Steve

Dear Sister,

I haven't heard anything from you in so long I just wondered if you were really all right. Harla and Darla thought they saw you on T.V. It was a Vice squad Raid on a bar in Houston on the Richmond Strip and some of the people’s faces were blurred so you couldn't recognize em. They thought one of em was you and then they asked me "Momma what's a table dance"? I told them to quit watchin the news. Lord knows Lester and I don't. We don't read a Newspaper either. Well except for the Watchtower that Lester's Jehovas witness Sister sends sometimes. I think one of their teachers at school told them to watch the news. I don't know what those people are tryin to do. I sure don't want them pickin up any bad habits like that.

They have been just been adopted up by the new family that moved in to the next place in late July. I think they spend most of their time there now. They have eight kids and he works for Fuller Brush. They are always sendin the twin’s home with little shampoo and spot remover samples. They are from Iowa and the kids are Gary, Debbie, Susie, Kathy Timmy, Chrissy, Nancy, and Don Jr.

I haven't talked to her much. All I really know is that she chain-smokes Newports. I mean constantly she either lights them off of each other or snaps on the gas burner on the kitchen stove and bends over and lights her cigarette sometimes almost burnin her bangs off. When she was still nursing the littlest one he always had ashes in his hair.

She tells the kids she needs to wax the floors and then she locks them out of the house about 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning and lets them back in about dark. Harla and Darla said that they seem to have Hot dogs or cereal almost every night for supper. Lester said they're so poor that they probably make the kids drink the boiled wienie water out of the hot dog pan instead of milk. Goin over to the Davis' for a little wienie water cocktail? He's always taunting the girls with that one. One day Darla came running home all excited squealing ''Kathy Davis' Dad just let her drink coffee and she’s only six years old"!

Lester said, "Oh now you know Her Daddy wouldn't let her drink coffee that young. It'll kill her taste for beer".

Mr. Davis does drink a lot of beer. I've never seen him without one. And especially when he's drivin. They've got this big ol Mercury stationwagon, Late seventies model. And they take out careening down the road with all those kids on board and him with still another beer in his hand. Lester says they're gonna come up over a hill on the wrong side of the road someday and hit an eighteen wheeler head-on. He said he reckons they'll just weld two more handles onto that station wagon and just bury the whole thing.

He backed the car over the three year-olds foot and didn't even take her to the Dr. I guess it didn't break any bones but she walked funny for a month.

The little kids climbed up in the attic on a ladder and the two and a half-year-old wanted to come too. So they hauled her up as far as they could, but when they got to the top of the ladder they dropped her eight feet down to the concrete garage floor. When she smacked the concrete it completely knocked the breath out of her. Harla and Darla said that Timmy got her feet and Krissy grabbed her hands and carried her in unconscious to show Mrs. Davis. Being little kids they do not understand what dead means and think if you’re dead you just count to ten or get a shot and you are alive again. So when they walked into the kitchen with now blue faced Nancy they said "Mom, Nancy's dead". When Mrs. Davis threw up her hands and screamed it scared the kids and they dropped Nancy hard on the linoleum floor. The smack to her back made her cough and start breathing again.

There's a lot more that these people do. They have become our very own Kettle family. I'll tell you more later. Harla and Darla have their school pictures made tomorrow and they've brought me the Braidini we got at Walgreen’s so I can french braid their hair. I better go. Write soon and remember we love you, anyway.