The White Dress

Retreat, this is the time of year I retreat deep into the curtained shade and air conditioning of my home.  Books are my refuge from the blazing Texas sun and oppressive heat.   I love stories rich in clever characters and a deeply personal journey. Tragedy and overcoming tragedy are the stuff of encouragement and perspective.  Perspective, that's the thing, the thing I gain most from hearing our stories.
It seems logical to begin at the first memories we have of our ancients but it is not the sequence or the time line that motivates me.  It is who they were, how did they survive, and survive is the essence because they did not live easy comfortable lives.  Poverty was the obvious tether in their lives but it defined only their lack of things and lack of ease but their stories are jewels, beautiful and faceted.

My Aunt Sis (Panethal Mae) is the source of most of the stories.  At 90, today she is brilliantly clear and a joy to me as she recounts her earliest memories.  It's a personal story of hers I want to begin with.  Sis was  eldest of three girls, Christine was next and then the baby, my mother, Beulah (Billie). My grandmother Mollie, the center of this small universe was the one and constant in their lives and her story above all others gives my life that much needed perspective.

It was a Saturday, Grandmother Mollie and Aunt Sis waited by the roadside for a neighbors weekly trip into town.  If you were on the road and ready you could catch a ride in the back of the truck and return from town later the same way. Usually an all day trip, this day was no exception.  Home was rural Arkansas and working the crops was the livihood.  Chopping weeds between the rows with a hoe and picking cotton with bare hands was a hard life.  It was well into the Depression and the small Warren family was hit especially hard.  Mollie, a young widow with three girls carried what little money she had tightly in her grip,  her money was always carried that way.  The errands were done and now they strolled the streets, window shopping until it was time for the ride home.  In one of the stores Sis cought site of a white dress. By her own admission this dress was impractical in every way but it was the most beautiful Sis had ever seen and she wanted it.  As we all do, she started pleading her case.  Relentless, throughout the rest of the day she begged.  Initially Mollie had definately refused but as time wore on she listened silently as they walked through town.  Finally, and without a word, she stopped, turned back to the store for Sis to try the dress on.  Mollie opened her hand and counted out the money, Sis had her beautiful white dress.  On the ride back home that day, in the back of a pickup truck on a rural dirt road Sis was in another world.  The dress was hers and she determined to herself then that she could never ever  again be so completely happy as she was then.   Sis rememberd a neighbor girl with a small box of trinkets she liked to show to the other girls. Forever after that when the box was opened Sis thought, "You have your box of little things but I have that dress".  Mollie made a hanger from a tree branch and the dress hung in her room until the memory of it was lost, admired, dreamed over but never, not once ever worn.

The cost of a dress, a treasured memory through all these years.  Could Grandmother realize that that expression of extravagant love would speak to me so many years later.  A white dress a thing of beauty to capture a young girls heart and mind and the obvious question as to why Aunt Sis never wore the dress.  Facets on a jewel and this jewel is ours.

Odd thing about being a woman of a certain age, important things change but somehow stay the same.  Sometimes thoughts become larger then life and life seems smaller then it ever was before.  I read a book not to long ago and when I can accurately reference it. I will. This woman came from a family where communication was nonexistant so she knew very little about her family, her relatives, herself and this was also the fate of her children to that point in time.  Her point was, tell your story, so everyone knows who they are, where they came from.  I have wondered so often about my distant relatives, what was their lifes point of view, politics, what were their successes and tragedies.  I know a few stories, my family knows many more. My hope is everyone will contibute what they know of our story.  Crazy to think I (we) have a story at all and it may be just a story about the human condition but thats life.