From Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies:
So picture me, Silvaney, if you will. I want you to see me plain. It is spring and skittery sunshiny day, I stand on the river bridge already missing my sweetie whose gone to the war, the river spews and boils like Genevas coffee, the wind blows hard and a bugle call comes across the river from the Army camp. I wear a dead womans pretty locket, I am free to come and go as I please. I will go to Boston and see what there is to see. Yet always I will be bound to you my love and my heart and I will come back for you one day soon and take you back to the mountain.
6 comments:
Lee Smith is amazing.
Fair and Tender Ladies is supreme joy. Fancy Strut is a different kind, with Miss Iona mincing down the sidewalk, carrying her purse before her, just like my great-aunt V.
Encouragement: 84 Charing Cross Road joy: Helene Hanff receiving book after book from Marks & Co., and the bookstore staff serving tinned ham and real eggs she sent them during post-war rationing.
Sheryl, I've copied this Lee Smith jewel in every writer's notebook I've carried since I was nineteen years old. I just love it.
Kathy, THANK YOU!!
By the way, I miss your blog. I hope you haven't been posting because you've been so busy on your novel?
You're welcome. Thank you for missing my blog, and for your generous assumption that I might be busy on my novel. Said novel, which is really a great big pile of disjointed scenes plus twenty pages of a real draft, and I are estranged at the moment, my fault of course. In a burst of general cussedness, I've snubbed the blogs as well. But since you've noticed the absence...Thanks for an amazingly pleasant kick in the pants.
I read this book when I was in high school and I feel so in love with the book. It is still one of my absolute favorites!!
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