I find it almost as difficult to leave Richards at age sixty as I did when I was thirteen. The family and friends of that small town live in vivid memories that come easier to me than what I had for lunch yesterday. Alas, I realized in writing these stories that I am now the age my grandparents were when I left Richards. And I know, for sure, that they were old. I never returned to live in Richards, but my dad was true to his word, and we visited there frequently after we moved away. When I got my first car in college, Richards was my number-one destination. And so, it has remained for the rest of my life. Now though, when I visit, my first stop is Fairview Cemetery, the beautiful resting place for almost all the family and friends in this book. The setting is a hill overlooking rolling pastures, with cattle grazing nearby. Each time I visit I hear the voices of my childhood and am grateful for that time and place and those loved ones. And often I hear, echoed across the years: “Sheila Rae, it’s getting late. You better come in before it gets too dark.”

 For my birthday in April this year, my friend Meghan gave me a reading with an oracle who felt I needed to return to my earlier writings, read them again, and try to determine whether they still say what I want to say. Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing was published in 2007 when I was sixty-one years old. Much has changed in the past sixteen years.

The book is a collection of stories about coming of age during the mid twentieth century in a small town called Richards located in rural Grimes county in southeast Texas – the stories of a young girl who could identify her feelings of being different without being able to name them, a little girl who loved her dysfunctional family that treasured its Texas heritage. My dad whom I adored was famous for declaring you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl when I moved three thousand miles away to Seattle as a young adult. A subsequent move to South Carolina several years later brought me closer to Texas but still a thousand miles from home.

While I have made my home in South Carolina for the past fifty years, I continued to cling to my Texas roots with a brief actual reconnection to them from 2010 – 2014 when my wife Teresa and I bought a home in Montgomery to help with my mother’s care. My mother had severe dementia, a condition that required placing her in a Memory Care Unit of an assisted living facility in Houston. Montgomery was eighteen miles south of Richards so in a very real sense I finally did go home again.

During that four-year sabbatical we purchased our own headstone in the Fairview Cemetery I mentioned in my Epilogue; I had it placed below my mother and father’s stone in our section of the cemetery that holds the dust and ashes of family and friends. I refused to leave deep in the heart of Texas with Fairview’s overlook of rolling pastures and cattle grazing nearby.

Sadly, Texas in 2023 is now the single villain capable of taking Texas out of me. The culture of gun violence within the state that provides opportunities for daily shootings, mass murders, bluebonnets replaced by the red blood flowing in the killing fields across the state, politicians who are dependent on revenues from gun shows, the unhumanitarian crisis at the border with Mexico as immigrants from around the globe seek asylum in America – all conspire to drown out the voices of my childhood described in this first memoir.  It’s getting later, and I’m afraid of the call to come in from the dark that once was a sweet melody but now has an ominous refrain.

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For the children.