Spelling

My hands are almost healed and I am hoping to start posting regularly. Here is a bit of my childhood lesson in spelling. It is from my book Tales of Whitethorn, somewhere near the lost coast. Circa 1949

"The summer is almost over and I have to go back to school soon. It won’t be long til the heavy rains start and everything in Whitethorn will turn to mud. I’m sitting at the kitchen table watching my mother Ruby make my favorite bread. As the dough rises, she cuts off slices and fries them in deep bacon grease. She calls them ‘dough floppers.’

While I’m polishing off the floppers, Ruby hands me an unopened letter. “This letter came yesterday. It’s from your father.”

A letter from George, my dad! I tear it open. He’s going to come up to Whitethorn ten days from now and take me home with him for a couple of weeks. He lives in Arcata and spends every bit of his spare time fishing on the Mad River. I love to fish with him. I can hardly wait for him to come get me.

After I finish reading the letter, I once again wonder why Ruby and George are not together. I just can’t understand it. My father George is a real nice man. We would have had an easier life living in town if she had stayed with him. I look over at her, “Why did you leave George?”

Ruby keeps working on her plate of floppers. “He sure was the best- looking guy in Humboldt County. He just wasn’t smart enough for me.”

Ruby talks a lot about how she was the smartest kid in school and how she finished high school at sixteen. Everyone also knows that in her second year she was often asked to read her poems to the senior English class.

I can’t say I understand it. I don’t know anyone else who’s left their husband because he wasn’t smart enough. But in my family, the most important thing in the world is brains.

“Was he dumb?” I mumble between floppers.

“He wasn’t dumb. I was just so much smarter than him.” She shakes her head. “He couldn’t even spell right.”

I can’t spell right either, I think. I love reading but spelling is hard for me. I wonder if she thinks I’m not smart. I remember the time she got a big laugh when I was writing a paper for school about the golden horses of California. I guess I didn’t spell horses right and called them hores instead. From then on, she told everybody she knew about the ‘golden hores of California.’ I don’t know what a hore is, but I guess it was a real funny mistake since everybody laughed.

In some ways it’s hard to live with her and my stepfather. Al thinks he knows everything, and she thinks she is so smart she should have been a lawyer. They are always giving me problems to solve like the fox, the duck, and the bag of grain. The trick is to get them all across the river in a small boat that can hold only one of them and the boat guy.
If the fox is left with the duck, the fox will eat the duck. If the duck is left with the grain, the duck will eat the grain. I’ve never been able to figure this out even though I’m going into the fifth grade this fall. They laugh at me because I can’t come up with the right answer. Al teases me so much about it I sometimes throw things, yell, or stomp out of the room.

Ruby has never said I was smart but she sure is proud of my strength. When we are at the bar she often takes my hand and shows people the thick rows of calluses I have. Then she tells them how strong I am.

As soon as I finish eating, I hear a soft knock on the door. I open it and my scrawny friend Ronnie, Shirley’s little brother, is standing there, tattered clothes and all. His family is dirt poor, but all of them are real lookers. There’s also some rough stuff when his father gets real drunk. I figure Ronnie is hungry, as usual, so I let him have the last flopper. He gobbles it down and then we walk outside to sit in the sun.

“I’m sooo bored today,” I groan. “I don’t have a single thing to do.”

“I’m bored too,” Ronnie says, elbows propped on his skinny knees. “I don’t feel like fishing, exploring mountain roads, or anything.”

We’re quiet for a while, taking in the morning sun. Suddenly, an idea pops into my head. “Why don’t we have a circus?”

“A circus?” he says, wide-eyed. “How could we do that?”

“My two white rats, Whisky and Frisky, could do some tricks. Rocky knows how to sit up and beg and he even barks for food.” I jump up. “We could do some acrobatic things like me holding you up in the air with my feet.” I let that sink in for a minute. “What d’ya think?”

Ronnie’s eyes brighten up. “My little sister knows how to stand on her hands and my sister Shirley can do a back flip.”

“And I can get pieces of cloth from Ruby’s sewing kit and we can make costumes for Whisky and Frisky. We can even paint our faces and dress up like clowns.”

“I’m going to visit my father in ten days so we need to have the circus before he comes. How about next Saturday?”

“Yeah, and we’ll put up some signs so people know we’re having it.”

“Let’s make them right now!”

Ronnie frowns. “With what?”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find something.”
“Are we going to charge people?” Ronnie asks. He’s always looking for money so he can buy something to eat.

“I think it should be a free circus. We’re not going to have monkeys or elephants like they have in a big circus.”

His shoulders sag. “Come on,” I grab his arm. “Let’s go look in the sheds and see what we can find.”

I pull him to the three old sheds standing in the middle of our yard. I keep my rats in one of them. Ruby throws junk in the others.

We climb up the battered gray stairs and go in to visit Whiskey and Frisky in their wire cage. They both stand on their hind legs and stick their pink, wiggly noses through the wire. I give each one a small nut. Their water and food bowls are full so we go on to the next shed.

This one is a jungle of junk. Way in the back I see a couple of big cardboard boxes. I look at Ronnie. “Crawl over there and bring back those two boxes.” As he’s tunneling his way to the boxes, I spy a can of paint. “And grab that can of paint off to the left.”

Ronnie drags the boxes out and then goes back for the paint. I pick up a small paint brush by the door and we haul everything to the garage. As soon as we plop the stuff down, I take my hunting knife out of my belt and cut two nice pieces of cardboard.

I paint the signs because I don’t trust Ronnie to do it right. When the paint dries, we take one of them down to the end of the driveway and prop it up with a stick facing the Whitethorn Road. We amble back to the garage, feeling we’re well on the way to our circus. “You take the other sign and put it down by the Whitethorn bar,” I tell Ronnie.

Just then Ruby returns from her trip to the store. When she gets close to our driveway, she stops the pickup, jumps out, grabs our sign and throws it into the back. When she drives up to us, she doesn’t look very happy. “You can’t put signs like that out on the road,” she yells.

Ronnie and I look at each other wondering what could be wrong about putting up our sign on the road. Does she think it’s a bad idea to have a circus?

It doesn’t take long before Ruby lets us in on the problem. “You can’t have a sign that says ‘fart’ on it.”

“Fart!” I holler. “I wrote ‘free’.”

“Well, it doesn’t say ‘free’. It says ‘fart’.”
I’m stumped. How could I write ‘fart’ instead of ‘free’?

Ruby starts laughing. She goes into the house bent over with giggles. I bet she can hardly wait to tell Al about the ‘fart’ circus.

Ronnie and I stand around for a while feeling like a couple of dopes.

“Are we going find out how to spell ‘free’ and make some new signs?” He finally asks.

“No! And we aren’t going to have a circus either,” I shout, throwing myself down on the grass, my hands cradling my head. Tears well up, but I wipe them away before Ronnie can see them.

He turns and trudges home and I drag myself into the garage and sit on the woodpile. My father can’t spell and Ruby thinks he’s dumb. When he comes to get me, I’m going to find out if he’s smart or not. I know just the test. I’ll ask him to solve the riddle of the fox, the goose and the grain.

Copyright 2009 Sharon Porter Moxley

Blood Moon Rising

I have just finished reading Blood Moon Rising by Angela Lam Turpin. This book is a little gem. I couldn't put it down. When I started reading it I stayed up until 2 am and finished the book the next morning. Although I usually don't read books about Vampires this whimsical little tale was more about mother and child relationships and the problems that develop when the child is born half vampire and half human.

You can buy the book on Amazon.

Copyright 2009 Sharon Porter Moxley