Beana_3

Dear Spiral Notebook

Through the many years of my life, I have tried to put the feel of Miss Olas house in one room or another where I have lived.  Once, I was close but you can’t make a childhood memory come alive when there’s no child left in your body.  Anyway, you might not think it was so great that she had a little house painted white but no one had paint on their  houses back then except rich folks and certainly not an old half colored lady back in the piney woods of east Texas.  She told me once that her cousin Bug, had brung her three big buckets of creamy dreamy white paint that he says fell off a boxcar on a train. He said that he hauled it in the back of a wagon all the way to her house.  It was an amazing adventure to hear him tell it she said, but that Bug had such low moral character, you couldn’t believe anything he said.  All that aside, she was so happy to have all that paint so it was easy to let herself believe ol’ Bug’s story because it had such a happy ending for her.

Her house was almost the size of a one car garage I had back in the 1950’s.  It had a small porch that fit one stool and two steps down in front of that.  It was all white and clean.  The inside was painted the same.  The floors the ceiling the walls and both window frames.  It felt glowy to me, kind of like a moon house.  Many years before I was ever born, she had squished up some dewberries into the paint and it turned lavender, which she used to paint hundreds of little flowers on the white floor.  It was like fancy linoleum. I found out many years later that she kept two of the buckets buried underground in case some white folks stumbled onto her place and assumed she stoled it.  She had a wonderful old cast iron bed that had belonged to her Mama and it was puffy high with all her hand sewn quilts.  All the sewin' in my own quilts was learned from her.  I'm trying to write you about her house but I keep getting distracted by her feel, or rather how she made me feel.

Miss Ola was glad to see me every time I came walking up, she liked my company.  I had never been anyone's company that I can remember before that.  I was her friend and I felt the burden of it.  I felt I "owed her" from the moment she was nice to me. This owin' someone for their kindness stuck like glue on me for the rest of my growing up years.  It weren't a good thing to have stuck on you.