I was extremely happy to see Family Search #52stories writing prompt this week because I have had it on my list for some time to write about my grandma, Clara Lou Peters Stewart. My love of music and singing can likely be attributed to her. My love of big band music came from watching her bobby-socking in the kitchen at a 4th of July party one year! She was one amazing piano & organ player. I have oodles of newspaper clippings from her younger days playing in school concerts and I daresay, she likely played at the wedding of nearly half of Pickaway County during her lifetime! I have so many memories of family holiday gatherings where she would hop on the organ in the corner of the dining room after a meal and play/sing for us.
My First Best Friend – Family Search #52Stories Project
I’ve been really lax in keeping up with the #52stories project writing prompts from Family Search but this one caught my eye and I knew I had to tell the story of my first best friend, Kristi Petty. We have been friends ever since we were wee bitty things in kindergarten at Walnut Elementary School in Ashville, Ohio. Brownie Troop, softball, school plays, band camp…. been there, done that with her.
If I had to pick one word to describe our friendship, it would be “epic.” There is just practically no other word that encapsulates the sheer magnitude or scope of shenanigans and misdeeds that we have experienced and/or perpetrated together. To this day, if you ask her, I even tried to kill her at one point. Seriously, she even recently posted horridly graphic hand drawn Get Well cards from fellow first grade classmates as a reminder of this incident on my Facebook feed, which you can see below in the gallery. I will be reminded of this even when we’re 90, gray and feeble. (If you’re wondering, she fell off the slide onto the pavement and was seriously injured. She wrongly asserts I pushed her to go down the slide first.)