Charlotte Dean Stark, IWSG, Being Thankful

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts: Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles!

This month's question is: Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

This is a difficult question to answer because there were/are so many people I admired when I was a child. My mother and father, my grandmother, and several older ladies in the small community of St. John in the Virgin Islands where I grew up, like Miss Meada, Miss Myra, Miss Agnes, and Miss Lucy.

My grandmother (left)
and Charlotte

But I have settled on Charlotte. What follows is a brief look into who she was and just one "small" lesson she taught me. 

Charlotte (left with dove)
and my mother.

Charlotte and my grandmother were best friends. Charlotte had been a part of our family from the time my mother was a young teenager, so we're talking since the late 1920s, early '30s. I loved her dearly and spent weekends at her home. Her patient, wonderful husband, Gus, would vacate their bedroom so I could sleep with Charlotte. Because she was a writer, there were times when I had to be quiet and keep myself occupied. Her bookshelves were a cornucopia of delightful reads like: a collection of Charles Addams cartoons, The Secret Garden, Oscar Wilde's fairytales, Grimms' fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackham, A Doorway in Fairyland by Laurence Housman with incredible engravings by Clemence Houseman, and others (many of which she passed on to me and that I still have.) 

Gus and Charlotte

Charlotte Dean Stark was my first best friend. Besides being an author, she was a book reviewer for the New York Times, as well as their first woman poetry editor. She had been a Suffragette and, rumor had it, she had been part of the Vicious Circle at the Algonquin Round Table.

What follows is story about

Mr. Davis and Tom

 

Mr. Davis lived in a 10 X 15 foot shed behind Charlotte’s house. He had, at one time been a talented artist, who made etchings (two examples can be seen here) but both my mother and Charlotte said he had always been cantankerous and difficult to get along with.

 

What he did in that shed all day is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he read. Perhaps he sat in a chair and mumbled to himself about how badly life had treated him. Perhaps he slept. What he didn’t do was art.

For me, at eight years old, Mr. Davis was a scary and mysterious person.

 

When I visited Charlotte it was understood, when it came time to feed him breakfast, lunch or dinner, I wasn’t to show my face.

Off her kitchen, a wide covered porch ran the length of her house. By the kitchen door was a small round table and a single chair. Charlotte would set the table and have a plate of food with beverage in place. Then, in her thin high voice, she’d call him.

 

“Yoo-hoo! Wilber! Dinner!” She alone called him by his first name.

 

A minute or so later Mr. Davis would appear out of the depths of his self-imposed exile. A large, imposing figure, he always wore the same thing, no matter the time of year or weather or that fact that he lived in the tropics: dark trousers, dark long-sleeved shirt, and often an ancient and filthy knee-length over-coat. Sometimes a battered fedora was perched on his head. He’d stump the 30 or so feet to the back porch, eat in sullen silence, get up, and return to his dark den.

 

Charlotte alone spoke to him. Did he want more? Would he like a glass of water? A cup of coffee perhaps? He’d reply with a simple gruff, yes or no.

 

When Charlotte called Mr. Davis for dinner, she also called in a wild tomcat. She had several tame cats, but she fed the wild cat when she fed Mr. Davis dinner. She’d put out a dish of food in the same place every evening and in her high, thin voice she’d call him.

 

“Yoo-hoo! Tom. Yoo-hoo! Dinner, Tom!”

 

Out of the tangle of thorn bushes that grew behind the house would come slinking a great battle-scarred, orange tomcat. Part of one ear was chewed off, and his fur was scraggly and lumpy with cuts and scabs and scars. He’d come slinking in, wary of anything different or any movement that was not part of his frame of reference, eat his bowl of food, then slink back into the bush.

 

Old man and old cat ate their meals together in hostile, untrusting silence.

 

Mr. Davis ate without looking around as if he might see something which would then necessitate an acknowledgement.

 

Tom crouched in tense expectation that he might have to bolt at any moment. After each gulp of food his head swiveled from side to side, taking in his surrounding, making sure nothing had changed.

