Grandma Grace and the Flu Epidemic of 1918

Photo: Young Grace, several years before the epidemic.


My grandmother, Grace, the main heroine of PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA, lived through the flu epidemic of 1918 -- but barely.  She was part of a religious group who were constantly going door to door with their urgent religious message that the end of the world was imminent, and holding large tent meetings.  The epidemic placed the evangelical Adventists in a difficult dilemma.  They were so certain that Jesus was coming immediately, and this was surely more important than anything else.  To stop going door to door, to stop traveling to set up tent meetings an invite whole towns, seemed a serious breach of faith.    But the flu knew no distinctions, and it struck down both the religious and the nonreligious.  Below is an excerpt from PRECIOUS JEWELS in which Grace nearly died of the flu after her sister gave in to her husband's restlessness after their tent meeting was shut down and left her to visit friends in yet another town.

"At summer's end, Grace left Nashville amidst sad goodbyes when the girls went back to school. She detoured past Memphis and went to Minden, Louisiana where Ruby and Harry were now running another tent meeting, and had been urging her to join them. It was September of 1918, and The War to End All Wars was winding toward a resolution. In its wake came a more terrible killer which took more lives than were lost in battle. But in September, the killer was still creeping softly across the land, taking one and then another, but so quietly that there was, as yet, no panic.

Unaware of the creeping killer, Grace had a joyful reunion with her sister in the lovely little bayou town, population 3,000. There were no Adventists at all in that part of the country, so the little group were true pioneers. Preliminary canvassing had shown there was a good interest, and the attendance at the meetings reflected this -- even though the Methodists, who had long been established there, had a rival tent meeting going full strength! But the Methodists didn't have the artist, G. S. Vreeland, who created beautiful pictures on the spot, illustrating the lessons in the sermon. Before the meetings closed, over fifteen people had promised to keep the Sabbath. Grace was kept busy visiting and studying with the interested ones.

But they were working against a clock - a shorter clock than even the Adventists perceived. For the Flu Epidemic of 1918 was upon them before they knew it. In October, there was word from her friends in Nashville and Hazel Academy that people were seriously ill with the influenza. Like the War, it was a world-wide killer, and by November, even the small town of Minden was aware enough of the danger that the health officials shut down all public gatherings, including church, and tent meetings. A day later, Brother Frank, a member of their group was already down with the flu. Two weeks later, he was recovering but still had a bad cough, and was in no shape for visiting, so he went home, and the artist, Brother Vreeland, left also.

The members of the remaining group were restless, especially Harry, whose frustration increased with each day of enforced idleness. Although travel was being discouraged, containing Harry was impossible, so he and Ruby decided to visit friends in Shreveport. Grace, suffering with a headache, remained in Minden.

"It's just a headache." she assured Ruby, and her sister took her at her word, and went with her husband.

 Left alone, the headache worsened until her whole body ached. By the next day, there was no denying that she had the flu. She was deathly ill within 24 hours, and with the other members of the tent meeting group having departed in different directions, she had no one to look after her. Grace didn't care, for she was quite delirious, but one day - she wasn't sure how many had passed - she became lucid enough to feel the nearness of death. Lying in her foul sheets, she noticed in the wan December light that her fingernails had turned black.

I'm dying, she thought. I'll be dead by morning.

She was nineteen years old.

The flu was no respecter of age - or youth. It carried away children and the elderly, but it was especially vicious with young adults in good health, seeming to use their own strong immune system against them. Grace, who was so careful with her diet, and who walked hundreds of miles doing missionary work, and who came into contact with so many people was especially vulnerable.

She lay in the pale afternoon light, and thought of her mother. She would be with her now if things hadn't gone wrong in Memphis. If only she could see her face one more time!

Then as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she thought about the work that she had just begun. The Lord needed her! This devilish influenza was trying to shut down the meetings and prevent the door-to-door presentations of the Third Angel's Message. This couldn't be allowed!

So Grace prayed. "Dear Lord," she said. "There is so much more that I can do for you if I live. I love this work! Please let me continue. Please heal me!"

She prayed herself right to sleep, and when she woke up, her head was clear and the pain was gone, and she was very hungry! She got up out of bed, and made herself a meal. Then she cleaned away the debris of her illness, and when the bed was nicely made and she was clean and dressed, she still felt well and strong.

"I do believe it is time to go back to work." she said. And, breathing a happy prayer of thanks, she packed up her magazines and went out canvassing.

The tent meeting resumed again in Minden, and although it was interrupted once again with another onslaught of the flu, the workers remained healthy, and the interest in the community remained so strong that they were still there the next summer. By then, there was extra excitement among the little group of workers. Ruby was pregnant. Harry strutted around proudly, talking about his boy, whom he had already decided would be named Wilbur Earl. Grace sincerely hoped the child would indeed be a boy, for no girl should have to answer to Wilbur Earl!

But what made Grace happiest was that her mother had joined them. Pearl had left Memphis and Jtun for good. She didn't talk about the reason for it, and Grace didn't ask her, fearing that the talk would lead into the reason for her own departure. Her parents were divorced once again, and that was all she needed or wanted to know."

Raven Ever After

People make fools of themselves around people who are in mourning.  They just do.  Some of the gaffes are honest mistakes.  You don’t know what to say so you start spouting platitudes.  Anyone who has suffered, really suffered, finds the one about God not giving us more than we can bear to be, well, unbearable.  That quote isn’t even in the Bible, is it?  I just looked it up.  It is a spin off a verse in 1 Corinthians 10:13 that says you won’t be TEMPTED more than you can bear.  That’s another thing altogether than getting smashed with horrible experiences.  I am sorely TEMPTED to smack some people in the nose for spouting platitudes, but I can handle it, I can control myself.  The temptation does not exceed my capacity to bear it.  But the grief, I don’t see how my family can bear the grief of losing Raven.  They are strong, they will bear up the for the sake of each other, but they are broken and no platitude will fix that.

Then there are the people who want to set a timer on grief. Last night I came on to Facebook to find requests from Raven’s mother and grandmother to flood Facebook with remembrances of Raven because some dimwit said that they shouldn’t keep posting Raven pictures since we lost Raven at the beginning of August and it is now October.  Time to move on, the dimwit reportedly said.

Hello?

Let me tell you something.

When I die, somebody sure had better mourn me loud and clear for longer than that.  Okay, I’m not as sociable as Raven was, so I don’t expect wide spread sorrow for me.  I’ll be happy if five people show up at my funeral, sincerely missing me, provided I even have a funeral, which I’m not really thinking I will.  I figure to just sort of fade into the mist as though I was never here, leaving only a few wonderful books behind and several awful oil paintings -- whereas Raven’s funeral was like a funeral for a princess.  Even Lilly Pulitzer sent a representative.  Yes, the Lilly Pulitzer clothing company, who did a special design for Raven because so many people wrote to them telling how much she had loved their colorful fashion line. So I don’t expect to have as big a chorus mourning me. 

