I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Lesbian Literary

  • Prologue to I’ll Call It Like I See It Revisited

    Prologue to I’ll Call It Like I See It Revisited


    The house that occupied the address at 1021 Timber Lane was an unremarkable story-and-a-half red brick structure with a bay window on the lower floor that jutted out toward the narrow concrete walkway leading from the front door to the driveway of the two-car garage facing the street. The first time I saw it in 1964, however, it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of English Tudor country homes with its dormered roof and cedar shutters, and I couldn’t imagine how it came to rest on a cement slab in Rosenberg, Texas. My schoolteacher parents took me to see the house initially when I came home to visit them for Christmas break of my freshman year at The University of Texas in Austin before they purchased the place the following spring. They were like happy, almost giddy children with a new toy and while I shared their excitement of finally having a home that belonged to our immediate family after eighteen years of rental houses and living with my mother’s mother, I was more interested in college life and the girls in Blanton Dormitory at school than I was in a house in a town I had never lived in.

                The women whose lives intersected with mine in that house on Timber Lane deeply impacted the person I am almost fifty years later. My grandmothers, my dad’s sister, my girlfriends, my mother, and her best friend who took care of our home and family through the Timber Lane years and beyond – all of these women walked the rooms of that house with me at some point in the time my parents called it home, and all of them loved me and supported me to the best of their abilities even though I was an absentee family member for over forty years except for random brief visits. Life is about choices, and I chose to leave the safety net of this house on the concrete slab and the family it owned to seek my happiness in other houses with other women in faraway places.

                I live in two houses in two states today and label myself a bi-state-ual. One of the houses is in Texas again where I care for my aging mother who has Alzheimer’s disease and barely recognizes me now. The other is a thousand miles away in South Carolina where I’ve lived my entire adult life. Recently I’ve realized we never really own our homes even though we hold a title to them. We’re really passing through on a journey from here to there. I haven’t quite made it to “there” yet, but I’m getting closer… and have earned the right to call it like I see it.

    The Prologue to my book I’ll Call It Like I See It published in 2012 intimated that the upheaval in my life wasn’t limited to expected college adjustments during the  summer of 1964. I graduated from high school on a Friday; my parents drove me from Brazoria to Austin for summer school the following week. Neither of them said one word to me on that three-hour drive about my dad’s accepting a position in school administration at Lamar CISD in Rosenberg, a Houston suburb forty-three miles north of Brazoria. I learned of the move two weeks later when I called them to say I had a ride home from UT with a friend from high school, only to be told by my dad oh by the way, we don’t live in Brazoria anymore. We’ve moved to Rosenberg. We’ll pick you up in nearby Needville. Wow. So much for open family channels of communication.

    I started college – they moved to another rental house in a different town in the same breath. I was shocked and felt deceived, selfishly wondering how I would keep in contact with my friends from the five years we lived in Brazoria. I realized in the coming days that would be impossible – Rosenberg wasn’t home, and my friends had moved on, too, to different colleges or jobs or marriages or joining the military or staying at home with parents. When I saw our new place that first weekend I came “home,” the move didn’t strike me as upwardly mobile. Six months later, however, during my first Christmas break I understood what changing positions must have meant to both my dad and my mother financially. They had achieved the American dream after nineteen years of marriage. Finally, two people who had devoted their lives to public schools were able to have that elusive title to their own house.

    I gradually got over myself and learned to like the Timber Lane house through the years, but it never felt like home to me. Instead, I subconsciously transferred those feelings of “home” from a house with my parents in an unfamiliar town to familiar houses I knew in Richards where I grew up, the place where my grandparents remained…they were my unchanging anchors when my world felt like a carousel ride where the ticket price changed before the music stopped.

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    I’ve had fun “revisiting” my earlier works – I hope you’re enjoying the virtual books tour.

  • Epilogue For Deep in the Heart Revisited

    Epilogue For Deep in the Heart Revisited


    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.

  • and then there were these Mother’s Day Moments in 2023

    and then there were these Mother’s Day Moments in 2023


    Number One Son Drew and Pretty Too Caroline along with their daughters Ella and Molly treated Pretty a/k/a Nana and me a/k/a Naynay to a Mother’s Day brunch Saturday at the Luzianna Purchase restaurant in Irmo, the second year in a row we have had that family fun there. Hm. I think I smelled tradition when we were eating, but possibly that was the aroma of the best French toast I ever had. Everyone enjoyed the food – I sat next to fifteen month old Molly whose little teeth allow her to taste whatever looks inviting which, for her at this moment, is everything.

    Naynay, can I please try your French toast?

    Three and a half year old Ella lost interest in our conversations but never loses interest in her Nana’s phone. Endless entertainment for her although her parents, ahem, prefer limited cell phone viewing. Honestly, where does that child get her phone obsession, Nana and Naynay?

    Ella took this photo of her mother using Nana’s phone

    At some point during brunch, Ella asked us if she could come to our house when we finished eating. Of course, the answer was yes so she came home with us for the afternoon. The energy level picked up steam when the tornado that is our granddaughter mixed with our barking dogs who announce but try to ignore her presence. Although the afternoon sun was warm with temperatures in the mid 80s, the pool was still too cold for jumping in so Ella had to settle for playing with her toys which we have had on our screen porch for her (and now Molly) for the past three years.

