That’s the BlogHer Find Your Roots prompt for today. Family stories! Hmm. My Dad doesn’t have any actual stories, mostly details and explanations of growing up on a little farm around Chicago chasing loose cows and breathing in the dust from baling hay. My mom was the storyteller in the family. Her stories are all in her memoir, Cherry Blossoms in Twilight. I don’t remember all that much from when I was little, so I can’t believe how good her memory was.
One of my favorite stories of Mom’s was how she and a friend, as teen girls tired of pigtails and wearing drab colored clothing to camouflage themselves from warplanes, decided to ride their bikes out to the hairdresser to get permanents. Mom’s mother warned them it was dangerous, but off they went pedaling down the path between tea fields, carrying charcoal to make the fire to heat the curlers. They heard the whine of a warplane behind them in the distance and pedaled faster. But the whine got louder and louder until the plane was so close they threw their bikes down on the dirt road and jumped into the tea bushes. Rat-a-tat-tat, the plane dove in and shot up their bikes, leaving the girls to walk their bikes the rest of the way to the hairdresser and all the way back. When they finally returned, my grandmother shook her head, saying, “You girls are foolish! Your lives are more important than curly hair.”
Girls will be girls, I guess, war or no war.
My mom (left) kept her hair curly almost all the rest of her life
moonbridgebooks 