Mrs. Estes was like another grandmother to me and my siblings. She would come over every morning and fix us breakfast and get us off to school and then she would be waiting there, at the house, each afternoon when we arrived home from school. Mrs. Estes was kind of like our own little Mrs. Doubtfire!!
Gertrude, as she later came to never-be-known-to-us-as, was quite a huge help to my mom. Even as I sit here and write this, I had to text my mom, dad, sister and brother to ask what Mrs. Estes' first name was. My dad replied with a "don't know". My mom replied with "go look up Alice Faye Burnett's obituary, that was her daughter". My brother responded with "Esther". I responded back with "that was Fred Sanford's mean sister-in-law's name on the television show Sanford & Son!". Finally, my sister, last to respond, texted "Mrs."!!! I am cracking up because none of my family called her anything but "Mrs. Estes"!!! Come to find out, by reading the obituary of Mrs. Estes' daughter, Alice Fay, Mrs. Estes' name was indeed...Gertrude!!
Mrs. Estes would clean our whole house while we were all gone to work and school. She would hurry and get the vacuuming done before my dad got home from work because he would need to sleep. Mrs. Estes would change our sheets, scrub the bathrooms, dust, do the laundry, and have our after school snacks ready for us when we got back home from school. Sometimes she would even start supper...man, my mom sure did have it made!! 😉 We would go outside and play and she'd sit in the window and watch us as the neighborhood boys and girls would come over to start a game of kick ball, soccer, or play H.O.R.S.E. with the basketball. We had a swingset, a playhouse, a sandbox, bicycles and tricycles, and a Big Wheel with a wagon hitch! We loved to sit out by the huge honeysuckle bush and suck the "juice" out of the flowers. It was a huge treat!! Sometimes, we would climb the Pear tree and get on top of the garage...which, if you were even more brave than that...you would jump from the garage over to the playhouse roof which was about five or six feet across! I have no idea what we were thinking...or why we were allowed to do such dangerous things...but we did...and we all survived!! LOL Yep, we drank water from the garden hose, chewed on painted window seals and crib rails slathered with lead paint, we ran around barefoot, we put mercuricome (loaded with Mercury) on our scraped knees and elbows, and we probably ate lots of dirt with our grubby little hands we never washed prior to eating! It sure is a wonder we're all living to tell about it!!
Back to Mrs. Estes...one of the most memorable moments I have of Mrs. Estes was that she always put my top sheet on upside-down when making my bed. I remember every single time I got in my bed and that top sheet was upside-down...I would be totally annoyed!! I don't even know why this bothered me, it isn't like I have OCD or anything!! I'm pretty laid-back...normally...but for some reason, that was just something I just couldn't overlook. I'd pull that sheet off and redo it...only to find it upside down again the next night!! lol I would ask myself "what was wrong with Mrs. Estes?!" "Couldn't she see that the colorful side of the sheet was facing down?!" I later learned that the flat sheet was supposed to be like that...turned down or folded over so the pretty side WAS actually facing up once it was folded over...how was I to know that's what the ritzy people required of their bedding!! I was only a little kid!
Oh, how I would love to have a "Mrs. Estes" in my life...and I wouldn't care one bit if the top sheet was on upside-down...or backwards...shoot, I wouldn't give a rip if the sheets didn't even match!!
RIP Mrs. Estes, we sure loved you!
No comments:
Post a Comment