When most people look at the stars they feel inferior.  With me, this is not the case, I never feel more important and in control as when I lie on the roof of my small, old-fashion, light blue house and stare at the stars overhead.  My “guy friend,” as my mother puts it, accounts this to my southern background - he accounts everything unusual to my southern background.  My daughter, although way too young to enjoy the stars, stays with me on the roof when I go up there.

My boyfriend, like I said earlier, is my “guy friend” to my mother and “that Yank” to my father, even though I’ve told them both more then once that his name is Bram.  This is another topic of disgust to my mom and dad, even though Mom would never say anything.  Dad, on the other hand, can’t stop himself from voicing his opinion on the matter.  “What kinda’ name is Bram?”  He demands every time I gently correct him that it’s Bram, not “that Yank.”

“I don’t know, Daddy.  That’s just what his parents named him,” I replied, starting the same conversation we have every time the subject of Bram is brought up.

“Well it’s not a proper name.  Isaac, or Abraham, or Jacob, or even Moses, just some...”

“Name from the Bible?” I suggested.

“They didn’t go wrong.  Bible names hold strength, and faith!”

“And sometimes aren’t the best.”

“I don’t believe you, Sarah!  Don’t you have a strong, Bible name?”

“Yes, we all do, you’d think it was a requirement!”

“Sarah!  Samuel!” my mother, Miriam, snapped looking up from her sewing.  Samuel looked a bit surprised at his wife’s outburst, and gave her a questioning look.  “Would you two like chicken-n-dumplings for supper or pot roast?”  Miriam used the question as a cover for the peacekeeping she had managed with her outburst.

“Pot roast, dear,” Samuel said sitting down and picking up the newspaper.

“I think I’ll just head home,” I said heading for the door with my daughter Lydia.

“Why don’t you and Lydia stay through supper, dear,” Not a command but close.

“No thank you Mom, I’ve got some work I need to get done.”  The excuse I always use.

“Call me when you get in,” Mom called from the kitchen.

“Okay, bye Dad,” I called shutting the door behind me.

“Where’s Sarah?” Samuel asked looking up from his paper a few minutes after I left.

“She went home, dear,” Miriam called from the kitchen as she sliced up some potatoes.

“I thought she was staying for supper.”

“Not tonight, honey.  She had work to do.”

“Oh.”
 

“I’m home, Momma.”

“Thank goodness.  I almost sent your father out to find you.”

“I had to stop by the store,” I replied taking groceries out of the bag on the floor.

“Oh, well, I’ll let you get your work done.  Talk to you later, sweetie.”

“Bye Momma.”

“Bye.”  I hung up, putting the milk into the fridge.

I guess I should explain why I have a beautiful baby girl and no husband.  Bram sees nothing odd about this, but here in the South there’d better be a pretty good reason behind it.  If you’re widowed that’s one thing, if you’re divorced that’s quite another.  In some Southern families that’s fine too, but in the old, Southern families, complete with racists and sexist members, it’s not.  I’ll be the first to tell you I’m neither of those.  My mother, Miriam, was raised in the south and her father, my grandfather, is Southern too, but her mother, Grandma Alice, was born and raised in the New York City, and from her I got my understanding that everyone is very much equal no matter sex or race, to the dismay of the rest of my family.  I am, also to the dismay of my family, divorced, but I think my reason is valid, seeing as it’s that he cheated on me.  To my family this is a semi-valid excuse but they believe we could have worked it out.  Wrong!  So that’s why.  Lydia and I are perfectly happy without him.  I had to get a job at the local paper.  A “friend of the family” owns it so I got a pretty good job, pretty quickly.  With Mom and Dad’s help, at first, I got to stay in the house my daughter was born in, quite literally, but that’s another story altogether.

