From A Cool Drink of Well Water
By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright 2003

I never once saw her wear pants. Always a thin cotton dress, hemmed to her knees-revealing the purple-veined mosaics on her bare calves and the scar near her ankle. She topped the ensemble off with old tennis shoes whose rubber soles were worn thin and no socks. It didn't matter that she might have spent her days mending barbed wire fence, or working a hundred head of cattle, or canning peaches, or pulling weeds from her garden, or picking dewberries, or driving a John Deere across three pastures. It just wasn't fitting for a lady to wear pants.

From River Days
By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright 2004

Patterns exist in every childhood. Eating warm oatmeal for breakfast. Going to church at 9 a.m. on Sundays. Catching the bus after school.

Well, I rarely ate anything as healthy as oatmeal, only went to church on Easter and Christmas, and rode the bus just once, to see where it went. But the one pattern that stands out most in my years of growing up in the South is this: for about 10 years, every other Sunday, my two sisters and I piled into the back of my father's 1979 green Ford truck with the camper on the back, sat on cattle feed sacks so hard we could feel every cube inside, and sang Tammy Wynette songs until my parents had driven the 20 or so miles to our bi-weekly destination.

My parents owned a camphouse on the banks of the Guadalupe River in South Texas. The cabin sat high on a grassy hill, just a stone's throw from the river, and looked like it was put together with wood glue and a roll of aluminum foil.