she came home.
Jess had built her the swing and a wagon...and believe it or not, he even gave her a teddy bear.
"It was my first one," my mama explains.
What we don't ever "talk about" is how hard things had been being a kid in a world so hard on grown ups.
Instead, the story goes...
Like the part of the tree where the trunk goes beneath the grass and way down deep, but you can't see it, you just have to know the roots are in there.
At night when mama slept on the sofa she could smell Chud's linamint. If it was summer she could hear the summer bugs outside. If it was winter she'd have to hurry, hurry if she had to go use the outhouse. In the fall she could hear the radio or the TV later into the evening. And in the spring she might be thinking back on Grandma Pearl finding a snake in the barn and Pearl chopping its head off with a hoe, or Chud saying about the weather. Or she might be falling asleep to her cat, Shadow's purring.
