Tag Archives: michigan

HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU . . .

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Kate b:w

“You’re always a happy camper,” my kid sister, Kate, says to me, frequently. “Even from back when. I’ve seldom seen a photograph where you weren’t. Whereas, the rest of us…”  She sighs as her claim tapers off; the ‘rest of us’ being our four older siblings.

I’m in her Florida home, fifty-eight miles southeast of mine, enjoying faded photographs of her and me during childhood, a monochrome to Kodachrome procession of us aging over the years, corralled in silver and brass frames crowding the desktop in her den.
“You’re smiling in them, too,” I insist.

“But even when you aren’t you’re happy.”

She’s right. In every print I stand guilty as charged, picture-proof that regardless of the rocks life hurled at me, I caught them as stones and skimmed them as pebbles across a body of blue. Setbacks, solutions, and silver linings have ruled my world in that way.

Kate triumphs, too; but does it differently. Unlike me, be it a word, a look, or an action, she wounds easily and holds onto the hurt as lifeblood. She can recite the time, place and reason for every slight she’s perceived from others, intentional, or not. She suffers the “slings and arrows” of both fortune and misfortune. Her self-esteem rarely rides on an even keel.

Most of that is reflected in Kate’s self-deprecating sense of humor where she casts herself as the ugly duckling and also-ran.

Until she turned 12, she shadowed me like a stray puppy inviting approval — but as a tall teen, she began rolling her shoulders forward and slumping down to avoid attention. She took a back seat in all her outings with friends. She never challenged authority. She catered to the wishes of others. She refused to go to her junior prom with a boy she had a crush on unless I agreed to find a date and go with her. (I did.) She always worked harder to strive higher because she felt, in doing so, maybe, just maybe, someone would love her.

I don’t think she’s ever accepted that everyone does love her — not because she played a great game of league softball for nine years, or bested those at any table where board games ruled, or succeeded at every task she undertook, or graduated from college summa cum laude, or even when she became an executive at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, rubbing elbows with celebrities, daily — but because she is without guile. She’s soft spoken and generous. She’s never late for anything, ever. She’s decisive and dependable. She is the first to answer the call, to offer her time, and provide for others whether asked of, or needed, or not.  Her meek demeanor matches her downy curls and wise eyes the color of a Russian Blue.

…and more.

.

THE ABOVE EXCERPT IS FROM:
Seriously, Mom, you didn’t know?
by Marguerite Quantaine © Copyright 2019

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Heartstrings 101

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Deatsville wasn’t any bigger than a whistle on a walk in 1954, and about as far due south of my Michigan birthplace as any eight year old could imagine. The roads running east and west past Popeye’s two pump, glass globe gasoline stop and shop had the soft, dust-rusty look of a boiled bare five-and-dime enamelware pan.

I’d traveled to Deatsville to spend the summer with my cohort, Molly, and her parents who owned that screen door gathering spot frequented mostly by natives of Elmore County and daytrippers from Lomax and Verbena who’d gotten sidetracked on their way to Montgomery.

Molly and I were counterfeit cousins, joined at the heart and mind’s-eye instead of the kinsman hip. Our mommas had been best friends before us. They’d met in New York City where each had fled during the 1930’s, intent on finding a more sophisticated lifestyle than that of a small town girl grown into a small town wife. Marriage and children returned them to convention, but our births had awarded each a vicarious second chance at adventure.

In time we’d give them their dreams, but for that last unadulterated summer of our youth we were as any other children growing up in the kind of rural community that red line roads on paper pocket maps connected.

“Do as you’re told and make me proud,” was always my mother’s marching order. I did and would.

I arrived by bus, the driver making a stop at Popeye’s even though it wasn’t on his scheduled route. Had he chosen to obey orders to pass Deatsville by, visitors and residents of the area would have had to find additional transportation back to there. Stopping was the common southern courtesy that northern dispatchers were forced to either ignore or accept.

Molly and her dog, Buford, greeted me by dancing barefoot in the dirt, a piece of her momma’s pecan pie held high in her right hand while she wigwagged the left.

“Hi you all, “ she enunciated with an exaggerated drawl.

I kissed her. Then I bent down and kissed Buford before attacking the pie.

“I ate mine already but you can share yours with me if you want,” she hinted.

We slept in a tall-walled room at the end of a tongue and groove hallway in a 19th century carpetbaggers house set five hundred feet back from the store. It was a proud, old, chipped-paint clapboard structure with faded green plantation shutters hiding nine foot, nine-over-nine pane windows, most of them swollen shut. Those that worked opened like doors onto wraparound porches connecting pencil post pillars to a sloping tin roof that provided both shade and shelter from the relentless heat and sudden white rains of an Alabama afternoon.

“I’ve got a secret to show you,” Molly whispered to me one afternoon while we were pretending to nap. Together we crawled under her grandma’s iron bed and removed the floorboards to an inwardly opening trap door exposing a ladder that took us ten feet down into a somber cellar of red clay and hollowed out slots where candles once burned as lighting.

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THE ABOVE ESSAY REPRESENTS AN EXCERPT FROM:
Seriously, Mom, you didn’t Know?
by Marguerite Quantaine © Copyright © 2019
NOW ON AMAZON & AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES NATIONWIDE
You are urged to LOOK INSIDE on Amazon for a try-before-you-buy FREE READ of the first 3 chapters. Click FREE PREVIEW BELOW THIS COVER.

 

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