Read Online Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush - Free Book Online

lifted. We began Little Women when I was only seven years old. I listened curled up with her on the top of the guest room bed--the house had three bedrooms, but we only had use for two of them, so one was set aside untouched for guests--mesmerized by the lives of the four March girls. I can still remember the tears running down my cheeks when Beth died, while alongside me, Mother's eyes welled and her voice cracked as she read the story of this fragile, imaginary Victorian girl who would not live to the end of the novel.
    When second grade was over, we moved again. Off the Estes Avenue block completely, away from the little Collins grocery just around the corner on Big Spring Street and the little toy store two storefronts down. I had spent hours gazing lovingly into its windows at a Tiny Tears doll, who looked right back at me with her bright marble eyes, until one Christmas she found her way into Santa's oversize sack. Our new house was on Princeton Avenue, with a covered carport at the end of the driveway and a giant red oak in the front yard, which Mother had imported all the way from Abilene. The tree was, for both of my parents, the height of extravagance, dug up and moved on a truck, but Mother wanted her full-grown tree, and Daddy was determined that she have it. As with all our other houses, my father had overseen the building of this one, but it was a fancier house, with a front hallway and picture windows and bits of decorative timber to offset the brick. My room was on the corner, looking out across the yard to the street and to whatever else lay beyond.
    My mother set about fixing up what we called "the Big House." It had a turquoise refrigerator in the kitchen and bright turquoise Formica countertops. She picked out turquoise bed skirts for my twin beds and matching flowered coverlets. She kept the books for my father's house-building business, and she cooked. For most of her marriage, my mother made three full meals every day. Even before he began building houses, when Daddy had worked at CIT and wasn't on the road, he always came home for lunch.
    Mother would be up at dawn each morning making coffee and eggs or pancakes. Then she would wash up and prepare lunch. At the end of the day, she cooked dinner. We ate mostly what would be considered Southern or rural food; Daddy's favorite meal was Mother's chicken-fried steak, a grainy cut of meat dipped in egg-and-flour batter and crisp-fried in bubbling oil, with cream gravy and homemade French fries on the side. Both Mother and Daddy had grown up in rural enough towns that the table was set by what was coming off the vine or out of the field. They both looked forward to the corn coming in each summer, and we loaded up on bags whenever we stopped in Lubbock or El Paso. They bought sweet, juicy Pecos cantaloupes, and some years, Daddy planted tomato vines. He also had an onion patch in the backyard because he liked to pull an onion or two for dinner. He grew squash, long and thin and a little bit tough because it never soaked up enough water, even with the hose, to swell up tender and plump. All summer, my mother made squash and chilies for lunch or supper. She called it a famous Texas recipe, but it was squash, green chilies, and Velveeta cheese baked together in a casserole. Or she would make fried squash. In high summer and early fall, we hardly ever ate anything out of a can.
    My mother considered herself a dainty eater, and for her entire life she has been tiny and bird thin, but my dad liked everything, even the jar of pickled pigs' feet that he kept in the refrigerator. He would eat anchovies or smoked oysters on a cracker, and sometimes the raw ones as well. Once or twice, Johnny Hackney, who owned Johnny's Bar-B-Q, would order big barrels of oysters shipped on blocks of ice from the Gulf Coast. Daddy and Johnny and their friends would sit out on a back porch and eat oysters as fast as Big Daddy, who worked the grill at the Bar-B-Q, could shuck them. Mother