Prairie Girls

Tayler

                                       by Collette

I am Tayler Parkhurst, and I am 10-years-old. My friends and I walk home from school every day and stop at the grocery to get a grape soda or a candy bar to split. I saved enough money to treat my friends to a cherry phosphate at the drug store. The druggist would not let my friends sit at the counter with me. I didn’t understand it, but he wouldn’t let them sit there because they were Negros.

 

Time with Grandpa

                                                            by Judy

When I was a child I spent a few days visiting my grandparents each summer. Grandpa always took me to town to the drug store for an ice cream cone. The bottom dip was strawberry, the middle dip chocolate, and the top dip vanilla. I knew Grandpa really loved me because he spent a whole dime on ice cream for me. On the hot, summer afternoons, melted ice cream streamed down my chin before I finished the soggy cone. I didn’t hurry to finish the cone, though, for sitting in the 1950’s drugstore with my Grandpa was as special to me as the ice cream.

 I still envision my mother as a little girl with a Dutch boy haircut when I remember Grandpa’s stories of her childhood. I picture him as a young boy in the 1890’s when I remember his stories about horses his father used on the farm. How sad that even one young girl was ever denied the pleasure of sharing an ice cream cone with her grandpa at a counter because of their race.