Pickup

After the pop-up camper we got a pick-up camper. For everyone who has never seen a pick-up camper, it fits in the back of a pick-up. It had a stove and icebox (that used a 25 pound block of ice). It had a bed over the cab of the truck and a dining table that broke down into a bed.

On some vacations we went to art shows, huge flea markets, and festivals. Mom had always painted in oils and she began to display her art. She started selling and dad built a trailer for her.

She eventually found her real market--oil paintings based on steamboats, plantation houses, and old photographs of ancestors siting around a lumber camp with huge crosscut saws, or leaning on hitching posts, or standing on the front porch of the old homestead.

My brother and I painted rocks, glued googley eyes on them and sold them. We arranged flowers on driftwood and in bottles. We sold spin-art. Dad made the spin-art machine with a fan motor that turned a turnable. The mechanism was mounted in a box. We would put a piece of paper on the turntable and turn the fan motor on--the paper would whirl and for fifty cents, a kid could drip paint from bottles onto the spinning paper, making circular or spiral designs.

We enjoyed making money and attending the events. We also went on normal vacations where we did not sell anything. Unlike with our tent and our pop-up camper, we did not have a mishap that caused us to abandon the pick-up camper. The folks just finally saved up enough to buy a motor home.