    The girls have tons of toys at their house, but when they come to our screen porch they make their own outdoor games with empty pill bottles, bandaid boxes, a tennis ball, homemade wooden car, a green frog that once croaked but the squeaker gave up, and a box of cards that can be admired but too difficult to open. Ella created elaborate stories while she filled the pill bottles with pool water from the shallow steps to make “pretend” sodas for us while we kept watch. She also was happy to carry cold water bottles and peanut butter crackers to the two men who were working on replacing the wood on our deck. Busy, busy, busy.

    I told her we were so happy to have her visits but I was afraid there’d come a time when she would have her own friends to play with and she wouldn’t be interested in visiting her Nana and Naynay. She looked at me and said with all sincerity, “When I get bigger I’ll have my own car and can drive to see you.” End of story…

    By far the highlight of Ella’s time with us was when Nana took her to the front yard and let her run back and forth through the sprinkler before we loaded her into the car for the trip to take her home. She loves water as much as Pretty does, and she squealed with laughter, with delight, with the pleasure of getting soaked and announced this was her best time ever and didn’t I just love what she was doing?

    Of course, I said yes.

    our beautiful Mother’s Day gift from the kids

    Pretty and I appreciate our family time and understand how fortunate we are to love and be loved by them. We also know Mother’s Day can be a reminder of loss for other mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers – losses that leave vacuums in our hearts. I remember a hymn that went something like now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening steal across the sky. For this one day let the shadows bring us comfort and peace with the possibility of love to fill the vacuums.

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    Slava Ukraini. For the mothers and their children.

  • making fudge with my mother

    making fudge with my mother


    Upon the suggestion of an astrologer I met for the first time this last week as a birthday gift from my friend Meghan, I began to re-read my memoirs beginning with the first one published in 2007. Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing was described by author and poet Ed Madden as a story of what life was for a little butch tomboy growing up behind the Pine Curtain of East Texas in the mid-twentieth century. I still like this little girl I wrote about in 2007, and I adore my maternal grandmother Dude as well as my paternal grandmother Ma today as I did then. Fifteen years later I feel more loving toward my mother the fudge maker – perhaps the result of sharing the last four years of her life as she struggled with dementia from 2008 – 2012. The difficulties in the relationships between mothers and daughters are universal, although they may hopefully be set aside at least once a year on Mother’s Day.

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    Slava Ukraini. For the mothers.

  • and now I’m seven and seventy

    and now I’m seven and seventy


    Six years ago in the summer of 2017 I posted my version of British poet A.E. Housman’s classic poem “When I was One and Twenty” published in 1896 in a collection called A Shropshire Lad. Housman, who was born in 1859 and died in 1936 at the age of seventy-seven, had partially funded the publication of A Shropshire Lad following a publisher’s rejection. In today’s jargon, we call that self-publishing. The book has been in continuous print since then so somewhere in London a poetry publisher in the last decade of the nineteenth century cursed himself on a Roman British tablet…or on something equally appropriate for turning down this classic.

    When I Was One-and-Twenty

    When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard a wise man say,
    “Give crowns and pounds and guineas
           But not your heart away;
    Give pearls away and rubies
           But keep your fancy free.”
    But I was one-and-twenty,
           No use to talk to me.
     
    When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard him say again,
    “The heart out of the bosom
           Was never given in vain;
    ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
           And sold for endless rue.”
    And I am two-and-twenty,
           And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
     
     
    When I was One and Twenty
    BY Sheila R. Morris

    When I was one and twenty, my father said to me,

     “Work hard, be kind to others, the truth will set you free;

    a penny saved is a penny earned was his advice to me.”

    But I was one and twenty, no use to talk to me.

    When I was one and twenty, my father said again,

    “Work harder, be smarter, but always be a friend;

    love family, serve country, life’s games are played to win.”

    And now I’m seven and seventy I hear my father say,

    “You did your best, forget the rest, your heart led all the way.”

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    Tomorrow is my 77th. birthday which I have celebrated with Pretty and our two best friends Nekki and Francie in the south of France for ten remarkable days filled with delicious food, three days at the Masters 1000 Tennis Tournament in Monte Carlo, and a day at the Cannes Films Festival (or “pre-festival” according to Pretty who knows everything about pop culture) where I donated my last American dollars to a casino next to the pink carpet.

    The trip was on my short bucket list – a trip made possible through the generosity of our friends whose love and laughter made my bucket overflow with happiness. The time with Pretty is always special – luckily she came home with me but told me she would like to live in Nice for two years (if she could bring her granddaughters and their parents!).    

     

    (l. to r.) Francie, me, Pretty, Nekki – country come to town

    Pretty and me at Matisse Museum

    Francie and me grateful for bus

    after unexpected downpour leaving Matisse Museum

    Francie and Nekki on hotel rooftop

    Pretty happy with setting, lunch and the polka dot hat

    Thanks to our trip photographer Nekki for capturing some of our memory makers.

    And thanks to all of you, my readers and followers who have also become my friends, for sharing part of my journey over the past thirteen years. Impossible to imagine that time without you.

    Onward.

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    Slava Ukraini. For the children.