North Star Writers Group

You know the ones I’m talking about. Like when you were a kid and left the front door open on a wintry day, your mother would shout, “Hey, were ya born in a barn?” Or how about all those times your grandmother tucked her hands into her apron and declared “Land sakes!”

There are plenty more sayings, of course.

See if any of these ring a bell with you.

You’d be outside barefoot on a summer day, see, and your mother would warn, “Don’t step on a rusty nail, you could get lockjaw!”

Some old sayings are as comforting as that lumpy oatmeal your mother used to fix for breakfast.

Whenever my Uncle Ken, who was a crackerjack poker player had to make a decision whether to take his last card up or down, he would say, “Down like a deep-sea diver.”

And whenever my father was getting ready to spank me because I’d done something wrong, he’d say, “This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you,” which, of course, was totally untrue.

My Aunt Mona had a slew of favorite sayings. They included:

• “He’s dumber than a box of rocks.”
• “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
• “Wake up and smell the coffee.”
• “She’s uglier than a picket fence.”

Does this one ring a bell with anybody? You were sitting at the dinner table trying your darndest to ignore the liver and onions and spinach heaped on your plate and your mother would say, “You’d better eat that because there are children starving in China.”

The old sayings go on and on . . .
• “She’s cute as a button.”
• “He’s stubborn as a mule.”
• “She doesn’t have the brains she was born with.”

If my mom saw me standing in front of the TV during her favorite show, she’d say “You make a better door than a window.”

Bill Reinke, my favorite newspaper photographer, will always remember his mother’s favorite saying. “Whenever she looked at me and said ‘One o’clock’ I knew what she meant,” Bill recalls. “My fly was unzipped.”

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