Sometimes Fiction Imitates Life

You read a book like A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child. 

My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law. 

 

My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth about 1923.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Unravelling the Mystery of Agatha Christie’s Country Retreat – Dean Jobb ay Crime Reads.

 

On Stones: Carving in the granite capital of the world – Ellyn Gaydos at Harper’s Magazine.

 

When I Am Dead, My Dearest, poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.