As I get older, I think about “the good old days” and the way things used to be. In the second Etta book, Remembering Etta Bend, I included remembrances of two of Ma and Pappy Latty’s children, Georgia Latty Cochran and my mother, Susie Latty Day. As I’m sure they would agree, they were pretty well […]
May 6, 2025
Nature’s Calendar
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The meadow at Manos Meadows, my home in Oklahoma for nearly forty years, was nature’s calendar, marking the changes from one season to the next. In the spring, daisies danced in the sun and wind carried the freshness of damp earth and renewed life. Hidden in tall grass, a quail called and another answered. […]
May 3, 2025
Looking Back
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This is the second and final installment of my May 5, 1985 Daily Press article about the tornado which destroyed Peggs, Oklahoma on May 2, 1920. In 1920, Walter Neel lived with his parents, brothers and sisters on the Gid Morgan farm, two and a fourth miles southeast of Peggs. The storm went a mile […]
Dec 29, 2024
The January Thaw
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In the days when my grandparents, Levi and Edna Latty, were on their farm at Etta, my grandfather waited for the January thaw, those few January days when winter paused to take a deep breath and remember that spring would soon be on its way. During the January thaw, Pappy would hitch his team of […]
Nov 14, 2024
Rain, a Hundred Years Ago
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We’ve had wonderful autumn rain lately and it has been a blessing. This morning, I’m thinking backward about a hundred years and imagining what it might have been like at the Levi and Edna Latty Farm, my grandparents’ farm, in the early part of the twentieth century. It would be dark on the farm at […]
Jul 27, 2024
In the Untamed Woods
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This morning, I came across an account I’d almost forgotten about. It’s written by my grandmother’s uncle and came by way of the Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma. What degree of an uncle would he be to me? I haven’t the slightest, but his grandfather would have been my third great-grandfather. I found this […]
