Free Lowcountry Summer by Dorothea Benton Frank

you.”
    “Okay.”
    I took my purse and left. Then I took ten steps, turned around, came back, and opened the door. Millie was standing there.
    “What?”
    “I still can’t believe Frances Mae really did that!”
    Millie was shaking her head and grinning as wide as she could. “Gone out of here, girl! I got work to do!”
    Miss Sweetie’s plantation wasn’t too far from ours, just up the road near Green Pond. Her house was even older than ours and her land had been in her deceased husband’s family since the mideighteenth century. Unlike our family, who bequeathed Tall Pines to women in the family, hers was passed down through the male line. I often wondered if other members of her family would want it when Miss Sweetie went home to heaven, but a thousand acres wasn’t something you just took on without a lot of thought. The maintenance alone required very deep pockets and an excellent sense of humor. The bad news was that like Tall Pines, Magnolia Point was a money pit. The good news was that Magnolia Point smelled like heaven when the strawberries were in bloom. As you might guess, instead of an avenue of oaks, Miss Sweetie had an avenue of one hundred or more enormous magnolias that led up to the front of her astoundingly beautiful and historic Georgian home, whose scale was nothing if not grand.
    Black-lacquered shutters were hung all across the front portico, ready to close and latch in case of a hurricane. The massive ancient walls were constructed of small handmade bricks and ranged in color from the palest pink to deep maroon, flecked from time and moss. The large thick panes of glass were warped with age, filled with tiny bubbles and halos. While I suspected they were not original, they looked as old as anything I had ever seen in downtown Charleston. Glass had always been interesting to me, the way it continued to shift and reshape as it aged. Richard and I had owned a small collection of handblown vases and objects. I always loved the idea that they might be alive in some way because they literally held the breath of the artist and because they were always moving and changing. I had left them all with him, and looking at Miss Sweetie’s windows reminded me that I missed them. And then it hit me. Life had become a continuum of leaving people, innocence, and belongings behind and moving on to something new that wasn’t always necessarily better. First, it was my father, then it was my childhood, a childhood shrouded in grief, propped up in the company of strangers in a boarding school. Then I left Charleston, Mother, and Trip to find New York and Richard and to bring Eric to the world stage, only to renounce Richard and the life we had there to come back to find Mother and Trip and to stand by him while we said good-bye to Mother, and then Frances Mae began her wretched downward spiral. And here I stood at Miss Sweetie’s door, reaching out for the door handle, feeling suddenly blue, wondering how many more exits were in my future.
    “Snap out of it, Caroline!” I said to myself out loud, and decided instead of just walking in, I would ring the doorbell.

6

Miss Sweetie
    C HILD? LOOK AT YOU! COME on in and let me fix you something cool to drink!”
    After a prolonged wait, to my great surprise, Miss Sweetie answered her own door. This was unusual. She had a houseman, Clyde, who had worked for her from the days before she had married Mr. Moultrie, who had long since gone to that great big strawberry field forever. Clyde was almost completely deaf, as old as Methuselah, crooked with age, and, more often than not, could be found somewhere nodding off in a chair.
    “Thanks! Where’s Clyde?”
    “Law! He’s gonna have his ninety-sixth birthday this weekend! Isn’t that just marvelous?”
    “Wow. Ninety-six. How do you celebrate that?”
    “All his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are coming to see him from all over the country. They’re going to have a big family reunion.”
    “Is