i am aristotic, smooth with ladies.

What makes us the most normal is knowing that we’re not normal. Little Ishy never knew her mother but she felt the loss more so from her father’s mood swings than for her own feelings. Her father was enough for her. She loved who she was in no small part to her father’s adoration of what she was and what she was becoming. By all accounts, Ishy’s mother was the loveliest lady a man could pray for. And now she was stuck in her time. Ishy thought of a story about her mother her father had told her. It was at a debutante ball, the first time my father laid eyes on her, he was stuck or in love, whatever your preference. She shined with piety but fierce independence. He asked her to dance, and by the third dance he knew he was in love along with every other eligible man there. The courtship would come to blows with other suitors but in the end he had won the fight to wake the sleeping princess. The daughter of a local plantation owner, Ishy‘s mother had more grit than ten men. She loved riding her horse and was more Southern gentlewoman than Southern lady. Her loss after the birth of Isabelle left a foreboding around the place that lasted many years after she was gone clear out to the time of the War of Yankee Aggression. Which thankfully was a ways off from this idyllic antebellisim.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse. The woods were dark and green. The canvas for all of her father’s stories of pirates and sultans and knights. It was little Ishy’s playground. She could be herself there with a shadow cast down upon her, encircling her like a flaming locust. She could whisper to God or shout out loud. It was just a patch of woods not far from the manor house. She could still hear the dinner bell. Somehow, her little corner of the universe showed her how much of life is a personal journey.