 

They were the same kind of creature. Life had dealt them blows which had caused them to retreat into isolation. Mr. Davis had chosen his while Tom had been born to it.

 

Yet between them they had Charlotte, whose sweet face, quiet voice, and non-judgmental manner, brought the two together each evening.

 

Was it because the wounds they’d suffered and the scars they bore were momentarily soothed by her ministrations? Those moments were not enough to civilize the misanthropic old man or tame the wild old tomcat, but they were enough to keep them coming back.

 

Daily they came to that borderland of civilization, the neutral zone that was the back porch. They could have come inside the house any time and been welcomed, but the porch was as close to the smell of humanity as either of them cared to get.

 

I caught occasional glimpses of the old wild man and old wild cat as they made their journeys to the edge of that reality where they couldn’t endure to live. I dared to take peeks at them, hoping they would notice me and see me as harmless and thus allow me to befriend them. But I was also terrified, if they did see me, they would run away and never come back or yell and hiss at me for scaring them.

 

I walked a thin brittle line. Common sense, instinct, or some part of my unconscious knew not to intrude and cause a break in the fragile connection Charlotte had with them.

 

Perhaps in that time with Charlotte, a memory was made which lingered like a salve, easing some of the pain. Perhaps it was the lingering trace of that memory which kept them coming back. Her calm, quiet, unhurried, demeanor taught me that even the most damaged or wild of creatures can be coaxed out of the darkness and into the light, even if only for a moment.

***

Has my opinion of Charlotte changed now that I am older than she was when I was 8? Not one little bit. I love her as much now as I did then.

Me on Charlotte's lap. L to R clockwise:
Friend, Ed, my sister Erva Denham, friend Milaine,
and Ed's brother, John. 

Being Thankful

I'm thankful I knew Charlotte.

Charlotte's Books (and good news)

Charlotte and Gus on their deck with an expansive view of ocean.

I've written about Charlotte before (click here) and will no doubt write about her again. She was a person who left deep and loving imprints on my life.

Her husband Gus was equally memorable, but it is memories of Charlotte I keep going back to.

Besides being a Suffragette, she was part of the famous Algonquin Round Table, having lunch with the likes of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. She also wrote editorials for the New York Times.

It seems only natural then, that once she and Gus settled on St. John, she would write about the island. She wrote two books.

I've been on the hunt for them for a long time, but it was difficult as  neither my sister, Erva, or I could remember the titles! Just a year or so ago Googling her name hadn't produced anything except what I had written about her in my blogs. But the internet is an amazing thing. While I was doing a little research for last Monday's blog on Reef Bay, I came across a quote from one of her books. OH JOY! I had a title. I Googled it. And there it was, staring me in face. Not just the one book, but BOTH of them!

From the Foreword: "Charlotte Dean Stark and her husband first visited the Virgin Islands as the result of reading  Desmond Holdridge's Escape to the Tropics. The moment they set foot on St. John, they wanted to stay there forever, but business in New York and Connecticut took them back to the States.

"Mrs Stark worked for the New York Times, writing editorials and selecting the poem appearing daily on the editorial page."

In the Acknowledgments she wrote: that Harper editors said they "admire the observation and the writing." And Little Brown & Company said, "It's all warm and intimate." These were rejections. Charlotte went on to self-publish Souvenir of St. John in 1958!

Some True Tales and Legends,  self-published in 1960, is more like a pamphlet or chapbook.

I often spent week-ends with Gus and Charlotte and many were the mornings when I'd be curled up on the couch reading a book like The Secret Garden or A Doorway in Fairyland while Charlotte clacked away on her typewriter.

I am absolutely delighted to have these little volumes in my collection of books about the Virgin Islands.

Good News!
Back in December I got an email from Andrea Milam, editor of Five Quarters, the St. John Historical Society's newsletter. She asked if I'd be interested in contributing an article. It seems someone from the SJHS is/was/had been reading my blog, for she wanted me to work up an article based on THIS blog about our Mobile Gas Station. After a little reworking I sent it off. I'm thrilled to announce "The Little Pre-Fab that Could," is in the February issue. I'd love to be able to throw up a link, but one has to be a member of the St. John Historical to get the newsletter. Thanks Andrea.

