Here's a very special holiday treat, a lovely excerpt courtesy of delanceyplace.com:
In today's encore excerpt -- from A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. Seven-year-old
Truman Capote, abandoned by his divorced parents, is taken in by
depression-poor cousins in the rural South. One of these cousins, a
distant, elderly cousin, becomes his closest friend and only refuge --
but she is only in his life for two more short years. As Christmas
approaches, they make fruitcakes as presents for people they barely
know:
"Imagine
a morning in late November. A coming-of-winter morning more than twenty
years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country
town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big
round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of
it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
 |
| Young Truman Capote Sook, 1930's |
"A
woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is
wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico
dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long
youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is
remarkable -- not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun
and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are
sherry-colored and timid. 'Oh my,' she exclaims, her breath smoking the
windowpane, 'it's fruitcake weather!'
"The
person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is
sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived
together -- well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the
house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently
make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are
each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was
formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she
was still a child. She is still a child. ...
"The
black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted
pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and
sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting,
nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out
to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done.
Thirty-one
