A SUMMER IN PINK

The timeline is the 1960's, and I discover reading.

My family and I are packed tight into a sedan.  Our dog, Pudgy the red dachshund, is our mascot.  We are leaving the urban sprawl of tract housing in California for a summertime visit to the farmland of my mother's homeland in a hollow in North Carolina.

The car in this classic brochure is blue.  Our Rambler is pink.  

The trip before us is soon proving disastrously adventurous.  While traveling Route 66, Pudgy gets into a food sack and eats a bunch of green grapes.  She is now grossly ill and is repeatedly sick in the car.  We keep stopping.  My father is snarling.  My mother is managing.  My brother, sister, and I are hold back our howls.

Somewhere in Arizona, we visit a regular tourist souvenir trap, and I buy an Indian doll.  My new treasure is soon packed safely inside my summer suitcase.  I have pen and paper, and I am writing about the trip.  I am also planning what I want to do when we finally stop in the south. The afternoon rolls along, and in my lap is a book I'd bought for ten cents at the end-of-school book sale, The Pink Motel, co-authored by Dorothy Erskine and Patrick Dennis. 

From the first paragraph I am hooked.  Far away from the primers of Sally, Dick and Jane, suddenly a whole new world opens.  In this story, a mother unexpectedly inherits an island hotel that she does not want to run from an uncle she whom she has not seen in years.  The father, a scholarly sort, helps maneuver the family to the hotel in order to make practical decisions about the hotel's outcome.  The two perky children narrate the run of the place.  The first guest arrives, and the zany plot is set into full motion.  Each guest, a regular annual visitor, brings a new, vibrant, eclectic personality into the mix.  In the tale's middle are the children, roaming an island and acquainting themselves with the quirky summer inhabitants and solid-sense residents who live there year round. Soon, the plot becomes a whodunit mystery that I don't want to ever end. 

My world soars.  Are there more stories like this?  Are there more good books?  

Once in Carolina, we leap excitedly into the waiting arms of our elderly grandparents.  Hours in transit, we chuck our Converse traps, and our toes are immediately warm in the farm's red dirt.  We race free to the creek.  We saddle and ride our horses.  We eat okra and corn and tomatoes and beans.  We fish and string brim from the bank.  We visit lanky cousins with their funny southern "ya'll come back before you leave" speech.  My grandfather walks with me daily to a country store where I press my nose to a long glass case, and I study rows and rows of penny candy in jars.  I eat a chocolate marshmallow treat called Moon Pie, and drink cold citrusy Orange Crush from a dark brown bottle.  My grandmother, a former midwife of this country community, takes me to an outdoor tabernacle camp meeting.  She tells me my grandfather helped pull the timber for the building when they first arrived in the hollow. Cedar shavings blanket the floor.  I sit on a long, prickly wooden pew, and sing a song together with a hundred voices, the words  Amazing Grace.

My mother had written the county library prior to our arrival, and an old bus book-mobile makes a weekly stop greeting me at the foot of my grandparent's drive.  I browse the shelves, and stack my arms.  I'm stock full and ready for the weeks to come.

I retire each night from all the coming and going to the top floor of a fifty-year old clapboard farmhouse that still has no indoor bathroom.  A large galvanized tub on the back porch is filled  at dusk for the day's washup.   My ruddy, limber frame is bucket soaked and Ivory-soap scrubbed. In telling my grandmother goodnight, I use the expression I've newly learned by default, "I am full as a tick."  I'm recloaked in cotton pjs, and headed to the old feather bed in the attic where my mother must have surely slept as a girl.  A window fan is humming.  On the nightstand is a selection of books.  I've recently begun, Stormy, Misty's Foal.  I am eager to read and read and read.  In a few hours, my father will come to the door and instruct me to turn off the light.  He will return again in thirty minutes  to demand the flashlight I am hiding for spare light under the covers.  My body is alive.  My mind is free.  

My reading ritual begins, night after night, as I return momentarily to the lively community living among the pages of The Pink Hotel.  I'll get to the decisions of the Beebe family and Misty's lot in a few minutes.  But first, it is the fix of the pink that will readjust and set my mind for the exploration of words I have finally found.