My Boys

Dennis Dewayne September 13, 1960


Danny Edward July 10, 1955


 


 
 


Danny with Dingo, Sarah and Dennis
 





Our next door neighbors had been Doctor Bradsher and his wife and when they had decide to move to Paragould to be closer to the hospital, we moved into the house where they had lived.  It was a much nicer house.  Dennis was a long labor.  I had false labor for about two weeks.  Danny was so much help, bless his heart.  I had to stay in bed much of the time the last couple of weeks and he would take care of me.

He started to school July 9, 1960, the day before his sixth birthday.  He would bring his homework in to the bedroom and stay by my bed. He knew he was going to have a baby soon.  He would lay his little hand on my stomach and feel the baby kick.  Then one day the work finally came, “I think its time to go get Daddy” and off he went to get Loran.  Dr. Bradsher still had to induce labor.  I was in the delivery room for five hours.  We almost didn’t make it.  The baby had a very hard time coming into this old world.

When we finally got to take Dennis home, Danny came with his daddy to get us.  I can still the sparkle in his eyes when he saw his little brother for the first time.  When we made it home, we sat Danny up in the middle of the bed and unwrapped Dennis and handed him to Danny.  We told Danny that this was his little brother and he held Dennis until he was tired.

We moved to the country in November of 1961 to the “Sweetest Little Home I Ever Knew”.  That is what Mrs. Lype use to say to me.  I remember we would all be in the kitchen and we would look out the window and Mr. and Mrs. Lype would be out in the garden.  I felt like we were somehow in private property for a long time, especially since this had been their home for so many years.

Dennis started walking real well here real early, but then one day he fell and decided it was easier to crawl than walk.

When we moved to this house, I was six months pregnant with yet another baby.  When we were moving in, we were trying to get the bedroom rug down and I got tickled and Loran got tickled because we couldn’t get it out of the tube it was in.  We only used three rooms that winter, three rooms and the path, the path to the outside toilet.  We used the living room where Danny slept on the couch and Dennis slept in the baby bed over where the television sits now.  Loran and I had the big bedroom, which we had to go through to get into the kitchen.  We were very happy.

Loran and I had our sweetest Christmas here that I can ever remember.  We had very little money and had decided not to buy each other anything.  I can still see him looking out our bedroom window when I walked up behind him and put my arms around him.  He turned and kissed me and reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a tube of lipstick.  That was and will always be the nicest gift I will ever receive.

Dennis was a good and happy child.  When he was seventeen months old, we finally got our little girl, Donna Kay.  Danny was in school.  He would walk across the field on nice days or sometimes he road the bus.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to ride the bus, so I told him that John Ray Evans was a church of Christ preacher, a man of God.  So the first evening that John Ray let him off out here, I was waiting on Danny as he yelled “Good Bye, John the Baptist”.