Brown-Eyed Girl by Virginia Swift Page B

then mud to harden.
    The winters were just plain horrid, the summers ambrosial. Meg went to a one-room school, when she could get there, doing her lessons in a classroom where the ten pupils ranged in age from five to fifteen. By the time she was twelve, she had become the teacher.
    Gert knew that her daughter was far too bright to be deprived of a proper education, so for high school, Meg was sent to live with Parker cousins in Laramie. She loved the fine brick school building, the smart, strict teachers, the town kids who invited her over to bake gingerbread and throw snowballs. But she missed her mother and father and the nearness of the great, brooding mountains. As far as she was concerned, the Laramie Range to the east of town had some nice rock formations, but was really little more than an overeager hillock. The Snowies, to the west, were too far away to walk into in an afternoon. The minute the school year was over, she hurried back to Mac and Gert and the Woody D. Her home in the Sierra Madre was safety and sameness to her, even if, one year when she returned, she found they’d graveled the Baggs road.
    At sixteen, Meg graduated from high school, and it was clear she should go to college. She had grown tall and lanky, nearly six feet, with a diamondshaped face and Gert’s cascading blond hair and big blue eyes. She had inherited her mother’s insistence on looking a man in the eye, and boys found her too formidable to court. It was 1920, and she was full of life but the furthest thing from a flapper, sturdy and studious and incapable of flirting.
    As her mother had, she went to UW. And much to Gert’s delight, many of Meg’s university teachers were women, some of whom had been there back in Mama’s time. She took classes on the Civil War from the serious Laura White, in political economy from the outspoken and controversial feminist, Grace Raymond Hebard. Both encouraged her to pursue a teaching career, or perhaps to enter social work. Meg wanted to be useful, above all, and earnestly joined the Red Cross and the League of Women Voters, the Society for the Prevention of War. But her inner rhythms thrilled not to reform, but to create. She was a superb student in all her classes. In Professor McIntyre’s class on British poetry, her mind sang.
    Clara McIntyre and Laura White shared a twostory frame house near the campus. Each fall when the students returned, they hosted a tea for women students in their spectacular gardens. Meg ached to please them with her knowledge and her imagination. She would be invited again, in the barebranched snowclad days of winter, for hot apple cider and conversations on poetry.
    The year Meg graduated, they invited her over for a chat about her future. Meg admitted she wanted, well, to write. “You should write,” Miss McIntyre agreed. “You have the brains and the courage to do it. But if you want to write, you’ve got to get out of here, Margaret. You simply have to leave,” she told Meg, sipping sweet tea from an eggshell china cup. “And I can help.”
    The computer screen offered only faint light in the dusky office. Sally couldn’t read the pages in the folders. She looked up, dazed, and realized that she’d written through the purpling blaze of a sunset. Now it was time to turn on a light and keep going, or call it a day. She switched on the lamp on the desk, and decided to stop working anyway. She knew where to start in the morning; a good time to quit. She saved the file, backed it up on a diskette, closed it, tap tap tap and out. Took off her reading glasses, rubbed her eyes, and stretched. The job was begun.
    She realized that she was starving. Thought about what she had to eat in the house. Blessed Mary Langham had sent her home from dinner the other night with some leftover lasagna. She had a cold bottle of California sauvignon blanc in the fridge. She could heat up dinner, have a glass of wine, turn on the