#AtoZChallenge - BLOGGERS WERE CHILDREN TOO! - A is for Ann - Ann Carbine Best

Hello!

Regular followers and visitors to this site will know I'm using BLOGGERS WERE CHILDREN TOO! for my theme this year. Today we begin reading about bloggers' lives, some you know and some you may not yet know, as they respond to some prompts I sent out. I've been so grateful for their responses as it helped me to get to know them better, admire their stunning cuteness as babes, and delight in the with random facts they shared.

Thank you Adult Bloggers for your heartfelt responses. Thank you readers for visiting my posts. I hope you'll leave a comment and if you'd like to follow the link to my respondents' blogs at the bottom of the post they'd be delighted to meet you.

Rock on A- Z Challenge. (Visit more posts here).

Today:

A is for Ann - Ann Carbine Best

Ann somewhere between the age of 3 - 5. She
tells me she hasn't grown a lot since then, lol!

I WAS BORN IN -- Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) in “Mormon” country, on May 13, 1940, a year and a half before Pearl Harbor. I was too young to remember anything about the war, but of course my parents did. My mother was 33, my father 32 years old when they got married, and thus there was never any chance of my father having to go to war. My mother was a housewife of the forties and fifties. My father eked out a living first as a service station attendant in the 1930s and 1940s-- his skill and talent was repairing cars -- and in the fifties he had various jobs, one selling and repairing washing machines. In some ways we were poor financially, but my parents were as frugal as one can be. My mother was born in 1905, my father 13 months later. They’re of the “greatest generation.” They lived through the Great Depression. They learned from experience how to be frugal.

I GREW UP IN Salt Lake City. I lived there until I was 19. Then I moved south about 35 miles to Brigham Young University where I rented an apartment off campus with five other girls.

MY FAVORITE HOME WAS IN -- Salt Lake City, my only childhood home. But I had a favorite home away from home. My mother grew up in Santaquin, Utah, a fruit farming town about fifty miles south of Salt Lake where during my youth I always spent two or three weeks every summer with my country cousins. My best childhood memories are of those times.

MY WORST CHILDHOOD MEMORY IS --  of an evening at the Great Salt Lake, a salty lake that’s a remnant of a great ice age lake that lies west of Salt Lake City. A resort called Saltair was a booming place in the thirties when my mother was young. But I remember it as a place that was beginning to crumble. I never rode the roller coaster because Daddy said it wasn’t safe.

Some of the beach was still very good though, and on warm evenings Daddy would often drive us to the lake in his 1930 Chevrolet that bumped and rattled over an old, now non-existent road. In the distance we could see clouds of brine flies hovering in the air, and smell the briny lake before we saw it.

At the lake, my parents and little brother watched me and my younger sister wade far out in the salty lake that was too salty to support fish life but so salty one could float in it without sinking. I had been assured one couldn’t sink in the lake. But I was only ten years old, frightened in the not too distant past by tales like Little Red Riding Hood and given to flights of fancy.

My sister and I had to wade quite a distance before the salty water reached my waist and my sister’s upper chest so we could lie on our backs and float without our feet or buttocks touching the lake’s bed; where under a twilight sky that began to turn a deep brilliant desert red, we floated side by side, maybe a few yards apart in the water, the inland gulls circling and cawing above us.

It wasn’t very long before I noticed the waves swelling around us, and felt as if we were riding the crest of a huge watery creature. With the pungent taste of salt on my lips and the hump of Stansbury Island within view on the western horizon, I suddenly felt an undertow around my legs. I had no idea how far below my feet the bottom was. I only knew that something seemed to be pulling me toward that hump, pulling me away from the shore and my parents and brother who were now specks, and I panicked.

I turned my head enough to see my sister calmly floating near me. Was she as terrified as I was? Sometime later, I don’t remember when, I found out that her experience that evening wasn’t the same as mine. She only remembers easily floating in the waves while I remember the terror I felt. I was certain we weren’t going to get back to shore.

A few years later we both took swimming lessons together, but after that evening at the Lake I have been mildly afraid of water, and even in a swimming pool never want to be far from the edge. I would never want to have to swim a long distance to save my life!

Ann lives in one of these duplexes in Harrisonburg,Virginia

TODAY I LIVE IN -- Harrisonburg, Virginia. Utah is my first beloved home state; Virginia, my second. Virginia is where I’m living the rest of my life.

Ann as a young mother with her husband Larry and their
children,  happier times before tragedy struck

PROUDEST WRITER MOMENT -- Having my first full-length book, a memoir, published by a small press on May 17, 2011, four days after my 71st birthday. The “moment” would be when I held the print copy in my hands for the first time.

RANDOM FACT ABOUT ME -- Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe that I don’t have a lot of patience. Certainly not the patience my friend Carolyn had that day we sat outside in the playground of the junior high school. We sat because Carolyn had polio when she was nine (in 1948). Her stricken right leg had been operated on for the second time, and she didn’t have to participate in sports. The teacher didn’t mind if I often sat with her. On this particular day a bee landed on her glasses. She didn’t move a muscle until it finally left the glasses and flew toward me. It landed on my forehead. Instead of copying my friend’s patience, I instantly swatted at the bee, and got stung. My forehead swelled until I looked like an alien from outer space.

 ANNE'S BIO:

I’m the author of In the Mirror, A Memoir of Shattered Secrets, Imprisoned, and An Ozark Memory as well as stories, poems, and essays that have won awards and been published in various magazines and anthologies.  I’m a mother of three daughters and a son, a grandmother of almost-eight wonderful children, and full-time caregiver of a lovely disabled daughter.


Want to visit Ann? She blogs @ AnnCarbineBest'sBlog

I hope you enjoyed reading about Ann. Join me tomorrow for B is for Bambrey, Laura Bambrey from Daily Dodo.


Want to visit RomanticFridayWriters A-Z Challenge - flash fiction every day? Go here.