Lydia is three months old, and I have to keep bows in her fine, blonde hair (chicken-fuzz, as I call it) or people ask if she’s a little girl.  Don’t get me wrong, the poor baby doesn’t look like a boy; it’s simply that her hair is so short.  She has got to be the healthiest baby in the world, she’s book perfect in every category.  And she’s not the least bit spoiled (well maybe a little).  She’s sure not perfect when it comes to her temper.  Besides having a bit of Irish from my momma’s side of the family, she’s got the Moyers’ temper, which is known countywide.  If you say “no” in her presence, you don’t even have to say it to her, and she starts screaming and kicking and waving her little fists.  She used to hit with those fists, but I broke her of that early on.  It’s her Nana and Papa that do most of the spoiling.  That child’s a mess.

I’ve always lived here.  Not just in the South or Kentucky, but Simpson County.

I’ve lived my whole life in this one county.  I went to college in Florida and planned to stay there, but Daddy got sick so I came home.  Most of my family lives in a 15-mile radius of the square in town.  It’s one of those extremely small towns, population 7,000 (and we joke that that includes pets), everybody knows everybody else and all their business.  In fact, my hometown isn’t even on the map of Kentucky.  Go get a map of Kentucky and look, I can promise you, you won’t find Franklin, Kentucky on it.  I’ve lived here all my life, and just when I thought I was going to get out I was drug right back for one reason or another.  Daddy getting sick, then Grandmother Ruth (my father’s grandmother) getting cancer and dieing, then marrying Joseph (my ex and a huge mistake), and finally little baby Lydia.  I didn’t even know I was pregnant when I divorced Joseph.  The day Bram flew down was the one-year anniversary of my divorcing Joseph.  Happy Anniversary to me.

Bram, who I’ve mentioned more than once, is, as I’ve said, my boyfriend, my Northern boyfriend.  He pronounced it Brom, but still spells it with an “a.”  I met him when I traveled to New York to visit my Great-Aunt Anne last summer.  We went out a few times and we’ve emailed and chatted back and forth since.  His longish black hair is what, besides being Northern, upsets my family the most.  “A man’s hair shouldn’t touch his ears!” as my Uncle Adam puts it.

I like his hair though.  The very fact that he could put his hair up in a ponytail fascinated me, but it was his eyes that won me over; deep, royal blue, and the color was achieved without contacts.  They “came that color.”  Bram was...is...a guide at an art museum in New York, and likes his work, something odd in the North he says.  He took off work to come down and stay two weeks; to see if we could live together and to meet my family.  I offered to come meet his family, but he said no, family wasn’t as important in the North, although I don’t see how.  “I love my family, Sarah, but we’re not close.  We see each other for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and no more then that more often then not.”  “That’s so weird,” is all I could say to that, and it was.

“Good morning,” Bram greeted my daughter and I when we met him at the Nashville airport, the closest one to our small Kentucky town.

“Morning!  How was your flight?” I asked smiling and taking one of his bags for him.  He didn’t answer, he simply laughed.  “What’s so funny?!”

“I forgot how thick Southern accents are,” he said, slowly stopping his laughter.

“Oh,” I said a bit taken back.  “I guess you don’t notice it when you hear it all the time.”

“I guess,” he said smiling down at me again.  “I could have got my bag.  You’ve got your hands full with Lydia.”

“It’s fine, it’s really not that heavy.”

We talked the whole way home.  Bram said he’d never been to a small town or even a small city, always big cities, and he’d never been camping.  How very odd.  I attempted to explain the humidity and bug population and bug size to him, but he simply didn’t understand.  ‘Sure there were bugs and there was humidity in New York.  What was the difference?’ ‘There’s a lot,’ I tried to explain unsuccessfully, ‘You’ll understand when we get there.’  Boy, did he ever!

“Damn, it’s humid!  What happened?  You can wring out the air down here!” Bram announced after climbing out of my car into the heat and humid.  It was my turn to laugh at him.  “What?”

“It’s not that humid today, only a 70% day.  It’s pretty nice, in fact!”

“That’s crazy.  God, it’s humid,” Bram continued rambling as we carried his stuff and Lydia into the house.  “It’s hot in here.”

“Yeah it is.  The air conditioner must be frozen up again,” I said heading over to it.

