#52 STORIES

Your great-Aunt Judy (and Gary too) is serving a church headquarters mission in Salt Lake City in the church history department. As part of that they are asked to be very involved in their own family history. Out of that has grown her idea for the Giberson siblings to participate in a FamilySearch idea called #52 STORIES. That means you follow a prompt to write a story a week for 52 weeks and by the end of the year you have a nice chunk of stories as part of your personal history. We are sharing them on our Giberiginal blog but I will post mine here too.

Share a memory of your first year in school

I remember going to some sort of Kindergarten orientation. I think Robin came too because it was customary to have someone more experienced bring you--I am not clear on this but have a faint memory of it. My teacher was Mrs. Bareth and my best friend Molly had Mrs. Bondurant so that was just wrong. My one vivid memory from the year is getting rapped on the hand with a ruler because I touched an egg the teacher was using for a lesson that day. This may sound like discipline straight out of old-timey days but this was 1966. (Of course to you that is old-timey!)

Tell a story that includes the weather in some way

I don’t think it snowed a lot where I grew up in Richland, Washington, but when it did I remember we would make some sort of track in the snow in our front yard with intersecting points, and then play tag on it. I remember doing this when it was dark outside so I'm not sure if we did this a lot or just the one time.

Texas makes me think of thunderstorms—the big one that came when we were staying at the Howard Johnson when we first arrived in town, and the one at the campground in Lubbock when our tent fell apart. We were there I think for Mike’s patriarchal blessing and then Stake Conference the next day. (Mom wrote about this event in her book of family stories.)

Things you connect with your childhood home...Longfitt, Agnes or Carlton (This prompt will need to come up again so I can talk about Carlton)

Note: Longfitt is the street my family lived on when I was born. We moved to Agnes Street when I was 18 months old. When I was 10 we moved to Texas and lived on Carlton Drive.

Agnes Street: playing records on the record player and singing and dancing to our favorites, getting the piano, reading books from the library, playing dodge ball in the backyard, playing with Matchbox cars in a hole in the ground behind the garage, learning to skate in the basement, Mom sewing, the rough, rocky surface of Agnes Street, playing with Molly and other neighborhood friends, our phone number 939-9039 (I think I'm remembering it right), the lilac bush outside our back door, tumbleweeds, the Shelter Belt and getting in trouble for going out past the Shelter Belt, being excited about the “Mosquito Man” coming, Jim Sloman living with us, Jerry the mailman delivering the mail on a snowmobile on a snowy day, the excitement of Christmas Eve, watching The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Monkees, Perry Mason, Star Trek, Batman, and other shows . . .