But the thing is, when a person bothers to get born and become a person and live a life, it is the least a person can ask is that someone remembers them, sings them, dances them, speaks their name, posts their photographs and memories for a whole lot longer than two months after they die.  Raven lived sixteen years, and by all accounts and according to the pictures, every one of those years was a joy and delight to those close to her.  So I would say that she has at least sixteen more years where it is appropriate for the family to flood Facebook with Raven memories.

At least.

~~~~~~~~~~~ 

In memory of Raven Alexandrea White, great grandaughter of “Garnet” in PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST FAMILY SAGA.  Raven died while boating at Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina.

INSIGHT MAGAZINE AND THE “NOW” GENERATION

Groovy and cool were the words of the day, and Do Your Own Thing was the mantra of the “Now” Generation, that is my generation of cool, groovy long-haired cats and chicks.  Guitars were always around, whether one played them or not, blue jeans were a sign of rebellion and not to be worn on religious campuses.  It was in this era, circa 1970, that the Seventh-Day Adventist church realized that it had to get hip if it was going to appeal to the youth culture. 

What did the Adventists have to appeal to flower children living in the moment, counting the petals on daisies, tripping out on cloud formations?  THE YOUTH INSTRUCTOR, the only Adventist magazine for teens at the time, had been started by none other than James White, husband of Ellen G. White of prophetic fame, before the Civil War.  1852, to be exact, not even ten years after The Great Disappointment when the Millerites had scheduled the Second Coming of Christ and been stood up, not once, but twice as William Miller recalculated all the signs and numbers. 

I remember THE YOUTH INSTRUCTOR.  In my time, they didn’t hand it out in Sabbath School because, perhaps, they knew it was boring to teens.  I remember my grandparents subscribing to it.  Mrs. White was still alive when they were children, so they were in tune with THE YOUTH INSTRUCTOR.   By 1970,  other Christian ministries were targeting my generation with psychedelic posters of a smiling Jesus in love beads.  The One Way arrow figured prominently (One Way To Christ).  Books such as JESUS THE REVOLUTIONARY were being published to show how hip Jesus was.  It was time for a cool,  groovy replacement of THE YOUTH INSTRUCTOR before our entire generation lost interest and split the scene, man.

            And so INSIGHT MAGAZINE was born, its covers featuring guitars and warped fonts in hallucinogenic colors.  This magazine was proudly handed out in Sabbath School, and I would surreptitiously read it from cover to cover during the church service that followed.  My ambition was to be a published writer, but I had no idea how to make that happen beyond writing stories, which I did with pen and paper, later on a Smith-Corona manual typewriter that was older than I was.  If I wanted a second copy of anything I wrote, I had to use smeary carbon paper and hope I didn’t make too many typos on the original.  Some writers claim they prefer a manual typewriter to computers.  In my opinion, that is seriously deranged.

            I was seventeen years old in 1973, one of an elite handful of students who had been chosen by Southern Missionary College to enroll in its Honors Composition Class.  I forget how they discovered me.  I was extremely withdrawn, traumatized by years of bullying and other personality-shriveling experiences.  I had never been on the Honor Roll in academy, and certainly didn’t graduate with honors, having focused instead on my notebooks filled with my handwritten fiction.  Apparently, rays of brilliance leaked out somewhere, somehow, in a detectable form, because I ended up in the honors class which was taught by the rather exotically-named Dr. Minon Hamm.   

            I still have the papers I wrote for that class.  Among them was “The Chase,” an action-adventure car chase story in which my father’s road rage ended up in a terrifying encounter with another driver who also had road rage.  In the story, I never identify my driver as my parent, and Dr. Hamm wrote a note on the margin that she found it intriguing that I never say who the driver is in relation to me.  Another story was “The Hearing,” in which a white child yearning for affection accuses a black teacher she admires of having slapped her.

            Dr. Hamm said that all of us could “write circles around her.”  She was a warm, enthusiastic teacher who loved mentoring us.  The most exciting feature of the class was that before we finished, we were required to submit one of our stories to INSIGHT MAGAZINE’s national writing contest.  If I’m not mistaken, it was their first writing contest ever.  If not the first, it was the second, for sure and certain.  At any rate, it was a new feature, this contest, and I was wildly excited (in my subdued, withdrawn way).  Dr. Hamm was submitting a story, also.    

            I submitted “The Shell.”  The story had happened the summer before, and I was, even then, struggling with the conflicts that would end with my leaving the church and rejecting all organized religion.  I wanted to believe, so I was in a wistful state of mind, when I wrote the story about an incident on the seashore involving the faith of my eight-year-old cousin.  She had found a shell, fallen in love with it, only for it to slip between her fingers.  The sun was setting, the wind was wild, and she was praying to Jesus to help her find the shell.  I didn’t think she would ever find that shell, and I was saddened that she might lose her faith at such an early age because I knew what a painful process that is.  The story was very short, only a few paragraphs long, describing the search on the beach, my inner conflict, and my shock when the little girl screamed with joy that she had found the lost shell.

            Now, the desired ending would be a reaffirmation of my own faith, but real life is more complex, or it has been for me.  Instead, I ended the story on a more haunting note: Then I hear another cry. It chills through my wet clothes to my heart. I hear the bleat of a lamb. Spinning around to face the roaring sea, I see the gull. It opens its beak and utters the bleat again, gliding and dipping to touch the water.

            The reader is left to draw an independent conclusion, one that I do not spell out except in my subtle reference to the bleating of lambs and the crying of gulls.     

            We in the composition class critiqued each other’s stories.  I think Dr. Hamm thought “The Shell” would win the contest.  Maybe she gave all the students the impression that she thought their story would win, and that was the mark of a true mentor.

            I don’t remember the other students’ stories, but I remember Dr. Hamm’s.  It was titled “Uccello.”  In the story, a group of students are spending a summer studying in Italy.  When they arrive, they find that they are staying two to a room and must choose roomates.  The narrator ends up rooming with an unpleasant girl named Robin. The story was beautifully written with bird motifs throughout, the birds on the rooftops of Italy, the tortured, birdlike soul of Robin, the Italian word for bird, uccello.  In the course of the summer the narrator and Robin build a rapport and as a result, Robin begins to open her heart to Jesus.

              I remember “Uccello” because it was well crafted, but I also remember it because Dr. Hamm was put in an uncomfortable position when she had to inform the class that “Uccello” had won the writing contest.  She apologized profusely.  I don’t think any of us held it against her because we knew that she had competed with us because she considered us worthy competitors.  Besides, it was clear to me why INSIGHT chose her story over mine.  Mine had a cool, hip teenage protagonist, but Dr. Hamm’s story had an exotic location and a tidy, religious conclusion.

            Several years later, I found my writing groove.  It was a new age, the hippies were a vanishing breed, quickly replaced by yuppies and the word groove was going the way of the vinyl record album.  I came back to the INSIGHT contest and won it several times.  There was a new editor at INSIGHT, so eventually I dug out “The Shell,” and what do you know?  They published it for the kids of the nineties. To use 1990s speak, Sweeeeet!

