This is Aunt Helen, youngest of six children born to Grandma and Grandpa Deeds, ninos. I believe this photo was taken her senior year in high school. As far as I know, she and your GG Marguerite were the only Deeds children to graduate high school. Isn't she pretty, grandchildren?
These are the five surviving Deeds siblings; from left is Helen, Pearl, Art, Marguerite and Neva. This photo was taken in 1963 when Helen (who was born in 1928) would have been thirty-five. Your GG was forty-two. They were attending a Long Valley reunion.
Helen is perhaps twelve in this picture. She was the adored baby sister, and Pearl and Neva, both married by then, were happy to help out both Helen and your GG. Times may have been a little better at this point, but life in the small town backwoods was still pretty tough.
This is Pearl with daughter Shirley and sister Helen. I am guessing that this picture was taken around 1945 putting Helen at seventeen or so.
Here are Art, Helen and Marguerite. Helen is around nine or ten, and your GG is possibly seventeen.
Again I am guessing but I think Helen might be twelve or thirteen in this picture.
This is a solo shot of Helen at the same time the picture with Pearl and Shirley was taken. This would have been around the time she graduated from high school, and shortly before she married Uncle Everett, a cowman and rancher, and her childhood sweetheart. Sadly, Helen turned out to be allergic to just about everything on a cattle ranch. It made for a difficult life. Worse yet for her, she was able to have only one child, our cousin Dean (who is the absolute best child/son for Helen and Everett if they could have just the one) but it was a great sadness for her because she dearly loved children. Dean has two daughters, and for a long time they filled Helen's life, and their children as well. But the gaps in between made it hard, and there has been an emptiness in Helen's life that was not quite filled. She was often depressed, and the allergy medications she was required to take didn't help. For all of that, Helen was always a hard worker, made the family clothing, cooked for the workers (even taking a chuck-wagon out to the round-up), and generally did her part on the ranch. She and Everett both have a marvellous sense of humor, and their hilarious stories (sometimes built around hair-raising adventures and zany near-misses) would get you laughing until your breath was lost. To me, they were part of the same person. To think of Helen was to say "and Everett" in your mind and vice versa. You could feel the bond between them, flexing and stretching as needed but always there. Helen's health problems grew greater over the years, and I suppose in some ways she gave over to them as time passed. She is not herself these days and will not be again, I know. But in my mind and in my heart I will forever hear her cracking wise about the latest exploit she and Everett shared. I will remember when she came to Arizona with Neva to visit Uncle Judd and Aunt Sandy and me. I will see her in the back seat of my car as I drove them around under seriously gray skies in the normally sunny, warm and beautiful Sonoran desert, staring through wet windows and saying "Heck, we have rain at home." When the toilets clogged at my place, we were forced to squat in the back yard under cover of darkness. This woman who could have stayed at the best hotel in the city stuck with me and helped us laugh past the embarrassment. Helen is the last of the Deeds girls. It is far too late for me to be wishing on stars, but if I could have just one more, it would be that I might have known each of them better, not just as girls but as the women they became, that I could have been more a part of their lives and understood what made each of them get up in the morning, put on their game faces and get on with their days. They were interesting, intelligent women, fascinating in their diversity; gritty, wise and stoic, women worth knowing. One more branch of our family tree to be proud of, ninos.
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