Sunshine Excerpt

For my sister Angie and me, the learning center for our childhood years was the back seat of our family car. It was a four-door Ford, and Mother sat with her hand reaching back to the handle on my side. I had flung it open once, not realizing the wind would catch it and throw my Ralston-Purina cap out into the air. She had not trusted me since. Angie, who rarely took chances, was deemed responsible and allowed to sit way over behind Father.

Thus positioned, we listened raptly, soaking up that family members don't have to like each other to be family, that life is a gift, and death is a part of it, and that some, scary unnamed something was the real reason our Uncle Walter had married Aunt Ophelia.

Most of that information we gathered on the way home from a visit to Grandmother Gertrude, when our parents sat closer together than usual and conversed in low tones. What one of us in the back seat missed, the other one caught and passed it on.

Grandpa Andrew we never knew, for he had passed on while our dough-boy father was heading off the Germans before they could come over and knock down America's front door. Unable to notify Father, the family had buried Grandpa on that very same hillside from which we had later been rescued, but only because he was that kind who wanted people to be inconvenienced to visit his grave. Now his enameled likeness stared mournfully back at us from the hallway in our home. No glass covered it. Our grandmother had used vinegar to remove all its fly specks, specks made by flies whose droppings had outlived both Grandpa and themselves, and then had been passed on to us, the next generation of Hendersons.

Grandmother Gertrude, a small, black-eyed woman with hair as shiny as a crow's wing, and a widow, always put her best foot "fo'most," we learned. It was only because of her that we, her grandchildren, were not even now out on that poor hillside, picking up rocks so that Father could follow Mule behind a plow. Because of her, we were not common. We wore store-bought dresses often as not and a matching bow on the top of our heads. It was because of her that the Henderson family had become both sanitary and urbanized.

Our mother, on the other hand, was a flapper. Not now, while we sat in the back seat of the Ford, but in some incredible time called "before you were born." Was there ever such a time? She had settled down some, we learned, and stopped her incessant picking at the word of God, but, clearly, she had caused dissension in the family of Hendersons. She and our grandmother had not got along.

The first real turning point in the life of the Henderson family had been on the day Isaac, who was our father, returned from overseas. "He's home!" little sister Ruthie had cried as her big brother swung her up in his long arms. "And, Lord, has he growed!" Taking the Lord's name in vain was strictly forbidden in Gertrude's house but Ruthie had been wanting to try it and this might very well be her last chance.

Isaac laughed, holding onto her body that squirmed to run tell. Little sister Naomi hung onto his right leg so that he could hardly walk, and baby brother Walter appeared from around the side of the house where he stood, shy and grinning.

Hearing the racket, Gertrude came from inside, wiping her hands on the side of her long, print dress. She had lost weight and her dark eyes were hollow holes in her head. Isaac swung her up, too, making her dress tail fly, and both Ruthie and Naomi rolled on the ground, overcome with fun now that their soldier brother was home.

"Pa ain't in yet?"