Returning to Where Magnolias Bloom

My sister Patsy went to South Carolina with the vacuum cleaner on her knee. Not just for a trip, but to move back to the scenes of her magnolia-scented young bridehood. Having been married to Col. Frank C. Thomas when the Lord was a corporal, as she so succinctly and reverently puts it, she knows more people in the South than Br’er Rabbit. And, in South Carolina, she has one daughter, her eldest, Mandy, and her 6-foot-4 baby boy, an Eastern Airline pilot stuck in that strange state of suspended animation that passes for employment if you’re working for Frank Lorenzo.

Between the two of them they have presented Patsy with seven grandchildren. Muffie, the middle daughter, still lives in Escanaba, Mich., with her husband and two more grandsons.

Patsy and I have lived together since shortly after our husbands died a few months apart 17 years ago. Patsy has been planning to return to the scenes of her marriage and to live nearer to her children for a long time and finally did it.

She has a brand-new house, and when I tell you what she paid for a living room, dining room, kitchen, a veranda across the back made coolly shady and shadow-patterned with jalousies, you will sag with disbelief. She has three bedrooms and two baths and an oak tree. There is also her very own pond and the house backs up into a piney woods. Ready? $63,000.

Because Tommy was always a fighter pilot for the Marine Corps, they lived all over the South. The Marines seemed to have decided that there are more clear days of flying south of Mason-Dixon than anywhere else. Patsy is in Beaufort, S.C., near a Marine air base. She knows everyone in town because many of them are retired Marines and their ladies with whom Tommy and Patsy served. Half the people she has met were in Tommy’s squadron. Thus she is the colonel’s lady come home to levees, picnics, shrimping expeditions and all manner of wonderful things.

Patsy, lucky lady, has never had a child do one thing wrong. I admit that occasionally, in the days of his adolescence, my Timothy made a mistake or two. Oh, nothing much.

But that is why I was so delighted with a telephone call I received from Patsy while she, Bo and Muff were driving across the country, having flown out to drive with her to South Carolina. Bo is not only the baby but he is the boy. Of course, she has no favorites among these paragons.

She called every night. The first night, she called from New Mexico, which seemed logical. The next night, she was in Texas. I said, “Well you’ll call from Texas again tomorrow night.” She said she supposed so.

The next night she called late in the evening. I said, “Where are you?”

She snarled into the phone, “Chattanooga, Tenn.” I knew what had happened. Bo had done nearly all the driving and had refused to stop, deciding he was going to get those ladies in the back seat out of there and home.

I said, “I’ll bet you’ll call tomorrow night from Columbia, S. C.” That’s where Bo lives.

“No, I won’t,” she said with her voice in her boots. And then when I said “Why not?” she said, about her baby boy child, “Because I am never getting back in the car with that ornery, bossy wretch again.”

You know what happens. You have driven with someone who gave you the carrot-and-stick treatment and who kept promising you that he knew a dandy little inn just a few miles down the road. Of course, when you get there, it is a dented gas station with a coal box for soda pop out in front and the driver said, “Oh, I guess it must be just around that next curve.”

He knows it is not there because he has no intention of stopping.

In the meantime, Patsy and Muffie were complaining about being hungry, thirsty and tired. Big bad Bo just put the pedal to the metal and headed for Chattanooga.

Oh, yes, Patsy called the next night, from Columbia, S. C.

All is well, now. All of her furniture caught up with her except the lamp bases, and things look different after a night’s sleep in your own bed with the katydids humming over the pond and the moon shining through the magnolia tree.

I picked up some bits and pieces to send to Patsy through one of those wonderful mailing services that pack and mail for you. I went to the one we normally use on California Street in Pasadena.

One of the women who runs the shop came in and saw my pack of stuff, which included a calico cow with long swooping burlycue queen eyelashes.

“What do you have, Zan?” the proprietor asked. The cow was for my granddaughter.

I said, “Two raincoats, a wool scarf, a picture of Tommy in his flight suit, Bo in a suit of armor, age 7, two coffeepots and a calico cow.”

“Oh, I see,” the lady said, “the customary package, huh?”