Sugar Land

When my mother married Charles, my stepfather, he had grown up on a farm, and when he got old enough to work, he was a cowhand, had seldom been much further than from where he was born and raised, and didn’t know anything other than farm life.

He and my mother were married only a couple years when she told him they had to get away from his parents, because they were controlling every aspect of our lives. My mother almost never put her foot down, but in that, she did. She was leaving and he could come with her or not.

So we moved from north Texas to south Texas, about 500 miles away.

For a couple of years, Charles continued to work as a cow hand, on a big ranch there. I don’t know how much ranch hands make nowadays, but back then, the salary was pitiful. My mother didn’t want to spend the rest of her life struggling to make ends meet, so she put her foot down again and told Charles he needed to get a decent paying job. Which scared Charles because he didn’t know how to do anything but farm and ranch work, and he had no confidence that he would be able to learn anything else.

We lived something less than 100 miles from Houston, and he did find a job at a machine shop about 30 miles from Houston. They hired him as a trainee, but he turned out to have a real knack for the work and was soon promoted.

Of course we needed to live close to the shop, and that turned out to be a little dirt road neighborhood close to Sugar Land. At that time, Sugar land was a little town with a population of about 3300. Outside of it’s city limits was miles and miles of woods, pastures and pecan groves.

The little rural community we lived in had real big lots. We had a vegetable garden and chickens. Other neighbors had gardens, goats, horses and pigs. Some neighbors didn’t have any of that. They just liked raising their kids in a country setting. It was a “neighborhood”, but it was rural.

We only lived there a few years, until developers bought up all the land around us and started building subdivisions. That’s when we moved back to north Texas, and Charles went back to farm and ranch work.

The reason I’m bringing this up, is because for those few years we lived there, so very much happened. When I tell about things that happened while we were in Sugar Land, I want the reader to get the right picture in their head. Of course we didn’t live *in* Sugar Land. That was just our mailing address. (If I tell about something that happened in South Texas, that was before Sugar Land).

And sorry for the crude illustration. I only have Microsoft Paint to work with. But you should be able to get the right idea of what to picture.

ADDENDUM: I visited the old neighborhood less than 10 years after moving away from there. HOLY COW! WHAT HAPPENED?! Sugar Land had become a city! For miles and miles and miles in every direction, there were no pasture, woods or pecan groves. It was all city! How did that happen so fast? If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never have believed it!