Maggie Boo

One night I found myself flying across the Green Swamp on one of those sage grass brooms that I remembered from my childhood at the old Malpass place.  My great-grandmother, Miss Ellen, and great-aunt Esther would use these brooms that were made of the tall yellow grass that grew wild outdoors, tied with a string.  I don’t recall their brooms having a handle, just bundled grass, and since the grass was tall, so was the broom, taller than me, standing up in the corner of the shadowy hallway of the old Malpass place.

I used to try to make my own grass brooms but there was more to it than I understood, so mine were never any good, making a floor more messy than when I started sweeping.

That night, I was flying on one of those brooms over the land of my childhood, over tall yellow grass and marshland, with a dark river winding under me, edged with trees that grew in the water.  It was a glorious night. 

I wasn’t exactly me, but that wasn’t strange because I often dream through the perspective of other people.  I’ve dreamed myself into different time periods and different parts of the world.  I’ve dreamed myself as men and women, old and young, different races.  Some of the dreams are so vivid that I cannot forget them, such as the dream where I was a brown man in a desert landscape, riding a large shaggy animal which I have tentatively identified as a wooly mammoth.  I remember the animal’s hair was ropey, somewhat dreadlocked, and that I was as dirty as the animal I rode, kneeling on a dirty rug across its broad back. Memories like that stick with you, even if they are only dream memories.

Sometimes I recognize where I am, but at other times I seem to be in civilizations that have been lost to time, such as the wooly mammoth rider’s time.  The dream of flying over the Green Swamp was that sort of dream, one I would not forget, although this time I recognized the time and place.

My destination was one of those weathered old houses they used to have in the Green Swamp, the kind that sit on stumps and never see a paintbrush.  It was about the size of the Malpass house but the roof was different and it had an attic room with a window.  A little blonde girl was waiting for me at the window, and I felt a deep love for her and a knowledge that this feeling was returned.  I knew that she was the only person in the household who was expecting me, and I wondered why. 

Other things were afoot in the dream.  There was about to be a wedding.  There was a threat to happiness.  The little girl was worried, and I had come to save the day.   The dream slipped forward as dreams do, and I saw myself lifting up from the front porch and flying over a wedding party arranged in the yard for an outside wedding.  Whatever was happening was about to happen now and it had to do with the bride and the groom.  But something happened and instead of saving the day I veered off course and crashed into a weeping willow tree.

I woke up with all this clear in my mind, but with so much missing information.  Whose wedding was it?  What was the threat to happiness?  What had I tried to prevent from happening and why?  Why did no one seem to welcome me except the little girl?

And just as important…

What happened next?

How could I find out?

There was only one way.

Write the story.

So I began at the beginning, well, no, I began before the beginning, at the point where the little girl defies her elders and invites me to the wedding.  Of course they didn’t want me there.  I was an embarrassment to the family, flying around on a broom and causing attention to myself. 

And who was I?

I was…

Maggie Boo.

And who was the little girl?

Annie Doodle, Maggie Boo's niece.

Who was getting married?  The little girl’s older sister, Minnie Carol.

And what was the problem?

No clue.

So I kept writing.  Maggie Boo arrives, flying over the Green Swamp, and suddenly other characters started showing up the narrative.  Granny June with her red beaded purse, and Crazy Jim with his tarantula that he wore on his head.  And then another character entered.  And she was trouble.

If you want to find out what happened on Minnie Carol’s wedding day, you’ll have an easier time finding out than I did.  I had to dream it and then write it.  All you have to do is click on a LINK and order a copy!

DNA Testing -- Not for the Racially Prejudiced!

I have seen overt prejudice against people of color decrease significantly over the generations in my mostly Southern family.  But if you still have those feelings – and you’re thinking about doing a DNA test through ancestry.com or its equivalents – be ready to deal with your feelings about race when you look in the mirror.

I was fortunate to have parents who chose not to bring me up as a racist.  Yet, racism was all around us, those feelings and expressions, and to some extent it was in even our house.  I remember my mother explaining to me that my friend from the Lumbee tribe had nothing to be ashamed of because she was mixed white and Native American, and as a result I defended her at school by shouting to the bullies “She is not black!  She’s Indian!”  So racism was there, even where we tried to keep it out.  If you were Southern, racism was like a wind that whistles around the house and it would sneak in like a bug through the tiniest crack in the structure. 

But in comparison to most of the people around us, my parents were quietly progressive, although they were by no means in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.  Still they taught me that people are people and that it is only society that discriminates.  Lucky me!  For I have just discovered that I am not completely 100 percent white, and my nonwhite percent isn’t Native American.

It is just a drop of African descent which I possess, one percent for me, three percent for my father.  But I can remember when “one drop” was significant, and it is significant to me--as in Significantly Interesting.  I wanted to know more.  How could it be that out of those tediously monochromatic ancestors of mine that there was, somewhere, a person of color?  And when did that line of ancestors turn white?

The first clue was an ancestor named Cornelius Davis who was listed as a “free colored person” along with his household in the 1840 census in Brunswick County NC, as were his closest neighbors.  But on the 1850 census, Cornelius, along with his household, was identified as white while his neighbors remained colorful, and that was his story, and he stuck to it through all the census taking to come over the next forty years. 

I was curious how Cornelius achieved this precarious freedom while still classified as a person of color in the antebellum South, and I believe I have made the connection that tells the story. 

I have tentatively connected Cornelius “Neal” Davis on the basis of location and time, surnames of neighbors, and recorded ethnicity to Richard Davis, a “mulatto” who was an artilleryman in the Revolutionary War.  Richard and his mother, Grace, were freed in the late 1700s by a slave holder named John Davis.  In the words of the 1791 petition filed by Richard and Grace Davis to the state of North Carolina upon the death of John Davis, they were determined to “continue to enjoy all the rights of a free Woman and the Privilege of a Freeman.”  

What a story those few documents tell!  And oh, the secrets we kept and took to our graves, burying the bones, burying the skin tones for what seemed to be forever! Until a new age comes when people are learning to embrace all their ethnicity and coincidentally we have the ability to raise those buried secrets from the DNA of our ancestors.  I belong to this new era, and I celebrate the African American history in me.

DNA Research: Prepare to Shake Up Your Family Tree

I haven't written much about my father's side of the family, partly because much was unknown, and partly because much was of a sensitive nature, but now and then I return to the story of my Grandma Annie, as I did several years ago when I blogged about lying to a genealogist in "The Facts Ma'am, Just the Facts."  There, my mother lied about my lineage because Grandma Annie was still living at that time and was still telling people that my father was her brother instead of her son.

Now, all these years later, we have a new page of the saga:

