano on Sunday mornings for the congregational singing.
Out of that place I began to sing solos in the little country church we attended before I could read the words to the songs. My mother taught them to me by repeating the words over and over until I could remember them. Then she would have me stand on a little folding chair on the floor just below the minister’s pulpit on Sunday morning to sing the “special music” for the service while she accompanied me on the piano.
I could look out on a congregation of maybe 50 people that included my two grandmothers, my dad, my grandfather, and at least two of my uncles…sometimes one more if my Uncle Ray came from Houston for Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s house. They all beamed back at me with love and great appreciation for my singing talents.
So much so that my Uncle Ray paid me the highest compliment he could give one Sunday after church when I had graduated to standing without the chair and actually was able to read the words to the music on my own. I must have been eight years old at the time.
Sheila Rae, he said, you sing as good as Patsy Cline. You should be on the radio on the Opry or the Louisiana Hayride.
This suggestion made quite the impression on my prepubescent self – remember this was in the 1950s before American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, The Voice and reality TV – and that comment sparked my interest in country music that has lasted for the past 60 (now 70) years. Could I sing as well as Patsy Cline? Clearly not, but I could fall in love with her music.
In times of trouble and deep distress, therefore, I am more apt to listen to the Country Classics. I think they’re good for what ails you.
Album Cover
Dolly Parton remains the last one standing of my favorites, but thank goodness for YouTube and the memories of Patsy Cline and Anne Murray. I saw Anne Murray in Vancouver, British Columbia, in concert in 1969 when I lived in Seattle, Washington. I had a huge crush on an older married woman at the time, and she invited me to go to the concert with her…and her husband. Anne Murray sang the right words to ease my naive heartbreak that evening and again in 1983 with A Little Good News that I believe is appropriate for the No Kings Days protests in 2026. The names need to be changed, but the problems remain oddly familiar 43 years later.
“A Little Good News”
I rolled out this morning…kids had the morning news show on Bryant Gumbel was talking about the fighting in Lebanon Some senator was squawking about the bad economy It’s gonna get worse you see we need a change in policy
There’s a local paper rolled up in a rubber band One more sad story’s one more than I can stand Just once, how I’d like to see the headline say Not much to print today can’t find nothing bad to say
Because…
Nobody robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town Nobody OD’d, nobody burned a single building down Nobody fired a shot in anger…nobody had to die in vain We sure could use a little good news today
I’ll come home this evening…I’ll bet that the news will be the same Somebody takes a hostage…somebody steals a plane How I wanna hear the anchor man talk about a county fair And how we cleaned up the air…how everybody learned to care
Whoa, tell me…
Nobody was assassinated in the whole Third World today And in the streets of Ireland all the children had to do was play And everybody loves everybody in the good old USA We sure could use a little good news today
Nobody robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town Nobody OD’d, nobody burned a single building down Nobody fired a shot in anger…nobody had to die in vain We sure could use a little good news today.
***********************
Until we meet again, I leave you with this Irish blessing: may all of your troubles be less and your blessings be more and may nothing but happiness come through your door.
Thank you for sharing Women’s History Month with me. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
I'll Call It Like I See It 
You must be logged in to post a comment.