Read Online Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells - Free Book Online Page B

thousand funny-books and Reader’s Digests in there. You have to pull down on a chain to flush, and the water is brownish from the well. You can’t drink that water without boiling it because of all the germs you can’t see. There’s a little basin just outside the john, and when you wash your face, the water has a tinny smell to it. It’s the kind of water that makes your skin squeak. When we get through brushing our teeth, we always have to wrap our toothbrushes in tinfoil so the bugs won’t crawl on them.
    Oh, but let me tell you, the front room is the best. It’s huge and long with a glider at one end and two couches and a rattan chaise longue, which Mama calls her “Throne.” And at the other end, there is a long table covered with a yellow-and-white-checked oilcloth, and it doesn’t matter what you spill on it because it just wipes clean. You don’t ever have to worry about what you break or spill at Spring Creek. It’s not like at home, where you get a whipping if you drop a mayonnaise jar on the tile floor. In front of the camp, we have six Navy hammocks strung between the pines around the fire pit. You can lay up in those hammocks all day long and read funny-books. Or get somebody to push you real fast and then jump out and feel like you’re flying for half a second. And at night, oh, at night! You can lay there (after you’ve put on plenty of Six-Twelve) and watch the lightning bugs and the fire, and sometimes we sing and dance and tell ghost stories.
    We keep our stilts with our names painted on them under the camp so they won’t get rained on and warp. But we keep the huge wooden electrical spool that Daddy got from the phone company outside, no matter what the weather. I can walk backwards on that spool all the way to the gate and back without falling. Me and Sidda can walk on it together like a real circus act. While we’re performing on the spool, Necie’s kids get Sidda to sing like Little Brenda Lee and they sit there and clap for us.
    At Spring Creek, I get to do what I want, when I want. Go to bed when I want and wake up when I want. When I wake up I just put my swimsuit right on without even fooling with clothes. All of us kids share the same clothes at Spring Creek. We just have a big chest full of shorts and tee-shirts and seersucker pajamas and that’s it. Mornings are good at Spring Creek. Sometimes when I wake up, the sunrise streams in through the screen windows so full of all these yellows and oranges and pinks, and I lay there in my bed. And before I’m all the way awake, I think that I’m in the back seat of the T-Bird at the Roxy Drive-In watching color spread across the screen! That is just the way it is at Spring Creek.
    Mornings at our camp Mama isn’t shaking all over, trying to fix a big breakfast like she does at Pecan Grove. I just walk out to the table and there’s a bunch of cereal boxes lined up with sugar and peaches. And I get the milk out of the short old icebox that has a good hum to it, and I fix just what I feel like. My throat never closes up on me at the camp. I eat all day long.
    I can take my cereal outside and eat in the sun. And Mama and the Ya-Yas are sitting on the steps drinkingcoffee and smoking cigarettes. Mama rubs the top of my head and says, How you doing, sleepy-bones?
    Then she starts singing “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’!” from Oklahoma! , one of her favorite musicals.
    Mama leans back on the steps and says: I adore every single one of yall! I adore Spring Creek! This is how I was meant to live! No responsibility! I hate responsibility! And she laughs and leans her face back in the sun and says, Yall don’t forget to put on your Coppertone! And Lulu, put that zinc oxide on your nose!
    I finish my cereal and head out for the creek for a morning swim with Necie and the rest of the kids, eleven of us in all. See, at Spring Creek, Mama isn’t the only Mama I have. I’ve got my pick of whatever Ya-Ya is around. We walk through the woods for