Grandma Annie was fifteen years old, unmarried and pregnant in a rural Southern community where everyone knew everyone else. I don’t think she ever dealt with what happened straight-on, so the only thing we know for sure is that she tried to reinvent her past by leaving everything behind and marrying a young man in South Carolina that she had known for about a week. She chose well that time. Roy Turner eventually learned that her little brother in North Carolina was her son, and when I came along he loved me as though I was his own grandchild. But Annie was always a haunted person.

I had always been told that a certain person was my biological grandfather. I knew who he was and where he lived, and sometimes I saw him sitting on his shady front porch when we drove past his house on the highway. I knew he didn’t claim me as his grandchild. My mother explained everything to me when I was about six years old and was asking the wrong questions. I learned that there are truths that you live as though they are not so.

The writer in me found it interesting to be part of a scandal that everyone knew about and didn’t mention. I was always very curious about this grandfather and his daughters who were supposedly my aunts; and they seemed curious about me, also. It seemed that everyone in the old neighborhood looked at me in a special way. I can remember walking into Matt Dale’s country store, and hearing people murmur, “Mason’s girl...” People speculated about which of the aunts I resembled. They said I had the wide-open eyes that are characteristic of that family. All this made me feel like sort of a celebrity.

In the later years of Grandma Annie’s life, she denied that the man with the shady front porch was my grandfather. Several possibilities came up and she flatly denied that one fellow in particular was my father’s father – which in hindsight, was significant. By now my father and I were both old enough that our characters were pretty well formed, so we told ourselves it didn’t matter who the missing father/grandfather was. But it did matter. And it wasn’t just our mystery. It belonged to the whole community, a generations-old story that is still talked about.

So to make a long ramble a little shorter, my father sent his DNA through ancestry.com. 
Of course it turns out to be the man that Grandma Annie said it most certainly was NOT. This new grandfather – we never knew him or his other family, and I never even saw his front porch. He was long gone from the area fairly young and may have never known he left a son behind much less a writerly granddaughter.

So now I’m in sort of mourning – because I had developed a life-long fondness for that old rascal on his shady front porch and I thought he was mine even though he never acknowledged me. I’m going to miss him in the shady area of my family tree.

Photo: Grandma Annie and my father

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC (OR NOT) -- Why I fear electricity

 

I fear electricity and electrical storms.  At my worst, I hover under the stairwell during storms.  I flinch with each lightning strike at my best. This is at least understandable to those around me who go about their normal business without a quiver.  But my phobia about plugging stuff into electrical sockets is downright peculiar, not to mention inconvenient, and it hasn't improved with time.  

Those who have read Precious Jewels, a Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga and Fireflies know that my grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle were all struck by lightning, and there are more distant members of the family who share in this legacy of the stricken by lightning on the Denton side of the family.  One of my earliest memories is of my Uncle Lester lifting his t-shirt to show me the zigzag lightning mark on his lean torso.  

I remember coastal storms where the air hummed with electrical charge. It was during one of those storms that a ball of electricity wandered out of an electrical socket between my mother and me when I was at the crawling stage of life.  "Don't move!" cried my mother, and I was obedient, or else I might number myself among the family stricken. I admit I probably don't remember this incident, but my mother told the story so often that I can see it in my mind.  This isn't the only reason I don't trust outlets.  I remember clearly Grandma Denton yanking an entire electrical outlet in flames from the wall. (Grandpa Denton's wiring was among the first in the Green Swamp, but it was a bit eccentric.) 

But that is mild in comparison to what happened later. Two of the most terrifying incidents in my life involved electricity. 

The first incident was when my parents, driving home one rainy night from Wilmington NC, tried to pass a store that was burning in a tiny one-street town, and drove into a hail of falling electrical wires.  Daddy and I have compared memories of this incident over the years.  Daddy's reflexes were normally, er, lightning fast, but he admits that the situation overtook us so quickly and in such a horrifying manner that he froze at the wheel, and we went neither forward nor backward for a period of time which we disagree upon.  Child time and adult time being different, Daddy says it was less than a minute.  I swear that I counted backwards from 100 to 1 before I took action to save myself.  When I saw that we were still sitting there and the wires were still going crazy around us, I opened the car door, and leaped about twenty feet (again, kid math) and started running in superhuman bursts to safety, dancing over wires that hissed like snakes and soaring over fallen branches that writhed like prehistoric monsters.

I was nearly clear of the conflagration when Daddy yelled at me to get back into the car, which he later agreed was probably unwise, but who has the luxury to think these things out while a catastrophe is occurring?  I obeyed, because that was the way my parents trained me.  I turned around and faced the snapping jaws and hissing snakes again and leaped back into the car. All I remember for certain immediately after that was that the car was now moving and Daddy was informing me that I could have been killed the second I left the car if a wire had been touching the metal.  One thing has remained with me, other than the fear of electricity. I cannot forget that I abandoned my family in order to save my own life.  It was pure logic.  I could not save them, so I acted in order to save myself. 

The next terrifying event happened about 25 years later when Kevin and I were trying to bring our first home up to code.  Those who know us well already know that we are insane, but for those who know us less well, I will mention that we moved into a derelict house on the side of Lookout Mountain.  The hundred-year-old house had no doors or windows, plumbing or electricity, and we squatted there until we had permission to inhabit temporarily; and, without any money to speak of, determined to bring it up to code so we could get a mortgage on it before we were thrown out.  

At the same time, we were under attack by the outlaw family who had once inhabited the burnt shell of a cabin next door to "our" house, and had a weird fixation on the whole property.  It was they who had stripped the house we were in, and probably they who had tried to burn it down (judging by the burn hole in one bedroom and the scorch marks in the hall), and it was they who kept creeping around, sabotaging and burgling us.  But we were determined save the house and live in it. 

Well, we required electricity in order to run power tools to repair the house, so Kevin ran a wire from our fuse box into the fuse box of the empty house on the other side of us (with permission of the absent owner).  All went well until the outlaws set another fire to the already-burnt cabin back on the other side.  While three fire trucks and the general hubbub around them had our attention focused on the cabin, one of the arsonists sneaked between our house and the house that hosted the electricity and cut the wires in between, probably intending to steal them for the copper.  This could have killed them which would have served them right, but there is no accounting for the behavior of electricity.  The fire trucks had left the cabin and gone down the mountain when we discovered more fire-- wicked, billowing black smoke and brilliant sparks erupting from the fuse boxes of our house and  the house we had plugged into, as a result of the severed connection in between. 

