I know that this would be the last morning I would wake up in this bed as a Sunday-school-going, dishwashing, tomato-watering member of this family. I’d been praying for this day for as long as I could remember, and now that it was here, all I wanted to do was crawl under my covers and pretend it was any other day. So many other things were never going to stay the same, and this morning was one of them. I told him there were a few things in life that should never be allowed to change, and my curtains were one of them. He finally found a few yards in some textile mill down in South Carolina. And I wasn’t letting go of any piece of her, pink or not.ĭaddy insisted on replacing my tired, worn curtains a while back, but I threw such a fit that he spent a good seven weeks looking for the very same fabric, little bitsy pink flowers on a white -and-pink-checkered background. If I had I would have lost another piece of my mama. There was nothing she could say that was going to change my mind of the color on my walls. You know as well as I do that there’s not a speck of pink on the football field.’ ‘Pink’s just not your color, Catherine Grace. Ruthis Morgan used to try to convince me that my walls should be painted some other color. Mama picked that color after I was born, and I’ve never wanted to change it. All the photographs and trophies and silly knickknacks that had blanketed the top and told my life story better than any words ever could were gone, packed in brown cardboard boxes and neatly stacked in the cellar.Įven my pretty pink walls were bare. And this morning that chest of drawers was looking sad. Maybe it’s stupid to think that a piece of furniture had feelings, but then again, I’m the same girl who kept my tattered old baby doll dressed in a sweater and knitted cap so she wouldn’t get cold sitting on the top shelf of my closet.

I opened my eyes just as the sun started creeping through the window, and I stared at the white chest of drawers that had greeted me every morning since I could remember. “My bedroom looked very different the morning of my eighteenth birthday.

The improper life of bezellia grove