The Bloxsom sisters have always had a bit of trouble getting along on trips. At some point in the mid-sixties, Jim and Myrtle along with her sisters Rosa and Gladys and Gladys’ husband Ted, made a trip to Ponca City, Oklahoma, to visit Virginia and Calvin Nelson, the Bloxsom sister’s paternal aunt. The entourage stopped in Guymon, Oklahoma, to visit their niece, Viola, and then proceeded on. By the time they got to Ponca City, they were all so annoyed with each other that they split up rather than travel together any further. Rosa Van Treese took a bus back to Washington and the two couples went their separate ways.

     Jim died in 1976 of stroke and heart problems, almost inevitable given the girth of the man. Jim’s death was a terrible loss for Myrtle, not only in the loss of his love and companionship, but because she was forced to deal with life as an adult. Jim had handled all of their affairs, all of their business matters and the maintenance of their lives. Myrtle struggled with this tearfully and petulantly for some time, reluctant to believe that someone was not there to care for her. The tasks of paying her bills and maintaining her home were over-whelming to her. However, eventually, in her own way, she began to master life alone.

     At this point, Myrtle was a woman in her seventies, she began to assert her independence in rather interesting ways. She once decided that she needed to have her old 67’ Buick painted. She took the car to the body shop and was dismayed at the quoted price of $300. She decided that she could do the job herself. At the body-shop, she tried to buy the auto paint, but the man refused to sell it to her, trying to persuade her that she could not paint her own car.

     Myrtle went down the street to a paint shop and bought several cans of spray paint. The first time around, she spray painted the car black. It was an interesting sight when seen proceeding down the street, looking rather like a low-hovering, dark cloud in motion. Myrtle then got into the car painting mode and it seemed as though she re-painted the car every six months or so, eventually even branching out into the two-tone affect. At times the car was black and silver, then black and red, then silver and red.

     When Myrtle was eighty-three years old, her little house developed sewage problems. Once again, she felt that the price of paying for a backhoe was much too high, she then proceeded to dig the sewer line out herself, Digging a couple of feet a day until she reached the alleyway. This project took most of the summer.

     After Jim Reagan died, the Bloxsom sisters, Gladys, Rosa and Myrtle were all widowed and in their seventies. They again tried traveling together to visit relatives, but these trips always ended in acrimony. By the end of any trip that they took together, inevitably, they were barely speaking to each other. The story is, that at the beginning of a trip, they would be standing for the picture of their departure, arm-in-arm, all smiles. The picture at the end of the trip would show them standing at opposite ends of the car, scowling.

     On one occasion, Myrtle (past eighty years old at the time) was driving with Gladys in her old Buick from Pueblo, Colorado, to visit Viola in Walsh, Colorado. As they were raveling down the highway at cruising speed, for some strange reason, Myrtle suddenly put the car into reverse. The car abruptly spun around on the highway, but by some miracle, complete disaster was avoided and they were able to continue on their trip. Gladys was furious with Myrtle and told her so, over, and over and over.

     Myrtle’s other claim to fame was that of a pack-rat, a collector to a mind-boggling extent. She kept every type of useful and useless item imaginable. The walls of her small kitchen bore witness. The walls were completely lined with more than two hundred pairs of salt and pepper shakers. She had fetishes for electrical appliances and any type of bedding. She owned dozens of coffee pots, and electric irons and toasters. She owned hundreds of sheets, pillow cases and blankets but continued to make quilts, in fact had barrels of material scraps for quilting.

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