It was the Wilmington highway all over again, only this time we were about to burn down two houses.  "We'd better call the fire trucks back," I said, but Kevin reminded me that the fuse boxes currently blowing up were illegally connected.  Personally, I might have preferred being hauled off to jail than to watch Kevin wrap a shirt around his face and plunge into hell to disconnect the bare wires from an exploding fuse box.  I had a broom in my hand ready to try to knock him away if he got electrocuted, but I can't swear what I would have done if he'd electrified because half my mind was on the Wilmington Highway, and we all know what my instinct was there.

These are only the most dramatic of the traumas that feed my oversensitivity to all things electrical.  In addition to that, I have had two microwaves blow up on me for no discernible reason.  No, I didn't put metal or other forbidden objects into the microwave.  No, I didn't do anything stupid or against the instructions.  It is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe, and apparently more rare than seeing a UFO for I have yet find anyone else who admits to having had a microwave blow up for no apparent reason.  (much less two microwaves)

So the trauma of electricity has happened and re-happened in various horrific incidents throughout my life, giving me more than enough reason to have developed a full-blown, embarrassing and inconvenient aversion not only to lightning storms but to the normal things that people do with electricity.  I haven't given up on overcoming my problem even though I recognize that this could be more than a phobia--rather, it is a deep-seated reasonable reaction to repeated trauma related to electricity.  

I have to work on the problem in my own way and in my own time.  There are times when I think I'm almost cured, but one unexpected spark can send me reeling back to my original condition. It cannot be forced. It cannot be willed. So I just carry on, face my fears when I can face them, and give myself permission to retreat when it is too hard.  I spare myself from the stress of electrical sparks by using power strips with on and off switches wherever possible. One learns to be creative in order to function in a world where everything runs with electricity.

But in the meantime, if you need something plugged straight into the wall, and can't reach it yourself, and I'm sitting right there… 

…well…

…don't look at me. 

Carolina Mourning Dove

I can't imagine life as a person who isn't driven to create.  When I was younger, I wasn't convinced that my talents were really gifts because they never gave me a moment's peace and not that much obvious reward.  A part of me always knew that because of my creativity, I would never suffer boredom because I am constantly experiencing things with newborn eyes, ever preoccupied with what to do about what I have witnessed, seen, experienced.  Not being bored is a good thing.  Bored people are sad, dull creatures.  I was delivered from that.  My creativity also helped me remain somewhat sane. I have always had a place to channel the stuff that makes some people go bonkers, become axe-murderers, and other destructive possibilities.  I don't claim complete and total sanity, but I am steady enough as I go that people forgive my eccentricities as being something cool rather than deranged.  That is a good thing.

One thing I don't consider myself is a poet, although I have written verse all my life.  My first real, honest-to-goodness published work was a poem, so maybe that counts for something.  But I never took seriously the idea of trying to get someone to publish more of my poems much less to self publish.  I am going to blame my Aunt for the upcoming book, she who is "Garnet" in Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga.  It is her fault that I wrote Church School Blues, also, so she deserves full credit for pushing me into this new endeavor.  Because of her, I finally looked at my collection of poems that span literally a lifetime, and they fall into two clear categories for the most part.  I'll tell you about the second category later, but the first category is that of poems of longing for coastal North Carolina, written from the age of 16 and continuing through all my decades in which I considered myself an exile from my true home.

There are thirteen poems in Carolina Mourning Dove, with photographs and drawings.  In some ways this is the most personal book I have put out there for all to see because in the poems I opened my heart and wept onto the pages. If you have ever been homesick, if you have ever been an exile, the poems of Carolina Mourning Dove will speak to you and cry with you.

I will let you know when it is available online.  First I have to get a proof copy and see if my aunt approves.

WHEN THE SNOW CAME TO DIXIE

Everyone knows by now that a big snowstorm has crippled the Southern U.S.  Now that the danger is mostly over, people are saying how poorly everyone with any authority handled the situation, ignoring the fact that no one, not even the weather bureau could predict the exact time or quantity of the storm to come.  Everyone made their own choices that day. No one was certain which was the right one, not even the police who were expected to be everywhere simultaneously and are now being criticized for failing to do so even though it was not physically possible; not even the heads of schools; nor the mayors of cities, and certainly not we who felt, nearly to a man, that we would be cowardly not to get into our cars that morning and go to where we normally go.  Despite the warnings, despite the knowledge that a storm was coming, very highly likely, very soon.  

Not seeing a snowflake in sight, most chose to continue life as normal, which they regretted a few hours later when the snow and ice came swiftly, turning the streets into frigid parking lots, separating children from their parents.  It was a sort of Pompeii scenario where people were caught in action and then unable to move, frozen in place for eternity, but most of us in the American South thankfully got up alive from our positions and eventually made it home, eventually were united.  Thankfully, above the voices of spoiled brats who expect everything to be taken care of perfectly at all times and complain when mere human beings take charge, we also hear stories of courage and generosity.  Those are the stories that will endure.

All of this reminds me of my own story in a long ago January when my grandmother died.  We had no choice but to get into our car and venture into the storm because the family needed us in another state.  I will never forget the huge, motionless trucks lying on their sides, as we moved perilously through an eerie and treacherous landscape, our hearts already breaking.  Here is the excerpt from CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES of our journey through the snow that January:

Part of the selling point of moving over here <to Chattanooga from coastal North Carolina> was that I would get to see snow. I have seen snow only twice in my life—once the canal froze solid! I was told that it snows in Chattanooga a lot more often, but so far, not one single flake has appeared. This is very disappointing and I am wondering if perhaps I was given false advertising.

Christmas comes, and I am still hoping for snow. We open the rest of the presents that Aunt Garnet brought Thanksgiving. We get two long distance phone calls, which are very expensive. We can talk for only sixty seconds before the charge starts doubling and tripling and quadrupling itself. One of the calls is from Aunt Faith and the other is a big surprise because it's from Grandma. She was still learning how to use her phone when we left, and now she is calling long distance! The seconds fly by. We have hardly heard their voices before they are gone again, into the cold winter distance that separates the Green Swamp from Chattanooga. 

Then on the twelfth of January, I see a few snowflakes before the sun goes down, but it is so cold that I don't stand around outside trying to call more flakes. In one hour, I can see through the window that the ground is completely covered and it is pouring down sleet with the snow. We are toasty inside the Duplex on Dupont because we have ceil heat. It drifts in gentle waves down from the ceiling all over the house. Always before, we had heaters you had to crowd around to get warm. We had a wood heater when I was little, and then oil. After we came to S. Saint Marks, there were heaters built right into the walls which was pretty nice, but this all-over heat is like a cozy blanket.

