"Elzbeth"

This really was a story told to me by my sister when I was a child.

Everything written here was the story she told me when I came home from school upset.

Do I believe it to be true? I don't know.

I couldn't stand school.

It wasn't as much the school as it was the children in it.

I was nine years old but very short for my age, and I had a lisp, so all the kids called me baby, of course, the bullying had affected my grades, so they also called me dumb.

Every day somebody was saying something, and although I told my mother, there was nothing she could do because we were too poor for me to go to private school.

After school, I was met by my loving elder sister, Linda.

I called her my second mom because of the vast difference in age, and she cared for my siblings and myself when mom was at work.

Although she completed community college and graduated as a theater arts major, she never really did anything with her life, but boy could she tell stories.

They were full of drama and flair, she wrote humorous, whimsical poems, and she loved to sing and laugh.

In the old days, she would have been called an old maid, but I never thought that was a bad thing.

One day I came home, and she could see that I was distraught, I put my lunch box in the kitchen and plopped down on the couch. "I don't want to go back to school," I stated while wiping the tears away from my eyes.

I explained to her that this girl I thought was my friend, told everyone about my toe.

(my big toe was cut off in a bicycle spoke when I was five) Some kids cornered me in the bathroom, even the boys were in there wanting me to take off my shoe. After the kids saw it they started saying that I have cooties and ran away.

"Could my life get any worse?"

My sister just looked at me as if she was pondering what she was going to say to console me, but that look changed, and she slightly smiled.

She said, "you know it could be worse."

Noticing I had a rip in the knee of my jeans, she told me to change and bring her my pants so she could sew them while I ate my lunch, and she would tell me about her childhood friend Elzbeth.

She started off by sharing how she met Elzbeth.

Linda said that this all took place after our mother's first divorce. We had moved to a trailer park right outside of town, it wasn't like the trailer parks you see today, each trailer was separated by green grass, a few trees, rolling hills, and dirt roads.

It was a place where people rented a trailer long enough to get on their feet then move on, she said it was a charming place in the country.

This was in Georgia in the fifties.

She said she was a curious little girl who didn't see anything wrong with speaking her mind and asking questions.

That didn't sit too well with our grandmother because she always said that children should be seen but not heard. Our mother, on the other hand, didn't mind it at all.

she always said that "Brilliance comes from a lot of answered questions."

Here is the story as told by my sister.

One day mama let me go out to play in the yard. I started to chase a butterfly and found myself past two yards near some clothesline next to the neighbor's trailer, "and there she was."