Flavors

Table of Contents

 

 

 

dedication

 

To James McKinley Miller, “Jimmy,” the male in my siblings' Three Musketeers alliance of childhood days. You are and will forever remain my precious little brother. I love you so.

To my entire family, especially those who helped shape me into who I am. To Norma Jean Miller Lindsey, my muse for “Nellie Jane.” You're the best.

In memory of my grandparents Bill and Minnie West Miller.

And last but not least, Uncle Clarence Henry Miller and cousin Lamaar “Doodle-Bug” Pruitt, who definitely made my childhood, if not better, infinitely more interesting.

 

Heartfelt love,

Emily Sue Harvey/Susie

Sadie Ann Melton is a composite of us all. She represents a fascinating collage of inner-child traits nestled deeply inside each of us, regardless of age or gender. Muses for her story include endless colorful Miller kin and friends who have influenced my life. My model for the Melton farm was my very own Miller grandparents' Spartanburg County, South Carolina farm, one that provided infinite adventures during my young years. The story is fiction, but in it, I suspect some of you will whiff tantalizing flavors of your youth. I recently visited the old farm site, only to discover it unrecognizable. Gone were the meadows and fields and wooded wonderlands. All the slopes and valleys were leveled by modern-day technology. Replacing the ancient farm house was a contemporary structure of wood siding. Nothing familiar remained. The essence of my childhood images was gouged away and disposed of. It was a profoundly sad, melancholy moment.

Then – I closed my eyes and remembered it as it had been and I realized all is not truly ever gone. Because no matter how old we get, there still remains that child inside us, just waiting for an opportunity to pop up and bestow a joyful full circle to our odyssey.

In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Youth has no age.”

Hence, I give you
Flavors
.

Enjoy, reader!

Today, lounging here in my easy chair, eyes closed, with television tuned to Sirius 40s and 50s Pop Hits, I listen to a familiar old song by the Nat King Cole Trio. “Paper Moon” lulls me and trips a button deep, deep down inside me, dredging up long dormant images from the past.

Young memories.

Funny thing. Nowadays, I am challenged to remember last week's happenings. Even yesterday's. But – there's something about musings of past youth. They're perched right there on the periphery of my brain, ready-set-go to dive in. And once one gains entrance, it sends out this telepathic signal to all the others, announcing a grand reunion.

Like today.

I sigh as Jimmy Dorsey's band accompanies Helen O'Connell's vocal rendition of “Embraceable You
,
” and my mind snatches and wraps around that bittersweet,
pivotal
1950 summer.

The burst of memories catapults me into contemplation. This meditation stirs up a thick emotional-spectrum that gallops from ecstasy to slushing, visceral melancholy.

It makes me wonder…why has life changed so?
Its seasons, in a retrospective, backward glance, do a kaleidoscopic-strobe that leaves me reeling, both physically and emotionally.

Pondering.

I prop my aching bare feet on a leather ottoman and sigh, bombarded by the swirling cerebral-smorgasbord, one flavored with infinite tastes and fragrances.

Truth be known, of all life's slices, adolescence is the most poignant. The abrupt transition from childhood – a magical time when emotions are sterling, distinct and spontaneous – to puberty (when nothing is defined and everything postured) is both brash and mystical.

One day, I was a snaggletoothed little girl who considered no question too stupid to ask, over and over, if necessary, to find out
why, what, who, where
and
how.
Never mind the endless “
Shutups
” along the way, or “
you ask too many questions
,” they simply did not register in my innocent quest for enlightenment.

Vanity did not yet exist. Hair bows sli-i-id slowly down my fine, stringy hair until snared by split ends. There they dangled until rescued by Mama. Dear,
dear
Mama – I still wonder if I'd have realized a bath's significance or put on a stitch beyond underwear had it not been for her, at least until my eighth or ninth year.

Somewhere between years eleven and twelve, she introduced me to Tussy deodorant. Thank
God
for good mamas.

Then came that summer. Ahhh, that magical season of new horizons. I had occasionally, all through my childhood years, been dropped off at the Melton farm for weekend visits with my Aunt Nellie Jane, who was only a year older than me. Those fun times are rock-chiseled into my recall.

But that summer was a time set apart, filled with epiphanies that divided time.

Then on its heels – seems overnight I was a young woman with squeaky clean, nightly roller-curled hair, who moved demurely amid swirls of
Prince Matchabelli
or Avon
Wild Rose
fragrances, wearing freshly pressed coordinated skirts and sweaters, snow white bobbie socks and spit-polished penny loafers.

Adolescence was angst and/or ecstasy, depending upon the moment's situation. Angst when pimples appeared and ecstasy when that cute guy in homeroom asked me for a date. It was
angst when I realized it was
chemical,
that surging of hormones that agitated my emotions into goulash – and I couldn't do doodly squat about it, except ride it out.

