Please Don't Throw Me in This Here Briar Patch

"We were like Brer Rabbit begging to be thrown into the briar patch. We are trying to tell the world it was all right since, like Brer Rabbit, we had been "born and bred in this here briar patch."

"All I want is protection and escape from the thorn like conditions much worse than any bramble patch on the hill. The difference is we are not like Brer Rabbit who was free after being hurled into it." Rodney’s background was an English grandfather from the Isle of Wight and mine was from Wales. My silly wordy comparisons sometimes caused him to look at me with wonder and absolutely no idea what I was saying.

Our small family was down to the bottom on our finances, and were even out of a car. Rod was riding a bicycle back and forth to work. Our clothes were rags and I was using the bits of change from teaching people to paint for Mark’s school clothes. When the girl who was ironing for me told her husband while I was standing there that she was tired of ironing rags it was a wake-up call for me.

The freedom from utilities and rent while we lived at Mother’s inherited home from Grandmother Lizzie allowed us to survive. Again my lifestyle must have caught the attention of someone up above and for whatever reason felt we needed to be out of our folk’s back yard. These were the only hardships as far as being at the mercy of the world around us. Sometimes folks must have believed we didn’t have any sense else we wouldn’t have been struggling so hard to work with a disabled child. Mother raised such a fuss for us to get out on our own we moved into an older, rented, two-story house. While trying to juggle Rod’s technician wages things just became impossible.

One has to remember this was a time of change. There was fear involved, too. Fear of the unknown. What consequences might be involved for these people to be out where all society, suddenly, must know there was less than a perfect race.

One cold morning while Rod was bundling up so he could climb on his bike to make his daily trek to work I stopped scrambling his eggs and held the spatula in mid-air.

"I’ll go with you back to Dallas if you want to move down there." I casually mentioned.

"Matter of fact, just had a job offer the other day." Rod was always short with words but I knew we were on our way again. He was in electronics at the time which would have been like saying Ponca City could offer up sandy ocean beaches and surfboards on sparkling blue water. That wouldn’t happen there were little electronics in the town at this time. He had been working for the oil company and although a number of his inventions were drawing small royalties we knew nothing great as far as being anything but a technician was going to be forthcoming.

Here we were in Dallas again and just as always bouncing about trying to find the best place and solutions for our problems. Rod nabbed a good job with Ling Tempco Vaught or LTV. Ling himself had a disabled child and whether this had any influence on my husband’s hiring was only a guess. Writing was a problem for Rodney and evidently this was a common problem with engineers because there were eleven secretaries hired to do but one thing and that was to write for their boss.

Rodney was happy he could work in his field, electronics, again.

Carroll school was now closed and a search began to find a good school for Rhonda. The first attempt was in one of the Dallas proper’s schools. A nice location in which to live was on Jonesboro Street in Dallas. The neighborhood was pleasant with long sidewalks and old trees draping their branches over the street. Every house was well maintained and clean looking and so were the small yards, This street felt a bit like Cayuga street where we lived when Mark was a baby. He was old enough to ride a bicycle by this time and the lengthy uninterrupted long street with good sidewalks was perfect for that

We laughed together when a Whippit dog came from several houses down and bound over the chain length fences as easily as if they were not even there.

"Oh wow! Look at that funny dog, Mom! It looks like a tiny Gray Hound dog like Uncle Paul has!

"It’s called a Whippet, Son." Rodney informed Mark of the dog’s breed.

The dog rushed past us and immediately raced down the street on its way home.

"Well, do you feel welcomed to the neighborhood?" I laughed with the children as we all enjoyed a dog we had never seen before. This seemed like a good thing to me.