“Well?” he asked looking too.

“The electricity is out again,” I deduced, looking at my blank clock.  “It’ll be back on later.”  I pulled the milk, eggs, meats, and other things that had to be kept cold out of the fridge and dumped them gently into a cooler.  I dumped a bag of ice into it and carried the cooler down into the basement and covered the basement windows.  Once the items were fixed I headed upstairs.

“Does this happen often?” Bram asked setting his bags down in my living room.

“Often enough that I know what to do, but not too bad.  Come on, I’ll show you where you sleep.”

“Okay.”  Bram picked his bags back up and headed down the hall behind me.  We stopped in Lydia’s room to lie her down and open the windows in hopes that a breeze would blow through.  “This is great!  I love the way you’ve done the house.”

“Thanks, I’m no artist, but I can figure out what looks good together,” I said modestly.  The house did look great, even if I do say so myself.
 

“What is it?” Bram asked taking a pie pan with a large slice of watermelon in it from me.

“It’s watermelon,” I countered laughing.

“What do you do with it?”

“Eat it, silly.  What did you think?  Wear it as a hat?”

“Not funny, Sarah, and I know you eat it, but how?”

“You just pick it up and eat it,” I said picking up my piece, sprinkled some salt on it and took a bite, spitting out the seeds into the pie pan.

“Do you have a fork?”

“What do you need a fork for?”

“To eat with.  You’re getting juice everywhere.”

“You do that when you’re eating watermelon.  It’s just part of it.  That’s why you eat it outside,” I said and tapped his pie pan with the saltshaker.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“If you’re this bad about watermelon, I’d hate to see what you do with a smore.”

“I know what a smore is,” Bram declared, trying to gain some ground.

“How do you make them then?”

“You put a marshmallow on a graham and a piece of chocolate then put another graham cracker on top.  Then you put the whole thing in the microwave and warm is up so the marshmallow is real soft and the chocolate is soft in the middle.”  I couldn’t help but laugh.  “What?”

“There’s something else we’ll have to teach you.  That’s not the right way.”

“”No, it’s not your way.”

“Do it my way and you’ll agree that my way is the right way.”

“Have you ever had hobby-hocks?”

“What’s a hobby-hock?”

“Oh Lord.  I’ll make them tonight for supper.”

“Sounds good.  Try your watermelon.”
 

“Hot dogs, with bacon, and cheese?” I laughed, watching Bram pile cheese onto the four hotdogs.

“Yeah, I tried your watermelon.”

“I never said I wouldn’t try it.  I just said it was weird, and I didn’t even technically say that.”

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” Bram asked pushing the tray of hotdogs into the oven.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.  Remember?” I asked, confused as to what exactly he was asking.

“I know tomorrow’s Sunday.  What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s the Sabbath, Bram.”

“Oh,” he said beginning to catch on.  “I forget this area is in the buckle of the Bible-belt.”

“Buckle of the Bible-belt?” I asked confused at this explanation.

The Bible-belt is a invisible strip that goes all the way around the United States, if not the world, where people are good, faithful Christians.  This area is even more populated by this type of people.  Therefore the buckle.”

“Ohhhhh!  The buckle of the Bible-belt,” I gasped, understanding.  “Clever of somebody.  Going back to your question, around here we go to church Sunday morning, then have Sunday dinner at a relatives, then church in the evening.”

“Let me guess, church on Wednesday too?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of religion.”

“It’s just the way we do things.  What about you?  Don’t you go to church?”

“Every Easter and Christmas.  Not a whole lot more then that, no matter how religious you are.  No-one’s got that much time.”

“Nothing’s open here until after church so there’s plenty of time.”

“What about football or basketball or baseball Sundays?”

“That’s what VCRs with record buttons and blank tapes are for.”

“That’s a lot of religion for me, Sarah.”

“It’s only two weeks for now, Bram.  You’ll survive.”

“That’s a whole lot of religion, Sarah!” Bram repeated, checking the hobby-hocks, they were ready
 

Rebecca
Franklin Simpson High School