Has anything from your past been returned to you? Have you gotten any writing requests through your blog?

Costumes

It being Halloween and all...

My mother was a gifted seamstress and liked to make costumes. After all she went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and studied costume design. She could make her own patterns and everything. I wish I had pictures of the costumes she made for my sister and me.

I think it all started with playing dress-up at Charlotte's. She'd let me dig through her closet and pull out clothes from late twenties and early thirties. She even let me wear her little tiara. What a princess! It doesn't matter that the gloves and shoes are too big!




















In the islands Halloween isn't the only time to get into costume; there's Carnival on St. Thomas, and the 4th of July on St. John. Here I am one 4th as some kind of Hawaiian chick wrestling with Gene, my sister's best friend.



















Back in 1969 I was in two Carnival parades, back to back, The Children's Parade on Friday and the Adult's Parade on Saturday. It was a crazy thing to do. Totally exhausting, particularly since I walked both days.

I think my school's floop (a combination of troop and float) was a tribute to literary characters. You can't see much... but that's me, as Snoopy, helping to carry a banner. I'm the one on the left.  The banner reads "Happiness is an Elected Governor," celebrating our first elected governor.

The next day I was in the Adult's Parade. That year there was a song called "Mah Na Mah Na," a one hit wonder that was very popular. Even Red Skelton used it on his show. He and others dressed up as a moon creatures and played the tune on kazoos. That lead to me being in the Carnival troop from St. John. We were moon creatures dressed up in painted foam costumes playing kazoos.  (Boy was it hot in that foam!)

The sign reads, " Legalize Extra-Orbital Activities."

Those round spots were price stickers. I had a spotted sun burn.








And here for your entertainment is a humorous rendition of "Mah Na Mah Na" done by The Muppets. Don't blame me if the tune gets stuck in your head.




Other memorable costumes include:
A mermaid with a full tail
Raggedy Ann complete with red yarn wig
A sailor on Columbus's ship
A witch (every girl has to be a witch at least once in her life)
Bugs Bunny, I made a paper mache carrot that I carried in a pistol holster strapped to my hip. My best friend, a head shorter than me, went as Yosemite Sam
A flapper
An ancient hippy (a ghost wearing love beads, medallion, peace and anti-war buttons)
A bag lady (I had every type of bag I could find pinned and/or taped to my clothes)
Miss Ellaneous, I wore a sash and a little crown and had paper clips, safety pins, pencils, pens,  post-it notes, scissors, rulers etc. pinned to my person
A gypsy

I know there are more, but I that's all I can remember at the moment.

What about you, got a favorite costume memory? Happy Halloween.

T is for Thesaurus

I'm going to be gone today, at the craft's fair selling my tatting. That means I won't be out and about visiting blogs. Have a wonderful Easter and may you find many treasures. See you Monday.

Thesaurus: New Latin from Latin, meaning treasure, collection, from the Greek thesauros.

Yes! A thesaurus is a treasure! Writing without a thesaurus would be like trying to play a sport with one hand or one arm. It can be done but it would be difficult.

This is my ancient, most treasured thesaurus, copyright 1922.

The pages are thin and yellowing. I had to put bookbinding tape on the spine to keep it from totally falling apart.

It resides at my right hand whenever I'm writing.

I love exploring it.

It was given to me by Charlotte who was my first best friend. Charlotte was a few years older than my grandmother. She had been a Suffragette. She was a book reviewer for the New York Times and became their first female poetry editor. She wrote two books about St. John. If you care to, you can read more about her here.

She and her husband Gus knew my mother from when Mom was a teen-ager.

Gus gave the thesaurus to Charlotte.

He inscribed it thus: I've underlined the "sufficient" word. Gus.

For many years I didn't know what the sufficient word was.

Then finally I found it.

The word is love.

A bit of torn, brittle ribbon, left in the book by Charlotte, lives between pages 600 and 601.

It is sufficient.

What do you treasure? What does your thesaurus contain?

