Writings

I hope you will enjoy the story below.

Making a Southern Belle?

     Claire de Blanc crossed the connector from Mt. Pleasant to the Isle of Palms with her heart fluttering as wildly as a humming bird’s wings. Though raised in the Midwest, she possessed a southern soul, living and breathing traditions that extended beyond sugar-shocked sweet tea, cheese grits, and college football. She arrived to the home-of-her-heart with her great grandmother’s Strasbourg sterling silver, new white Chanel shoes–waiting to make their appearance right after Memorial Day–and with a summers worth of clothes packed neatly in large plastic bins stacked in the bed of her polished pickup truck.

     “Dixie, Ah-am-heyah,” Claire drawled to her friend as she climbed down from the pickup.

     “Welcome Claire!” Dixie hugged her tight and kissed the air beside each cheek. “Let’s get you settled into your new place.” She dangled keys to the beach cottage, which Claire gracefully accepted before she sashayed to the front door.

     After an evening of sharing news-southern girls never gossip, fine dining on shrimp and grits-a local favorite, then polishing off a pitcher of margaritas, Dixie walked the block to her house on the beach. Claire slipped into bed, exhausted after a long drive across several states and a time zone, to sleep the sleep of a gentile southern belle.

     The next morning when Dixie returned, she found Claire, covered with pink dots of calamine lotion, scrunched on top of a large plastic bin in the living room.

     “Dixie, after last night, I thought surely the headlines would read, Woman Found Dead due to Itching Attack. Then,” Claire raised her voice to make her point, “I went to make coffee to deliver me from Mosquito Central and had to convince myself not to panic,” Claire paused, then whispered, “There’s a nuclear creature . . . I won’t dare call it a roach, in the kitchen cabinet. Is that thang what you referred to as a palmetto bug?”

     “Probably.” Dixie sat on another large plastic bin next to her friend.

     Claire hitched her voice up a notch. “It’s in the freak’s cupboard next to my expensive organic coffee!” Then she whispered, “Tell me they don’t like coffee. Tell me someone is making’ a movie, “Giant Palmetto Eats Eggplant in Charleston” and that thang in there is just a prop and a product of your southern sense of humor.”

     As a tear escaped and dribbled down Claire’s face, Dixie hugged her then whispered, “Darlin’ welcome to the south. There’s a lot more to being a Belle than the stories and glossy photos in Southern Living or Garden and Gun.”

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