About 9:30, Daddy opens the kitchen door and says we have four inches of snow and there is no end in sight.

"Close the door, honey!" shrills Mother when a cold blast flies into the house, and Daddy is glad to oblige. "Brrrrrr!"

It's hard to settle down with so much excitement, but the house rocks gently with the wind, and the walls shift and the floors crackle with the cold outdoors, and it's like bedding down in a warm igloo.

The phone rings at about 1:30 in the morning, waking us all up. It rings and rings, and I can hear my parents stirring and mumbling, until Daddy pads down the hall in his bare feet to the phone.

"Honey, you better come to the phone," says Daddy to Mother.

I can hear Mother struggling with her bathrobe, and she says in a thin voice, "Hello?" And then, "Oh, my soul!"

Suddenly I'm on my feet beside them, not knowing how I got there, and Mother is sobbing. The last time I heard her cry like that was when she got the news that Jacky was killed in Viet Nam. The time before was when Grandma's old yellow cat, Goldie, killed the ten baby rabbits.

Daddy turns to me and says, "Your Grandma Denton is dead."

He has his hands full taking care of Mother who is sagging against him and still crying into the phone, so I creep back down the hall to my bed and sit there on top of the quilt that Grandma made, listening as Mother brokenly tells Daddy that Grandma had the flu, but she has always been healthy and nobody thought it was serious. She had been pretty sick with it, sure, but Aunt Faith was taking care of her and Grandpa was right there—but in the middle of the night she gasped for breath and just died.

Grandma's mother, my Great-Grandma Pearl, lived into her eighties, but Grandma was only just turned sixty-nine years old. She was planning to teach at least ten more years because she had promised God to devote her entire life to teaching. In those ten summertimes, her granddaughter in Tennessee is supposed to come stay with her and Grandpa in their cabin near the canal.

But summer is long gone and far away, and there are twelve inches of snow on the ground in Chattanooga. The ice and snow are still falling, as we throw clothes into suitcases and drive into the storm in search of North Carolina. Finally, after months of longing to go home, after months of dreaming of snow, I am getting both things at the same time. But the snow has become a blizzard, and home has lost its light.

Daddy manipulates our speed through his varying pressure on the gas pedal and avoids using the brakes, so we keep our traction on the snow-thickened highway while other drivers lose theirs. We pass cars that have braked too hard and skidded into snow banks, and we thread through the hulking shapes of tractor trailer rigs which are mostly lying on their sides.

Mother is sobbing about throwing away the last pie her mother will ever give her. She says she would have waited to move out of the Green Swamp if she'd have known that she would never see her mother again. And on and on, varying her weeping with attempts to rest. She has already cried up a migraine headache.

In the back seat, I am silent, chewing my bottom lip until its bleeds, but I cannot cry. Our car is a lone bubble of life, moving through a Salvador Dali painting that mirrors the unnatural landscape of my life.

--CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES

Pictured: Me in the CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES days.

The Third Alternative

An unbelievable quantity of nonsense comes across my Facebook page from friends who forward what appear, on first glance, to be wise sayings to live by.  I find myself picking apart a great many of them, after which I am probably perceived to be a curmudgeon who will leave no good idea unpunished.  I don't care who uttered the quote.  I am as likely to attack Einstein and Plato as your next-door blogger.

I try to control myself, I really do, with varying degrees of success.  So I thought perhaps if I am to have any online friends left that I would begin to publish my own words of wisdom and leave their forwarded wisdom alone.  It is true that I haven't come up with an idea to rival the Theory of Relativity, but I know something about something, and if I keep on at the rate I'm going, I'll soon be to the age where I might qualify to possess a sage's wisdom.

And so I shall presume.

And in so doing, perhaps I can occupy myself so as not to attack the likes of Einstein and Plato and even Mother Theresa, complaining of their seesaw thinking.

An example of seesaw thinking is the either-or choice:  If you are this, then you cannot be that.  If you are on the up end, you're not on the down end.  The possibility of a balanced seesaw is ignored.  You must be up or down, and there is no third alternative such as being on the swings or slides, and not interacting with the seesaw at all.  Such quotes often start out "There are only two ways to...."

A close relative of seesaw thinking is all-inclusive thinking.  These quotes usually have the word "all" in them.  All something is this, without exception.  All immigrants.  All Christians.  All Liberals.  All women.  All-inclusive thinking is the birthplace of prejudice.  When we don't know the individuals, we tend to speak in terms of "all", and upon this comes the first the stereotype and soon along comes the paper tiger that must be destroyed.

Most of the quotes that raise my hackles fall under these two categories.  At the risk of being all-inclusive, I will say that I have observed them coming from "all" belief systems and political persuasions.  As a result, I offend everyone, as I run, tilting my sword equally at quotes that assure me that all Republicans, all vegetarians, all animal lovers, all all all....  I don't believe in all, probably because I have been the exception to so many rules.  I am the third alternative in a two-alternative universe.

Here is my first constructive response.  It is inspired by a post I saw recently that assures us that we aren't as broken as we think we are even though we may have "a couple scars and a couple bad memories," and that all great heroes do.  I like the gist of the quote, that heroes are scarred by definition.  What I dislike is the way it downplays the damage a person may have endured, minimizing it as merely a couple scars and a couple bad memories.  I dislike the sweeping generalization that we aren't as broken as we think we are, for some of us are exactly that broken, perhaps more so than we think we are, and denial does not help heal us.

But rather than attack the post, and thus the person posting it, I have sheathed my sword and created my own words of wisdom.

I NEVER KNEW SANTA CLAUS

I was never taught that Santa Claus was a real person who rode in a sled bearing gifts for good children, sliding down the chimney at night.  For one thing, we didn't have a man-sized chimney.  Even an elf would have wound up in our wood stove instead of an open fireplace, so that part of the story fell through even if my parents were inclined to tell me this lie.  I was a child of dual cultures, although it is seldom expressed this way.  I lived in a community off Highway 211 where my mother's people were Seventh-Day Adventists.  Some of them barely tolerated Christmas because its traditions were a mishmash of several religion's festivals and, therefore, not considered purely Christian.

Most of my mother's community did tolerate Christmas.  We had a Christmas tree in the foyer of our church/school house, we drew names at school for gifts, and we always had a Christmas play where every year I hoped to be chosen for the part of Mary and never was.  When I was very small, I was one of the adorable line of angels in paper halos covered with gold glitter who paraded down the aisle with candles dripping on paper candleholders. Later, due to the shortage of boys at the small country school (grades 1-8 in one room, one teacher), I was drafted to serve as a shepherd.  I rather got into the role, proudly stomping around, carrying a crooked staff (or a close approximation.)

We always had a Christmas tree in our house, beautifully decorated by my mother, and always Christmas gifts although there was no hanging the stocking by the chimney with care.  (no chimney, no money to fill a sock with extras.)  One of my favorite Christmas eve memories is of spinning merrily with my arms outstretched in pure glee -- right into the Christmas tree.  My mother didn't scold me since I didn't break anything and tipped the tree only a little bit.

