A trip down memory lane.

So I made a new friend. Her name is Jennifer . I found her blog while going through the list of people signed up for the Stitcher's angel swap and instantly felt like we were friends. We have a lot in common from what I can see reading her blog.

Anyway, reading her blog today it triggered a memory of something I want to blog about. She was blogging about her grandma's things and the memories they hold for her and it reminded me of the things I remember most about my grandma's house when I was a little girl.

Most of all, her clocks!

When I was a little girl and we would go to visit, Shanae and I would sleep on her green shag carpet in the living room. You know the kind, the LOOOOOOONG shag carpet, she even raked it so it would look nice LOL We would lay there at night and listen to the resounding tick tock of her cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall above the china cabinet. And every so often that little bird would pop out of it's little door and screech it's cuckoo so loud the neighbors didn't need a clock of their own to keep time. In the morning grandpa would come in, singing as usual, reaching up to pull the pine cones and rewind the clock for another day. I can still hear in my mind the zipper sound of the chains as he pulled the heavy pine cones back up to the top. And sometimes, if we were especially good, and very careful, he would lift us up above his head and let us pull the pine cones ourselves. And we would beg him to twist the hands around, speeding up the clock, so that the noisy little bird would make a premature appearance and sing for us.

As I got older and grandma's kids moved out of her home, Shanae and I started sleeping in the middle bedroom. It had a headboard with shelves and sliding doors, I thought that was so cool, I wanted a headboard just like that some day.

In that bedroom there was a little round metal alarm clock. I swear the tick on that thing was loud enough to crack the paint and I was SURE that was why the paint was peeling off the walls in there rather than the fact that it was the scary lead based paint.

I used to slide open the cubby on the headboard, shove the clock in there, then shove the little yellow and brown throw pillow (Made from a hand towel even) in there on top of the alarm clock in a vain attempt to drown out the sound. I was never successful and would lay awake 'til late in the night listening to the tick of that clock and slowly going mad.

At some point in time the cuckoo clock went away. I don't know if it died, or if one day they just decided they had out grown it, but the cuckoo was replaced with a grandfather clock. The obnoxious yapping bird had been replaced with another loud ticking giant clock with a vibrating BING BONG every half hour and a bong, bong, bong... every hour on the hour.

Maybe my grandparents are hard of hearing, maybe they just like ticking in the background. But they surely seem to have a *thing* for noisy time pieces!