Random Recollections I

Recently I remembered that several years ago I had asked my mother to record stories from her life, especially her childhood. She was not comfortable doing a voice recording, so she wrote them down and emailed them to me. I found them in a file and will post one each of the next few weeks, with my comments. She called them "Random Recollections of Dorothy Reed" so I use that title, too.

"The first “event” I remember in my life was the day my step-grandmother was buried in 1933. My biological grandmother died of pneumonia and was buried on my dad’s third birthday in 1892.
My parents, two older brothers and I lived in a small house across a huge garden from where my grandparents and Aunty Mabel lived in a big house.
I was not allowed to go to the funeral so my Aunt Leona (my mother’s only sister) and her son, Clayton, came to stay with me in the little house. The funeral took place in the big house and we watched from inside as the people came. I don’t remember seeing the hearse or cars leaving, so maybe I fell asleep before that happened.
I have a picture in my mind of her being “laid out” on a black leather couch in the living room of the big house. Maybe I was taken in to see her before the funeral or perhaps I have made up the image in my mind from things other people have said about that day."

That means that my mother lived where those lilac bushes were in the corner of the small pasture just west of the house that I knew, which was the big house mentioned. As she points out, it can be difficult to distinguish between memories and imaginations, years later.