My father's people, across the marsh near Delco, weren't Adventist, and they embraced all aspects of Christmas.  Nativity scenes melded with Santa Clauses and I was aware that my little cousins on that side of the family actually seemed to believe that Santa Claus was not only comin' to town, but that he was coming way out into the woods where we all lived, none of us with a working fireplace, but comin' just the same.  My mother turned up her nose at such silliness.  She made it clear from the minute I heard the name Santa Claus that he was just another fairy tale, same as Mother Goose.  My mother wasn't an especially religious Adventist, so I don't think her objection to Mr. Claus was religiously based.  Her reasoning was simple and practical:

Every gift under that tree was acquired through hard work, scrimping, and sacrifice, and the idea that some bozo in a red suit would get all the credit was outrageous.  Children should know, said my mother, that their parents were the givers. 

Despite the fact that Santa Claus was nobody in our house, Christmas was still exciting.  My parents concealed larger parcels until Christmas morning, and one Christmas when we were house-sitting a friends' hotel (long story there), I was banned from going upstairs for several weeks while my parents merrily and secretly rode my new English Racer down the long upstairs hallway.  We didn't need Santa, and I never missed him, although there turned out to be a downside to this for my mother one December day in downtown Wilmington. That was the day that she suddenly got it into her head that it would be cute to have a photo made of me sitting in a storefront Santa's lap.  I knew his visage from drawings and wrapping paper, but Santa in the flesh was an alien concept to me.  Mother pushed me toward his bearded form before I knew what was what.  "It's just Santa!" urged my mother when I balked.  "Santa Claus!"

But Santa had no reality for me, and certainly no appeal. I was causing such a scene that she had to give up the idea.  Later, I recall that she patiently explained to me all about costumed Santas, and that it was just a cute way to take Christmas photo.  So the next year, I willingly approached the bearded man and had my picture taken although I was perplexed when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas.  That wasn't a question that adults usually asked me, although my mother would give me a fair hearing on the matter, usually explaining to me why we couldn't afford a swing set or a dollhouse. 

One year, though, they got me the Jumping Shoes I craved.  They were bright red strap-ons with springs, and I eagerly tried them out, expecting to fly over the roof.  But alas, the shoes wouldn't budge because I didn't have enough weight to make an impression on the springs.  Still, I'll never forget the wonder of the illustration of an airborne kid, and the thrill of opening the package and realizing that my parents had somehow managed to purchase my dream.

I never felt that our Christmases lacked something by not having Santa central to the secular side of it.  For me, it was every bit as wonderful to have gifts from my parents, family, and friends as it would have been to have gifts hauled in from the North Pole.  In fact, I have always wondered about the breach of trust involved when children learn that their parents lied.  There are enough lies floating around in families that we surely don't need a Santa Claus lie on top of it all.

However, from my observation of families who lie about Santa, no one seems to suffer permanent damage from that particular lie.  It appears that it is a sort of rite of passage when a child realizes that Santa is a fairy tale.  Along with the disillusionment comes the privilege of stepping into the knowing circle of older people, and the merry mischief of fooling the little kids.
     I get that, I really do, I think...

THE JESUS, JESUS PICTURE and Other Stories

THE JESUS, JESUS PICTURE and Other Stories is now available on amazon.com. 

I had fun with this cover.  Since most of the stories were taken from my teenage years, I did a drawing from a photo of me at about the age I was when I wrote "The Shell" (which is included among the stories.)  I always felt so cool in that hat!

WHY I BECAME AN INDIE WRITER

People always ask, when you say you are a writer, "Have you ever been published?"

This is especially true when you are an "Indie" writer, independently producing your own books.  The idea behind the question, I think, is two fold.  1) Okay, you're a writer, but how serious are you?  And 2) Are you any good?  Being good at something, in our society, is measured by how much people are willing to pay you. Or if they are willing to pay you at all.

My personal opinion about becoming an indie writer is that it is wise for the writer to have proven herself by at least having sold something to a publisher.  One doesn't have to be famous, one doesn't even have to have sold enough to give up the day job.  But one should at least once have submitted some sort of writing to a publisher who paid for the privilege.  One must prove oneself worthy.

That is my prejudice, and it may be a cruel one because getting published isn't easy.  It isn't easy even to get a response from a publisher.

It is trial by fire, as is acting or creating art.  You tear off a piece of your soul and offer it to people who don't want it, and usually you get ignored for the effort.  There is a reason that there is such a high suicide rate among creative people.  It isn't because you have to be crazy to be creative (although that helps).  It's that you have to be very tough indeed to endure the amount of rejection that comes with plying the trade.

I am very tough.

I have been rejected many times.

I have continued to ply the trade.

And I did get published.

And then, despite the notion that it's easier to get published once someone has slipped up and published your work once, it is not easier, not really.  But I eventually did it again.  And again.

It is good if one can find one's nitch.  If you find your nitch, it does get easier.

And it is good to take the advice of writing what you know.  This helps you find your nitch.

I was published in several genres, but the one with which I was most familiar was the Seventh-Day Adventist youth market, because I had been a Seventh-Day Adventist youth, and boy did I have stories to tell!

The Jesus, Jesus Picture and Other Stories is a collection of the stories I sold to SDA publishers.  Several of my stories won prizes, two of them were published in a book.  

I proved myself to myself.

But when it came to publishing my books, I have chosen to bypass publishers because it takes so long to get through the process, because some of the process strikes me as unfairly biased against writers, and because I simply love to design and illustrate my own books.  What I have given up is publicity.  My fame is spreading slowly because I don't have a publisher behind me.  Maybe in time, after I have satisfied my urge to produce full blown books all by myself, I will submit again to a book publisher.  But for now, I'm happy being an Indie writer.

So in case I failed to mention this clearly before, my soon to be released new book is The Jesus, Jesus Picture and Other Stories.

I'll let you know when it is available.

A Sense of Humanity

This is how I write.

Often, I have to draw in order to write.  Church School Blues would still be struggling to become a book if I couldn't draw.  This is partly because I didn't want to go back to that awful time in my life.  Drawing helped me see it in color even though my drawings were mostly black and white.

Drawing helped me see the ridiculous clothes of the seventies, Drawing helped me get on my bike in my 11-year-old body and FLY!  Drawing helped me see Willie Swan even though I didn't have a photograph of him and never saw him again after I was twelve and the scandal blew all over our community.

I didn't have photographs of many of people in my story, but my hands remembered.  Like a crime sketch artist, I kept tracing and re-tracing my memory until I got a fair likeness in my mind.

