Paksworld

This image is complicated…so here’s the explanation, from Abigail Miller:  “Audiobook having coffee at Jupiter House this evening (4/2) at sunset on the Courthouse Square in Denton. The desktop wallpaper is snow on the plum thicket blossoms two weeks ago on the (ahem!) “first day of spring.”   I add: the green circle (looks like crayon) on upper right corner of screen shows location of Oath icon.

Photo courtesy of Abigail Miller

My mother had less-than-happy memories of Denton when she was sent to what was then Texas Women’s College.    Her mother–who had died when my mother was 14–had expressed the hope that my mother would become a teacher, and had mentioned this college, so that’s where my mother was sent, willy-nilly.   It was not, let’s say, a match made in educational heaven.

She wanted to be a doctor (gasps of horror all around) or an engineer (redoubled gasps of horror.)   The idea was that her brother would be the doctor and she, the teacher (appropriate gender roles) but in fact my uncle had no interest in medicine, and made a good college swimming coach.  And my mother, after sneaking her way into engineering by way of art (somehow convinced her father that architecture was like art, sort of) ,  went off to nursing school when the ’33 hurricane and the big crash on Wall Street put an end to her university career.  (Well, that, and the fact that a woman engineering student was just Too Much for some professors who refused to have her in their classes.  Come WWII, things changed, briefly.)  And then she married before taking the state exam (a big mistake, she told me–always get your degree or certificate or whatever.)

However–and the only reason I bring up her less-than-happy memories–she loved to draw buildings, and though that drawing was lost (quite a few of her drawings were lost to hurricane flooding in the 1960s), I believe when I was a child I saw her drawing of this courthouse.   She drew a lot of courthouses and churches and older buildings.   When I saw the photograph there was a little shock of recognition.