The Story Hour In My Front Room

So the first Saturday Ellie saw me rub my knee, which I do, it is an old knee, she climbed down off the rug in the middle of the story and came and patted it, pat pat, very grave, and went back to her spot. After that she checked on my knee every week. I let her. A child who needs to take care of somebody has to be let to, or it curdles. I knew a thing or two about that.

Then I washed my face and went back out and read them Make Way for Ducklings, and nobody knew.

I kept thinking, those first weeks, about the church basement where I learned to do any of this.

When I was a girl, the women ran what they called cradle roll down in the basement at the Baptist church, concrete floor and a coal furnace that knocked, and Miss Alma Pruitt ran it with a wooden spoon she never once used on a child, only tapped on the table when she wanted you to settle. She kept oyster crackers in a coffee can and she read us the same six stories until we knew them cold, and I did not know until I was grown that half of us she was feeding because there was not much at home.

Nobody typed Miss Alma a schedule. Nobody laminated her anything. She had a coal furnace and a coffee can and a wooden spoon, and forty years on I can still hear her voice doing the wolf in the three little pigs, and that is the whole of what a child keeps.

So I was not inventing something in my front room. I was just carrying a thing down the road that had been carried to me. That is how it goes out here. Nothing is new. It only changes houses.

I told the mothers that one Saturday, the Miss Alma part, and Steph said, “Who’s going to be our Miss Alma for these ones when we’re gone,” and the room got quiet, and then Faye said, “We’re looking at her,” and pointed her coffee cup at me, and everybody laughed, and I did not, because it had landed somewhere true and I had to blink a minute.