Jane in June long, long ago.

This was another summer, another June, so long ago, in a town I loved and still love. It's the setting of my fictional town in the novel. Though we really lived in two towns, Greenville, Mississippi and then a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, this third town was where we spent a lot of our time when not on other trips. My mother kept us very busy. It was nothing for us to take a long weekend somewhere any time of the year, to pack up and just go somewhere. She had wanderlust. 

We spent lots of winters and yes, summers in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where we rented trailers and houses and little cottages for weeks at a time. St. Francisville was our jumping off point to New Orleans, LaFayette, Morgan City, Baton Rouge, Sulphur, Lake Charles, places where my mother knew people or had had relatives. We would go down on weekends a lot. But when school let out in May, mother took to the road. The two youngest of her children never returned home until after Labor Day. 

When she got into horses, this changed some and our trips were scheduled around horse shows. I did not like horses or horse shows so sometimes I went down with my Daddy to St. Francisville or with my older brother and his wife. This summer that happened. My brother later went to booth camp and then in 1971 he was in Vietnam. We slept on couches and floors that summer. I never wanted to go home. I could have stayed all summer in St. Francisville where I had local friends, some I had known since I was six years old. But mother wanted to go home for some reason. 

I ended up staying a month in Greenville with some friends and then going over to Moorhead to my cousin's where I spent at least two weeks. My grandmother lived nearby. I am not sure how I got home or when, probably by Greyhound, which was my friendly travel service in those days.

I suppose this old faded polaroid made me think of how much I really loved St. Francisville, the Mississippi Delta, and how I never settled into that little suburb of Memphis as a young girl and even struggled with it as a young woman, though I live there now and have for years. I am not sure where I call home, but the house I live in or the proximity of my children and their families. Where is my home?

I suppose the answer to that now is where my books and computers are. My flowers. Outside my children, all the people I truly loved are gone and this girl looks like a ghostly memory of the wildflower. She was lonely and always floating. 

The wildflower now still is and does.