Grammy

My mother's mother was born on this day in 1895, in Ada, Ohio. Her name was Erva Love Hartwell. The middle name of Love was dropped when she got married, at which point she became known as Erva Hartwell Boulon.

At around the age of two or three, she was chosen to be the face for Mellin's Food, a brand of baby food. This is the original ad, not a copy.

Here she is with her dolls when she was about six or seven.

At around nine or so, she and her family moved to Key West, Florida because her father, Frank Hartwell, was a weatherman for the newly formed Federal Weather Bureau. The Bureau now bares the name of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Below is Erva Love in Key West.

In 1909 Frank Hartwell was transfered to the weather station in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Erva Love was about 14. She graduated from Central High School in San Jaun. This beautiful building is now an art school.

Erva Love Hartwell at 19.

She was fun-loving.

This is my favorite picture of her. Imagine how long her hair was when it was unbraided! I don't know how old she was when it was taken, but I estimate somewhere between 18 and 20.

She married Paul Alfred Boulon in Puerto Rico and had four children, my mother being the oldest.

In 1928 they bought Trunk Bay on St. John. In the years that followed the family build a summer home there. I'm not sure if that's her in this picture or our dear family friend Charlotte.

After World War II Grammy ran Trunk Bay as a guest house. She did it without electricity, cooking three meals a day for her guests. John Dos Passos, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife were among some of her more well-known guests. She gained the reputation for being a superior hostess and an excellent cook. Using local foods, she learned how to prepare them in ways that would please American taste buds. An article was written about her in the cooking section of the New York Times and she wrote a cook-book call My Island Kitchen. I loved having breakfast at her table because she would toast your bread on a charcoal pot set on a small table next to her chair. Below is a postcard of her kitchen.

Here she is on horse-back about 1945 going into Cruz Bay to pick up the mail. There were no vehicles on the island at that time. Everyone rode or walked.

Grammy had a wonderfully loud, uninhibited cackling laugh. Her hair turned silver by the time she was in her forties. She wore it a single braid on the top of her head and dressed up her do with hibiscus. She liked large, avant-garde jewelry. She was a pioneer.

She died on December 27, 1972. We all still miss her.

Among those who share a birthday with her: Henry V, king of England. William Wilkie Collins, writer. Jose Ferrer, actor. Bill Graham, rock promoter (Fillmores East and West who stayed at our guest house at Lille Maho.) Elvis Presley and David Bowie.

Old Things

Tricia over at Talespinning shared a picture of a beautiful piece of china hand-painted by her grandmother.

This got me to thinking...

My sister and I are blessed to have many things passed down from our great-grandmothers and from family friends.

Rather than sitting in a cabinet to be seen and never touched, in our family the china, crystal, silver and linen were loved by being used for special occasions like birthdays and holidays. There is a deep emotional connection, visceral, as mouth wraps around fork, as lips touch the rim of a wine glass that was used by someone 50 to 75 years ago. Using it taught my sister and me how to handle and care for it. Erva uses her china on a daily basis.

One of my prize possessions is a near complete luncheon set of Harebell bone-china made by Shelly, an English company no longer in existence. It was given to me by Charlotte.
This picture really doesn't do it justice.


But here, on this "eared" cream-soup bowl, you can see the layers of color; the light and dark blues and greens, the lavenders. The vines and flowers look like a gentle breeze is stirring them.

I can almost see fairies peeking out from behind leaves, swinging from the stems.

I remember when Charlotte would set the lunch table for me and her and Gus. Matching tablecloth and napkins, the Harebell, sterling silver flat-ware. She would let me help. I would carry one plate at a time across the concrete floor from the kitchen to the table. Then we'd sit down to some simple meal like sandwiches and a salad. Afterwards we'd clear the table. Charlotte or Gus washed the dishes, I helped by drying and setting them aside on the counter. When everything was clean Charlotte would put the china back on their open shelves which were too high for me to reach.

We don't live like this any more. We don't take the time to dine, even if the fare is simple. We gobble and bolt. Many of us eat off plastic or paper, in front of the TV. We are losing, maybe even have lost, the ability to set a table and sit together.

