This is perfect. Thank you for sharing this story. I’ve already read it twice, and I’ll probably read it a couple more. The parts about these old Southern women holding each other up, and how they wouldn’t abide any complaining, and her daddy with his shotgun keeping the white man off his property — these are some of the best storytelling and descriptions I’ve ever read. You’ve got a short story or a book right here, or a dynamite memoir.

My mother, born in her grandparents’ house in the desolation of the Texas Panhandle, raised her own younger siblings and knew the lash better than she knew her name. She was this way with me when I was coming up, whipped me daily because I wouldn’t stay out of trouble, but now she’s lost her two daughters and I’m all that’s left, her only son, down to one child and so she frets over my health and that I’ve gained weight (I’ve had a stressful year, too). Now the regrets she feels about her two lost girls and the things she should have done have changed her. After being tough as nails to me for 40 years she’s too nice now, and I want to go back to the old way, the woman who held this damn family together through sheer force of will and worked full time and raised the kids and scrubbed the floors and made every meal. I visited this summer, and now she’s raising two grandkids, my late sisters’ daughters, and I see that in fact she hasn’t changed at all, she’s still the toughest woman I know, and so all is right with the world, and she grapples at the age of 75 with raising two teen-aged girls, it makes her vital again. I see the steel resolve returned, the leather strap no longer comes out, but no, I tell my nieces, you’d best not cross this old woman who could outrun and outwork and out-mean both of you put together. And she’ll damn well make sure you never miss a meal or a day of school or work and heaven help you if you complain because you’ll just get her started telling you the way it was when she raised her three younger siblings and quit school at 15 to go to work when her daddy went into the hospital to dry out. Don’t get her started. No ma’am, don’t.