My getting-in-touch sketches were face-on, but the sketches in the finished book are all in profile.  I did this partly in honor of my younger self who was fascinated by Egyptian wall murals where everyone is in profile.  Partly, I did it because profiled faces flattened the look of the scenes.  When one is abused, the world goes sort of two-dimensional.  You don't look out of your eyes in a normal fashion.  You lose all sense of eye-contact as you lose touch with other human beings.  When one is abused, life becomes a cartoon where one seems to be the indestructible wabbit whose wounds don't bleed from the outside.

In about half of the illustration panels my character, Jade, seems to be trying to walk or project herself out of the scene.  In one of my favorite panels, Jade has turned into a sphinx which has also positioned itself looking away from the action in the school room toward whatever alternative is beyond the edge of panel.

Through drawing, I was able to get in touch with my sense of humor about those times.  There is nothing funny about being bullied and isolated, but the world itself and people's quirky personalities contain unexpected gifts of humor that can make hard times bearable.  I had a well developed sense of humor as well as a sense of the absurd as a child, and I think that this aspect of my character helped me retain a measure of perspective.   The worst outcome of being bullied is that both the bullied and the bullies tend to lose their sense of humanity -- their own and that of other people.  But humor keeps one in touch so that one can survive with a spark of self intact.

A sense of humor, and the ability to draw, took me back to those haunted days without turning me inside out, and allowed me to see past the flat panels of pain to the color and the humor that accompanied me on my difficult journey, so that there were times as I wrote and as I drew, that I laughed out loud.

PRECIOUS JEWELS CHARACTER DIES

John Thomas "Jack" Wagner

1935-2013

Jack had a walk-on part in Chapter Fifteen "The Old Homestead", but it was an important part because his preference for the wistful youngest daughter Faith over her man-stealing sisters changed her life.

Passage from PRECIOUS JEWELS about Jack.

In addition to glads in the summer and teaching in the winter, Ralph continued to work in pulp wood. His son was his constant companion at his labor, and Lester was cheerful and industrious, not given to the rebellion of his sisters. What Ralph didn't expect was that one of his daughters would turn her hand to pulp wooding as well. Faith, still casting around for a sense of place within her family, chose to position herself alongside her brother.

Ralph let her come along because her presence allowed him to innovate on how to load the wood. They needed a team of three for Ralph's strategy to work. Most people loaded each 5-1/2 foot log by hand, but Ralph had mounted a boom behind the cab with a cable running through it with a hook. Ralph stood on the truck, Faith attached the hook to the log, and Lester backed up the tractor, pulling cable and hooked log up to Ralph. Ralph placed and unhooked the log, and Faith was ready to take the hook back to the next log.

Ralph's "hookman" was a crucial member of the team, but it didn't occur to him that she needed to be told so. He might slap his son on the back in satisfied camaraderie, but he didn't slap his daughters on the back, and when her brother strolled along with his father's arm draped across his shoulders, the hookman watched them wistfully.

Faith might be able to keep up with a logging crew, but when she dressed up, she was every bit as pretty as her sisters. She looked older than her age, so the young men who dated her sisters paid her attention also, unaware that she was six years younger than Joy. Even Joy didn't take into account the age difference. She was making a great game of breaking up other people's relationships. It was a rare fellow who could withstand Joy's charm when she turned it on. "He's cute," she might say upon spying one of her sisters with a new fellow. "I think I'll take him away from her!"

Both of her sisters had fallen victim to Joy's game playing. Joy was now in the process of taking over the correspondence that Garnet had going with Mason Malpass who was now a sailor on his tour of duty. "They always liked each other," Joy said to Faith. "He's liable to come back home and marry her once she comes to her senses and leaves that old Bill. Let's see if I can get him before that happens!"

Increasingly the red, white and blue airmail envelopes from oversees were addressed to Joy instead of Garnet. Even Grace wasn't pleased about this. It had always seemed to her that there was something special between Garnet and Mason with their shared musical abilities and the way they sparred. Despite the fact that Garnet had proven that she was not likely to languish away her life as a spinster, her mother still felt protective of her.

But there was one young man who seemed immune to Joy's games. Jack was tall, muscular, with a handsome baby face. He had taken Joy out a time or two, and he had also gone out with Garnet. But he made Joy edgy the way he seemed to look right through her little wiles, while Garnet tended to have long, serious relationships. Jack wasn't ready to get serious. At least, not until he noticed Faith. She resembled Joy in her looks, but she didn't have her careless banter. Faith saw him eyeing her and she glowered back at him. He was smitten.

Faith would never forget the day of their first date. She had gone out in the woods as usual with Ralph and Lester and they had worked until the weather turned. A tropical storm was blowing in when they got home, and the willow fronds were blowing sideways in the gale.

"Tell Mother to come home," said Ralph to Faith, and his daughter obediently hopped out of the cab and dashed up the dirt drive toward the Babcock house where Grace had spent the day with her mother who wasn't feeling well.

Ralph and Lester went into the Denton house, and Lester was standing at the window of his attic bedroom peeling off his dirty shirt as Faith reached the pine tree at the curve of the driveway across from the Babcock house. Just as his sister reached the tree, a bolt of lightning hurled out of the sky and struck it. He heard the ripping crash and saw the searing flash — and he saw it reach out to Faith.

"No!" he cried, already in motion. He thundered down the steps past his Dad, who called after him, saw that his son wasn't stopping, and followed. Faith lay face down in a mud puddle as the tree beside her burned. Lester scooped her up in his arms and kept running. Grace had the door open and she stepped back as her son staggered past her and laid his sister down on the bed.

"Oh my soul!" cried Grace, as Pearl pushed her way past them to examine her granddaughter. Faith was already struggling to sit up. "I'm f-f-f-f-f-f-f-ine." she stammered, but she couldn't stop shaking.

"Give me my robe!" snapped Pearl, and Grace grabbed the terrycloth wrap from its hook.

They got the girl out of her wet dirty clothes and swaddled her in Pearl's robe. It was too bad that Faith was in shock and wouldn't remember much of the next few hours because she was, for once, the center of her family's attention.

"Dear Jesus, my poor baby," said Grace, her arms around her, rocking her, nearly as stunned as Faith. Her prayers were garbled, an illogical plea to save her from what had just happened and a prayer of thanksgiving that she wasn't hurt badly.

Lester tried to lighten the mood. "Hey, maybe you'll have a scar like mine!"

Faith glared at him through the cradle of her mother's arms. "I d-d-d-d-d-d-don't w-w-w-w-w-w-want it."

"Sssssh," said Grace, sternly, "You're upsetting her. Poor baby, we'll take you home and tuck you into bed for the night and I'll bring you some supper in bed.

But this had the opposite of its intended effect. "N-n-n-n-ooo! I have a d-d-d-date with J-J-ack!"

"You can't go anywhere until you stop shaking like a leaf." proclaimed Pearl.

"All of you stop making her talk," said Grace. "Let her rest and if she feels like seeing him tonight, then she may."

By evening, Faith's nerves were still jangled but she was determined to keep the date. By the time Jack arrived, she was ready to go. Ever after, when she told the story of how she had been struck by lightning and had gone out on that date anyway, she would say, "And I am so glad that I did!"

For Jack turned out to be Faith's future husband, and with him she would find where she belonged.

----

In Memory of Uncle Jack from his "Favorite Niece." *

*Rumor has it that he told each of his nieces that she was his favorite, but I know the truth!