Elma

ELMA

I met her at City Senior Center in 2011. She is the one of the most adorable person at the center and she was 85. She lives in a little cottage in suburb of a big city and she has nice cleaned cut lawn and all kinds of flowers in her front yard garden. She cannot do gardening at this age anymore but she hires the gardener to do the good job. At the time I met her, she told me that she just lost her driving privileges because she had too many accidents, just like me, so we like and trust each other suddenly very much like we have known each other for last twenty (20) years. She has no driving license; she could not drive, living alone so she was isolated. She had not seen her childhood school friends and work friends for a long time. So I took her to everywhere where her friends live. They told me about younger days, shopping, eating out, going movies and life was a lot easier, simpler in those days and a lot of fun. City is famous for its city boulevards which are straight and wide and long line of trees in the middle divider. There used to have world class big parades in summer time to celebrate city birthdays (photos shown on newspaper clips of 1950s) and so on. Not anymore, the times and the economy are changing the city scene quite. There used to have head quarter, factory and all kinds of facilities for the very big US International Company, it is gone now, nothing but only shells of building and factories left, more importantly they used to have huge plantation (occupied almost the whole city area) , now is all gone, replacing with homes, so did the monkeys who live there for centuries among those trees were gone too. There used to have railroads, now they are all gone, replacing with foreign made cars.

She lives with her two (2) beautiful little cute and very intelligent dogs given by her son who lives a little far from her house. Her son and her daughter in law and family visit every weekend.

The most interesting stuff in her place is photo albums. She has photo albums of five (5) generations starting from her grandfather (who has a big moustache) to her granddaughter, three hundred and fifty (350) years of history.

A City History Library in One Little House