Yet food and the process of eating is really the only communal thing all humans do. We have no problem eating out and dining with strangers all around us. In fact, we enjoy it, maybe even need it. I think it's genetic, a caveman thing, from a time when we all had to share in the hunting and gathering and thus shared in the meal. Like animals that share a waterhole, enemies and strangers come together in the presence of food.

Maybe the way to world peace is through our stomachs.

Summer and Sand

I've written about Charlotte before. Here she is with a bunch of us kids. I'm sitting on her lap.
Notice I'm the only one who's barefoot.


Charlotte was a long time family friend. She's on the left, with my mother. Mom was about 17 or 18 years old. They are holding doves.



Charlotte, who was several years older than my grandmother, was my first best friend. She had been a Suffragette, had written book reviews for the New York Times, and was their first female poetry editor. She was part of the famous Algonquin Round Table, hanging out with the likes of Dorothy Parker and company.

She introduced my sister and me to books: The Secret Garden, the fairytales of Oscar Wilde, Little Brother and Little Sister (a collection of Grimm fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackham which was given to her in 1919 and which I have) Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens and A Doorway to Fairyland by Laurence Housman (I have these books too) to name a few.

She introduced us to music: Gilbert and Sullivan comes immediately to mind, memories of all of us singing along with the H. M. S. Pinafore...

And she introduced us to poetry. Below is probably our all time favorite. It was so true for us, who lived near the ocean, who went almost daily to the beach. And I thought, since summer is almost on us, I'd share it, because some of you might get to (or have been to) the beach and you'd identify with it.

Enjoy.

SEASON AT THE SHORE
by Phyllis McGinley


Oh, not by sun and not by cloud
And not by whippoorwill, crying loud,
And not by the pricking of my thumbs,
Do I know the way that the summer comes.
Yet here on this seagull-haunted strand,
Hers is an omen I understand -
Sand:

Sand on the beaches,
Sand at the door,
Sand that screeches
On the new-swept floor;
In the shower, sand for the foot to crunch on;
Sand in the sandwiches spread for luncheon;
Sand adhesive to son and sibling,
From wallet sifting, from pockets dribbling;
Sand by the beaker
Nightly shed
From odious sneaker;
Sand in bed;
Sahara always in my seaside shanty
Like the sand in the voice
of J. Durante.

Winter is mittens, winter is gaiters
Steaming on various radiators.
Autumn is leaves that bog the broom.
Spring is mud in the living room
Or skates in places one scarcely planned.
But what is summer, her seal in hand?
Sand:

Sand in closets,
Sand on the stair,
Desert deposits
In the parlor chair;
Sand in the halls like the halls of the ocean;
Sand in the soap and the sun-tan lotion;
Stirred in the porridge, tossed on the greens,
Poured from the bottoms of rolled-up jeans;
In the elmy street
On the lawny acre;
Glued to the seat
Of the Studebaker.
Wrapped in the folds of the Wall Street Journal;
Damp sand, dry sand,
Sand eternal.

When I shake my garments at the Lord’s command,
What will I scatter in the Promised Land?
Sand.

My First Cat

I guess I was about seven when I got my first cat. I got to pick him out of the litter and name him. I don’t think we knew he was going to grow into a big old Tom, so it’s kind of ironic that I named him Kitty Puss.

Upon bringing him home our dog, Happy, who was about six months old, proceeded to lick the poor kitten until he was absolutely soaking wet. Happy used to carry Kitty Puss around. He didn’t pick Kitty Puss up by the scruff of the neck. No…he put the cat’s whole head in his mouth and Kitty Puss let himself be carried around like that, perfectly calm, hanging limply from Happy’s mouth. They were best buds and often slept together.

Kitty Puss’s docile nature made him an excellent doll. I dressed him up in my Tiny Tears doll clothes and pushed him around in my doll carriage. The proof is in these two pictures taken when I was about eight years old.

I would also put my mother’s lipstick on his face and take it off with cold cream. He never struggled, never clawed, never bit, never even growled.

I loved that cat.

