Page 32 - Senior Link Magazine Summer 2018- Online Magazine
P. 32
HONORING SENIORS
MY SIDE OF LIFE
Virginia Taylor AS TOLD TO JANE BROMLEY
It was in sparsely-populated Floyd the windmill. It doesn’t hold water afternoons taking walks and picking
County, a few decades ago, that anymore, but it still stands on the up pretty rocks. Sometimes they
Little Miss Virginia Faye Taylor property where Virginia has lived would go play in the nearby creek
arrived on planet Earth, her story almost all of her life. and find even prettier rocks. They
unfolding on the wide, open plains would bring them home and pile
of West Texas. She was born into “My grandmothers had a strong them at the corners of the porch.
two early pioneer ranching families influence on my life. I was blessed “Grandmother Taylor taught me
- the firstborn of J.P. and Trudie to get to visit with them often,” to appreciate nature and to see the
Frances Merrell Taylor’s three Virginia attests. She remembers beauty in the land around me.”
children. The other two were J. Grandmother Taylor’s long hair
Ronald and Katie Gwen. that she wore in braids coiled on “Grandmother Merrell was always
top of her head. They spent long caring for other people,” Virginia
She grew up in a three-room remembers. Virginia would go
house with neither running water, with her grandmother to carry
electricity nor bathroom facilities food and clothing to some of the
- only a one-hole outhouse. Her neighbors, her grandmother being
mother cooked on a wood-burning very sensitive to other people’s
stove, and the whole family slept needs since she’d had a very tough
in the one bedroom. Elm trees time growing up. “I learned from
and cottonwood trees surrounded Grandmother Merrell to help
the house. A windmill, a barn, a care for those less fortunate than
chicken house, a smokehouse and myself.”
a scale house (for weighing cattle)
completed the setting for Virginia’s Most people today are highly
childhood. Her memory is filled dependent on their phones, but that
with happy imes playing outdoors industry has come a long way from
with her brother. And, since the its early beginnings. The phone lines
nearest neighbors had all boys, little to her grandparents’ houses were
Virginia played lots of “Cowboys strung along the tops of wire fences.
and Indians”. Virginia taught herself Each house had a specific number
to swim in the big metal tank by of rings. “That’s how you knew the
32 Lubbock Senior Link
