Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Growing up in Granola Village: Surrounded by Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes
    Growing up in Granola Village: Surrounded by Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes
    Growing up in Granola Village: Surrounded by Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Growing up in Granola Village: Surrounded by Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes

    By D. St. Louis

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    When my brother became terminally ill, he and I began to examine our childhoods.
    We were seeking answers: Why did this happen to him at such a relatively young age? Was there something in our past that had contributed to this? Soon our remaining two sisters got involved as well. We had so many stories to tell. Many, in hindsight, were funny. Some were insightful. All of them helped provide a distraction for George while he was undergoing treatments. I don't know if we ever did answer our original questions but we came to see our very early years in a more positive light.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateApr 22, 2013
    ISBN9781481734912
    Growing up in Granola Village: Surrounded by Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes

    Related to Growing up in Granola Village

    Related ebooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Past The Edges Of Town

      Jan 27, 2022

      Past The Edges Of Town
      10 min read

    • Article

      SMALL Ponds

      Aug 5, 2019

      SMALL Ponds
      17 min read

    • Article

      Family Man

      Apr 15, 2020

      Family Man
      5 min read

    • Article

      “I Wore The Daily Mail Down By Still Being Here”

      Apr 25, 2021

      Broadcaster and presenter Sandi Toksvig might be the closest thing we have to lesbian royalty in the UK. As host of shows like QI and The Great British Bake Off, the 62-year-old has become a beloved household name, adored by millions. How different t

      7 min read

    • Article

      School’s Out

      Nov 14, 2023

      School’s Out
      12 min read

    • Article

      Out Of The Woods

      Nov 25, 2021

      Out Of The Woods
      10 min read

    • Article

      Winning Letter

      Feb 23, 2024

      EACH week our team comes together to discuss and plan the magazine – from choosing which stories will go into the issue to sourcing images for each page and seeing everything through to the layout process. And week after week, story after story, the

      5 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Casting

      Jul 11, 2019

      Perfect Casting
      5 min read

    • Article

      Where Teens Used to Hang Out

      Dec 12, 2023

      Where Teens Used to Hang Out
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Years Of Solitude

      Dec 31, 2021

      Two Years Of Solitude
      12 min read

    • Article

      How To Hang A Mezuzah

      Sep 1, 2020

      How To Hang A Mezuzah
      24 min read

    • Article

      The Ultimate Gift

      May 23, 2023

      The Ultimate Gift
      4 min read

    • Article

      Winning Letter

      Aug 19, 2022

      Life on the streets is very hard. Not everyone who is displaced is a drug addict or disobedient. Some of us are faced with difficult situations back in our villages, like unemployment, forcing us to come to the city for a better life. I found myself

      5 min read

    • Article

      Coming home

      Oct 13, 2022

      Coming home
      16 min read

    • Article

      On Aging

      Mar 1, 2022

      On Aging
      9 min read

    • Article

      We LOVE our NEIGHBOURS

      Apr 2, 2020

      We LOVE our NEIGHBOURS
      5 min read

    • Article

      Faith Empowered

      May 27, 2020

      Faith Empowered
      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      The purpose of being alive is to carry a sequence of code.And so, being adopted, I’m part of a plot, a sleeper cellin enemy territory, quietly working against the systemfrom within. It’s fall, I’m on an ancestry website signing up for a DNA kit,becau

      4 min read

    • Article

      Your Page

      Aug 17, 2022

      Little did I know that a Country Style front cover from September 2013 would lay the foundation for one of the last and most cherished memories I would have of my mother. After a nine-year stint in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, we moved back to country

      5 min read

    • Article

      Q&A with Bonnie

      Apr 21, 2023

      ◗ Elizabeth Zott is a character we would all love to know or even become. Where did such a personality spring from? Fury! I started Lessons in Chemistry about seven years ago. I’d just come out of a meeting, irritated by some garden variety sexism, a

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 11

      Dec 7, 2021

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 11
      26 min read

    • Article

      It Happened To Me…

      Jan 5, 2023

      It Happened To Me…
      8 min read

    • Article

      50 Years Of PRIDE

      Jun 14, 2022

      50 Years Of PRIDE
      4 min read

    • Article

      FAMILY Secrets

      Mar 28, 2024

      FAMILY Secrets
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Growing up in Granola Village

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Growing up in Granola Village - D. St. Louis

      © 2013 by D. St. Louis. All rights reserved.