But we were not destined to have him for long. He was no more than three years old when he was poisoned. He got very sick and for several days wouldn’t eat. Then one day he drank a little milk and we thought he was getting better. That night we went to Gus and Charlotte’s for dinner. When we got back home I was the first one in the door, eager to see how my cat was doing. I will never forget seeing him stretched out on the floor, his mouth and eyes open….I knew. I screamed and hollered and cried and had to be comforted. I was devastated.

No cat has ever been able to take his place. That goes for Happy too, who lived twelve years. Although he tolerated all the other cats we had, he was never a friend to any of them the way he was a friend to Kitty Puss.

I’m sure the two are lying in dappled shade on the soft grass of the Elysian Fields enjoying each other’s company.

Charlotte...and Gus Too

Charlotte Dean Stark. She was my first best friend (after my sister that is.)

Charlotte was older than my grandmother by 5 or 6 years. She had been a Suffragette. She was a book reviewer for the New York Times. Between December 4th, 1932 and August 6th, 1944, Charlotte wrote a total of 192 columns.

She was married to Gus, a thin man who had no teeth. But that didn't stop him from eating whatever he wanted. He ate everything from popcorn to steak, gumming things to death. On New Years Eve he'd put in his teeth and look completely different. But he didn't like to wear them because they hurt.

I don't know how Gus and Charlotte first learned about St. John or when they first arrived. I do know they were already family friends when my mother was going to Pratt Institute between 1934-36 because Mom spent the holidays with them up in Connecticut.

They came to Trunk Bay on St. John early on, before 1934, before Grammy opened it as guest house. In fact, the only building left at Trunk Bay, the Lower House, was built by Charlotte and Gus between 1948-49.

Charlotte had short curly graying red-brown hair. In her youth it had been a deep auburn. Her eyes, if I remember rightly, were a watery blue-green. She wore long skirts and dresses, which she made, to cover her right knee which had been severely mangled when she was a girl.

The story she told is that while riding a bike the front wheel hit a trolley or train track. She was thrown, landing on her right knee. The knee cap was shattered and a large cut on the top of her thigh caused a piece of her stocking to go up inside her her leg. Doctors had to enlarge the cut and with a long pair of tweezers they pulled the piece of fabric out. Her knee remained gnarly and lumpy and it didn't bend very well.

Over the fireplace (the only one on St. John at the time) there was an oil painting of her that was done when she was about 18. She had been a pretty young woman; a small heart-shaped face was surrounded by an abundance of auburn hair. She was wearing a long yellow dress. She looked very much the Gibson Girl.

She still had the dress when I entered her life. She'd let me play dress-up in it. It was made of satin and had a drapery-like front, like a narrow shawl that acted as both yoke and straps. It had a small train. When I wore it I loved pretending I was in a grand ballroom strolling and dancing about. Made me feel very elegant.

Charlotte was slender and had long fingered hands that were bony. She filed her nails into small points. She played the piano and sang in a thin watery voice. My sister, Erva, Charlotte and I liked to sing Christmas carols all year long.

She liked to do acrostics. She also had a knitting project, making herself an outfit of fine off-white wool. But like Penelope, she never finished it.

She took a battery of pills, mostly vitamins. She had these little pill boxes, each one different. Every morning she'd sort out which pills went into which box; morning, noon, evening, bedtime. She hated taking pills. She'd chew up the ones she could, all together (YUK!) Then all the gel-cap types she'd pop in her mouth, take a big sip of water, throw her head back, shake and wiggle her head and stroke her throat to get the pills down.

She made her own yogurt.

If I was around when she made bread she always gave me a small lump to knead. Even if it fell on the floor she'd bake it in its own little pan and I would eat it. She taught me how to use their special pop-corn popper. It was a large electric machine. Just this much oil, this much corn. I got so good I became the official popper when ever I visited, which was often.

Charlotte wrote two books about St. John. I wish I had them.

She slept in the nude and walked from the bedroom to the bathroom butt naked. She was not the least bit modest about her aging, saggy body. She slept with dozens of very small pillows which she made special pillow cases for. She also wore a black satin mask over her eyes as she couldn't sleep when there was any kind of light. She made the masks too.

