When I changed the Photo of the Month, this photo which had been the April photo was deleted so am uploading again so it'll be here on the blog somewhere.... A bit of history to go with this photo---this was taken at my parents house and I'm not sure if we were engaged yet or not--but probably were. I just marvel at how round and full both our faces were with our youth! And weren't overweight either--both of us probably weighed our least. I'm in my first bout of ortho here too. Can't remember which niece or nephew's monkey that was--maybe one of them remembers. So I'm a very fresh 'bout 21 year old and Jug is about 28. He kept this full beard from the seventies until one day in 1987 (when Olivia was a toddler) he came out of the bathroom, no warning whatsoever, clean shaven! I just about died. He looked so weird to me!
More history--so we're at my parents, and I want to share that my parents, Gladys and Smith just loved Jug. He was always so comfortable with them. That's just his nature, Jug is not intimidated by ANYone really and when he met them he just called them Smith and Gladys and talked to them like he'd known them all his life. They ate it up! And the fact that he was so good to me, unlike previous boyfriends was a plus too! When Jug and I met in '79 I was living in an apartment in North Wilkesboro, Myers Park precisely, with Mel but when we got engaged in the fall of 1980, I moved back home. I wanted to be with my parents one last time before starting married life. Well, we were kinda accustomed to doing as we pleased when we pleased answering to no one. My parents were old-school and I knew I couldn't just not come home....so I told Mama, ah, so, ah, on Saturday nights, I'll be spending the night with Jug, that okay? And she was like, yeah, that's okay. They just loved him so much! And Jug loved them, especially Daddy. Daddy taught Jug how to make jerky and what a heritage that has been. They made and sold jerky in the early 80s and had quite the little business going supplying mostly bars with jerky that the drinkers couldn't get enough of--and all was well until the state inspectors got wind of it and shut the business down since the jerky was not made in an inspected kitchen. Jug still dreams of selling jerky for a living...maybe one day!
One last thing--the wall hanging behind us was done by my paternal grandmother, Annie Bess Palmer Hudson. Think I've written already about how talented she was. This was one of those prints on fabric that she'd sown around the images and then stuffed them to make it 3D like. How very tacky I thought it was back then but it was all the rage, I guess, in the sixties. Wonder whatever happened to this piece? I'd love to have it now!