      Edited by: Amy Sullivan, Boaz Ky

      Cover Photo by: Justine Jones

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      Published by AuthorHouse 04/17/2013

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-3493-6 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-3492-9 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-3491-2 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905823

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Contents

      WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE BODY…

      SCARY EVENTS AND ACCIDENTS

      THE PETTING ZOO

      FEARS AND SUPERSTITIONS

      OUR FAMILY TREE IS FULL OF NUTS

      AND A BLOSSOM OR TWO

      IT TAKES A VILLAGE

      SCHOOL DAZE

      GROWING PAINS AND MISCELLANEOUS ADVENTURES

      In early December, 2012,1 received the devastating news that my brother had a brain tumor. Do you ever believe that something like this is possible? I mean, among your siblings? And, if that wasn’t enough, he called two days later with the rest of the diagnosis: this was only one of several rapidly progressing tumors. The others were in his lungs. And, as I shopped for Christmas decorations, I received another bulletin: this form of cancer was so invasive, and so destructive that he had perhaps six months to one year to live. With luck!

      How do you deal with this? What do you say? Where do you go from here? As I turned white and began to fold, I said the only thing I could think of, I’m so sorry. Keep fighting. I love you. But, in my heart of hearts, I prayed only that he would not suffer, even if that meant losing him sooner than later. There was one thing I had to do before the end however… . finish the genealogy I had been working on for more than four years. He had to read this stuff ! He was the only one other than myself who seemed to care about our history. I had already completed three volumes of research, one for each line of the family going back from our grandparents. The fourth was still a work in progress. But he did not seem to mind that one was missing. He gratefully accepted the books I did send and would call often with questions and observations about some of the information contained in those volumes. I knew that on many days his ability to read was hampered by the tumor which had been pressing down on his optic nerve, but this did not stop him. He was determined to know as much about our family as he could and was pleased that this quest offered him an opportunity to focus on something other than the disease.

      Asour family became aware of George’s need for distraction, we all began to send jokes, funny sayings and small presents. When all he could keep down was Rice Krispies, for example, each of us sent him a box of that cereal. He got four in one day and called to thank each one of us. We could hear the laughter in his voice even though we were talking long distance. It was a wonderful sound. And we all wanted more.

      It was at this time, and because of something my sister Gladys had said, that I got another brainstorm: why not send funny stories? Because when she asked, How in the world did we ever survive our childhoods? I knew that there was another type of family history just waiting to be told, a history that might interest George even more than the genealogy. So I began to collect stories from all my siblings; I even got George in on the act. He seemed to love talking about our childhoods and was amused by the stories I related during each phone call. Soon the storytelling took on a life of its own. Our discussions became centered around, not only family, but our school, our neighbors and our environment-all those elements that were present in our formative years. What emerged was a rather telling history of our generation, a history of struggle and triumph, and the joyous knowledge that we had all survived the good old days. It had been a long road, and our paths had led us to places far apart, but we never lost our sense of family and our emotional closeness. Even though George lives in Maine, Evelyn in Colorado, Gladys in Tennessee, and I live in Kentucky, (Our younger brother lives in Texas.) we have managed to keep in close contact via telephone. Two hour calls are standard; we are phone junkies

      Before I go too far, let me explain our background. I am the oldest of four children born into this family. (The fifth child, our brother Paul, was born after we were grown.) The sister next to me in age, Evelyn, was born when I was not yet one. George was born when I was four and the youngest sister, Gladys, when I was five. We lived in a small village in the northeast corner of New York. If you reached out you could almost touch Lake Champlain on the east and the Canadian border on the north; it was that far into the corner of the state. On the map, if it appears at all, it is a little blip that you probably would not notice without a magnifying glass. It was and is an economically depressed area where people had to struggle to survive. Many of the people in the little village were of French Canadian ancestry, with some Native American thrown in. Many, like both my parents, were alcoholics, and that, probably more than anything, colored our history. There was hardly a family in that small village that had not been touched by that dreadful disease.

      The village is centered at the intersection of two state roads. On one corner was the rectory for the Catholic church, directly across the road was a residence whose occupants none of us ever got to know. The third corner was the site of the largest general store in town, and directly across from that was a dairy barn and accompanying residence. The family that ran the farm were also the ones who operated the store. There were three other, very small, grocery stores in town, all within a stone’s throw of each other. I am not quite sure why we needed all those little stores because the village was so small. In today’s world, someone would do market research and probably close them down. But in that day, they each had a small clientele and somehow, they survived.

      Each of the four stores had at least one gas pump but there were no garages for auto repair until much later in our childhoods. There was no school; we attended school in neighboring towns. There was a stone wall dividing our property from that of the house just west of us. If you lived on our side of the wall you attended school in the town directly north of us. Children across this divide attended school in the town directly west of us. This always seemed unfair to us kids. Our best friends lived across the wall so even though we played together all the time,we had to goour separate ways when it came to school.

      In a straight line down the road from the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1