She wore Joy perfume. Gus kept her supplied with an extremely large bottle of it. One bottle would last a couple of years.

Charlotte introduced my sister, Erva and me, to the "Sea Sick Record," (as our cousin Frances called it.) It's real name is "The Pinafore" by Gilbert and Sullivan. We loved that album and would sing along with it. I particularly liked trying to imitate the contralto who sang the part of Buttercup.

"I'm called little Buttercup,

Poor little Buttercup,

Though I could never tell why...

...So buy off your Buttercup, buy." It must have been a hoot to hear an 8 or 10 year old singing that song.

Charlotte and I got along like two peas in a pod. I spent many week-ends with her.

Gus would take us down to Hawksnest in the afternoons around 3 p.m. to take a sea bath. He had an old tractor and he'd rigged up a seat on the back of it. I would sit in Charlotte's lap as we made our slow way down the steep rocky road to the beach. We always had stale bread on hand to feed the pompanos.

After the beach Charlotte and I took a shower together, something that by today's standards would be frowned upon and/or questioned. One time I asked her why one breast was smaller than the other. She told me she had had a tumor removed and lifted up her breast so I could see the thin white scar that went from one side to the other. Another time I asked her why she and Gus didn't have kids. She told me she had lost three. I can only assume, now as an adult, that she had had three miscarriages. I told her I was sorry. She told me it didn't bother her anymore, particularly since she had me to play with.

Sunday mornings were always fun. Charlotte and I would get all dressed up. I would wear one her long dresses, all pinned and gathered up to fit me. We'd dab on some Joy, then we'd climb onto the tractor and Gus would motor the three of us down to Caneel Bay to pick up the Sunday New York Times. We must have been quite a sight, an old owman and little girl walking through the lobby of the hotel as if we owned the placed; Charlotte looking elegant - she carried herself as one who had once been among the elite, which she had been - and me, trailing skirts that were too long acting like a princess.

Then there was Gus, who wore the same basic outfit every day, jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, leading this odd female pair.

Every morning Charlotte took her flower basket and shears and went out into the yard to gather hibiscus blossoms. She had a multitude of different kinds. Inside the house Gus had mounted on the walls lovely pieces of drift wood into which he had drilled holes. Charlotte would take out yesterdays wilted blossoms and replace them with today's. And so, there were these wonderful splashes of color in the foyer and on the white walls of the living room. A praticularly beautiful piece of free-standing drift wood sat on the top of her white up-right piano.

Once Charlotte taped/attached all these differnt types of hibiscus to one of her large potted plants. She called her "Ho-ax Charlotta."

Sometimes we had screaming contests to see who could scream the loudest. She and my mother called me "one of God's screachers" because I could scream so loud.

She liked to eat pomegranates and had several trees in the yard, both the white and ruby red kind.

In the late 1960's after Gus's death, Charlotte moved back to the states. I was very sad about the move. I begged her to sell the house to my Mom and Dad, but it was not to be. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo took the roof and destroyed part of the house. What was left was eventually torn down...all of the beautiful stonework Gus had done, their large open porch overlooking Hawksnest. It's all gone now.

But I have some pictures. This one shows me on her lap. My sister stands tall in the back. Our friends, Melaine, Ed (left) and John (right) gluster around her like bees on a flower. I am, as I always was, barefoot.

I loved Charlotte dearly. She always answered my questions, even if it was to say, "I don't know." I have a pretty little three-shelved cherry wood piece that was hers. I also have her Harebell china. Between us, Erva and I have several pieces of her jewerly. I also have two of her painted fans and several books from her extensive library. I read the The Secret Garden at her house.

In 1968 I visited family in Connectcut for Christmas. I spent the night with Charlotte in New York City. She was living in a hotel-apartment. We had dinner together. The next morning, before light, she gave me instructions on how to get to Grand Central Station. We hugged and said good-bye.

It was the last time I saw her. Charlotte died in 1977.

I still miss her from time to time, which is why I'm writing about her today. It's one of those moments.