THE TAIL ON MY MOTHER'S KITE--A Memoir

THE TAIL ON MY MOTHER’S KITE

            How do you survive a crazy childhood?

My mother was rich, beautiful, and oversexed . . . and like Elizabeth Taylor chose to be married seven times. As she dragged my brother and me from city to city and husband to husband, we were like suitcases that became too heavy to carry. From time to time, she dumped us off with strangers . . . her two inconvenient children. 

            For the past two years I’ve relived an era where cars had to be coaxed to go, where we entertained ourselves because movies and radio were the only outside diversions, and where country people lived on unpaved roads.  Here, then, is the first page from my memoir, “The Tail on My Mother’s Kite.”  

AFTER THE FIRE, nothing was ever the same.

Even to our mother who, like Elizabeth Taylor, was destined by her own choice to have seven husbands, nothing was more life-changing than the Siskiyou County forest fire.

Like a cougar stalking its prey, the fire crept down the ridges of Mount Eddy and arrived in full destruction mode at our family’s virgin guest ranch, a 320-acre property with two houses--one wrinkled and old, the other newly framed, barely roofed. The year was 1939.   

In the distance Mount Shasta still rose above the clouds, lofty and gleaming white, disdainful in its splendor as though such devastation a mere seven miles away was beneath its notice.     

    

Unlike the grownups, I hadn’t seen the fire coming. As I stood in the dirt road with our mile-away neighbors, I watched in awe as one by one, flames shot up the pines on a distant hill. We’d never seen anything like it. In unison, Alice Deetz and her three boys and I all shouted, “Oooh! There’s another one!” “Oh . . . wow!”  “A big one! Look at that!” We were spectators at a shocking, living event, thrilled but not afraid. The sparking hill was far away, across a vast meadow—as all of us knew, in its own universe. 

    

I thought, Wait ‘til I tell people about this! They won’t believe what I’m seeing.

I now have books to sell. It’s listed at $15.00, but these first copies will be $12.00--plus shipping for $3.00. For autographed copies you can contact me at Maralys@cox.net or 714-544-0344. After the first of the year—perhaps sooner--they’ll be on e-books at Amazon.