Velda Brotherton's Blog – July 2012 Archive (3)

Besides being a writer, I’m a woman, a wife, mother, grandmother and a great grandmother. And I’m a human being, an American, a daughter of pioneers.

Over the past 28 years that I’ve written and been published, I’ve seen the role of women in novels and stories evolve from the meek to the mighty. Some could say this has happened much too slowly, some could add that the female role has become a bit ridiculous in some instances. Women who fight and conquer monsters might seem to…

RECONNECT TO PAST

On a lovely day almost forty years ago I drove south from my new home in Winslow, Arkansas, intent on revisiting my childhood past. Though Highway 71 had changed a lot, I had no trouble at all recognizing Old Creek Road. Back in the early days it was rutted and narrow and meandered through the remote hollow where more than a dozen families lived. I turned off with some reluctance. This would be hard, for what I had always known was gone. Deep down in the…

Yesterday I received a post from my daughter forwarded to her from friends. It was a wonderful revelation of the story clotheslines once told about a family's life. I had to laugh at the rules listed, for they were exactly those my mother and later I followed. There was a special way to hang out the clothes. Oh, yes, we once actually hung our washed laundry on lines out in the sunlight and wind.

Though we lived in the country when I was small, a place where there were no clotheslines…