There is a lot of Harriet in me.
She is the female protagonist in "Hoppin' John Soup & Turtle Wax" and a mixture of me and my daughter; part quirky introvert and part extroverted nightmare. Harriet channels a younger version of sixth-grade me, during those tough middle school years when I was feeling like a misfit and needed some respite on the weekends.
On Friday nights, I would pack my bags and travel a whopping ten miles to my Grandmother's farm to spend the weekend; at the time, I thought it was at least a thirty-mile trip. Grandmother was nearly 185 at that time, having raised six kids and fed farm hands for years upon end. Why in the world she agreed to let a chattering busybody like me come and stay with her all the time is still a mystery.
Anyway, we had the same routine. She started making dinner around 4:30: hamburgers fried on the stove. After dinner we went to evening Mass, then came home and watched "The Golden Girls," which scandalized her years later because she "didn't realize at the time how racy it was." I guess while my eyes and ears were glued to the screen and taking in every word of Blanche's latest male conquests, she was working on her crossword puzzles.
Sometimes I watched her play Solitaire--with real playing cards, not on a smart phone! We turned in early, got up early, and I spent many happy hours just playing on the farm. I ran through the corn fields, chased after barn cats, and always came back the house around noon for what they called "dinner," but it was actually lunch. She made huge meals: green beans, ham, mashed potatoes, rolls, and the most heavenly home canned dill pickles on the planet. My uncles would come in from working, wash up, listen to Paul Harvey on the radio, devour that lunch and go right back outside.
Then she would give me a huge bowl of potato peels and scraps to feed to the pigs. I galloped down the lane that led to the barn like I was delivering a pan of gold to those hungry herds of swine.
Those days seem so mundane, but they were everything. The carefree afternoons that seemed to stretch into infinity provided a canvas for a child's imagination to sprout wings, and many happy hours were spent huddled under the grapevines watching ants carry tiny breadcrumbs back to their colonies and traipsing through the cornfields (they were actually jungles filled with man-eating Bengal tigers).
On that farm, I could be my tomboy self. I didn't care who wore the latest Benetton shirts, and I never did fit in at school, or anywhere else for that matter! The characters we create are reflections of ourselves-- our true selves.
That is why I created Harriet to be a little girl who just doesn't quite care what others think ... because the more we allow children the space to be who God created them to be, the less fictional they are in real life.