The ecstasy was when that hormone-surge spit out romance.

Ah, but I digress as I sit here ruminating about all the whens. Focusing on childhood stretches that something inside me that gauges changes from then to now. Startling transformations. Makes me realize just how far I am from then.

Could it be there have actually been two of me? One then and one now?

Now
casts me so far from
then
that I'm convinced a distinct time-warp thing is at play here. Why can't the two times be more
converged
?
Why
does my middle-age atmosphere differ so from my childhood one? Going outside now makes me sneeze, wheeze and freeze, while up until I was twelve, being outdoors was an adventure
,
when temperature and humidity had no bearing on
fun.

Exploring an old hay baler at Grandpa and Grandma Melton's farm set my senses abuzz. I can close my eyes and still smell the damp earth and sweet hay and see, from three-and-a-half foot stature, the baler's rusty square trunk, whose platform struck me about chest level and instantly became my stage. I clamored aboard and –
kazaam!
– I was Jo Stafford, belting out “Shrimp Boats are Comin'” or Betty Grable, arms thrust wide, tap-dancing the length of the stage. Nearby cornstalks, rustling in summer's warm breeze, became my adoring, applauding audience.

Other times, I ventured into forest's wonderland, where a tree stump became my table, or stove, or throne. Birdsong, warbled by robin, sparrow or bluebird, harmonized to serenade me.

Ahhh, and the meadowland...I'd sprawl flat of my back on lush, watermelon-scented grass, happily chewing nectary
sugarcane and watching a small plane pass slowly overhead, lulled by her drone and with 20/20 perception, sight its passengers' pinpoint heads. I just
knew
, with a child's 14k trust, that they returned my eager wave.

The cricket's
chirrupp,
the fly's
bzzzz
and the wind's every nuance tickled and teased my ears. Honeysuckled and gardenia breezes tantalized my nose. I tingled with discovery and
being
. Appetite and energy abounded. A five-cent BB Bat gave my tongue a diphthong-range of heavenly tastes. Youth's vibrancy buoyed me.

Life's flavor was sharp and tangy,
lemony.
Colors jumped and danced and shimmered, while sounds lifted me to soar and spin and fly...

Today, a half century later, I am at ease sitting here, immersed in the vibrant
when
, and I think,
I'm not so old. It's all in the mind. Heck, you're only as old as you feel.
I'm psyched out and young again. Until I move. In an instant, the illusion shatters. Like a cement Frankenstein, I shift my bifocals, turn up the television volume to catch a song's lyrics, stiffly arise and painfully shuffle to watch the neighbor's kids through my den window, romping outside on their lawn. I experience yet another piercing,
longing
, backward glance to
when.

And, again, reality jolts.

Even though my body has betrayed me yet again and my short-term memory has gone south,
back when
zooms in like when I donned those 3D glasses at the movies and screen images leaped out at me.

My husband swears that canned pork and beans – which he once relished – don't taste the same as when he was a kid. “They don't make ‘em the same anymore,” he laments.

“They don't make them different,” I counter. “Your taste buds just changed, is all.”

That revelation leads to yet another eye-opener and it occurs to me that just like pork and beans, the atmosphere hasn't changed. Not at all.

I have.

When exactly did the change begin?

It was during that summer.

 

That summer at Grandma and Grandpa Melton's South Carolina farm would be a season from which I would thereafter mark time. The prospect of actually living there for an entire summer loomed before me like a chocolate treat. Nowadays, I would compare the indulgence to a Snickers bar. Then, it was a creamy milk chocolate Hershey's bar – simple, just like me before I acquired a taste for nuts and caramel and anything rich and gooey. That came years later.

Anyway, that spring ushered me into a far more complex world than I'd ever imagined. And considering that my imagination was quite colorful and rampant, the nuances I faced would prove to be, at times, cataclysmic. Until then, life had been dealt to me generously and kindly. In merciful increments.

Then, in late May, our live-in babysitter/housekeeper, who mainly tethered us to home's general vicinity and moved the dust around in our house, up and quit. Clodette, a friendly, robust, caramel-complected teen suddenly, on a weekend leave, ran off and got married.

With Mama and Daddy working the Carolina Cotton Mill's second shift, Clodette's elopement left my parents high and dry, seeing as how there were two Melton kids, ages four and twelve, needing supervision for at least eight out of twenty-four hours.

I was a late-bloomer and kind of small for my age. “Puny,” Grandma Melton called me. “My little girl” was Mama's more sensitive reference, while Daddy saw me as “delicate.” That's
because most Melton females were of more sturdy stock. With my pale blonde looks and seasonal allergy afflictions ranging from coughing and sneezing to hives to dark under-eye circles that would rival football players' war-paint eye-black, poor Daddy had his job cut out keeping me from withering away.

Mama was more laid back, assuring me Daddy was just a bit neurotic about me since I'd been their only child for so long.