Christmas in July with Gail Roughton Branan

Hey y’all!  My name’s Gail Roughton Branan and I’m new to the world of publishing, but not to the world of writing.  Even before I was capable of writing, I was the creator of many and varied fantasy worlds where I spent most of my time as a child.  I’ve said for years that I was a closet writer who wrote books and put them in the closet, and now I guess I need another description since I’m not exactly in the closet anymore.  I’ve been a paralegal for over thirty-five years and working in a law office is what I do.  However, I’ve always known that a writer is what I am – along with being a Mama, of course, to a daughter who is one of the strongest women I know, two handsome sons who are genuinely good men, and a son-in-law who’s one of America’s unsung heroes – a canine officer on a drug interdiction unit.  I’m also “Ganmama” to young Master Austin, who lives, sleeps and breathes Thomas the Tank Engine, and who wraps both me and his “Gandaddy” – and in fact everyone on both sides of the family – around his fingers with the greatest of ease.  I hope y’all enjoy my small contribution to Susanne’s Christmas in July.

Thoughts Occasioned by Flowers on the Fence

by Gail Roughton Branan

            First, thanks to Susanne Drazic for putting together Christmas In July.  Second, thanks to Susanne Drazic for hosting a writer whose first published book won’t come out until April.   Susanne has graciously extended an invitation to host me again upon the release of Miami Days & Truscan (K)nights, Fantasy Romance, coming from MuseItUp Publishing in April 2012.   Of course I’ll be here for that.  I’m new, but I’m not about to pass up a promotion opportunity.

            I’m so new, in fact, that I don’t even have my own blog yet and have been shamelessly cruising the blogs of my new family of friends, the writers of MuseItUp Publishing, getting ideas for mine.  Well, it’s not up yet, but it’s in the planning stages in my mind.  It’s called “Flowers on the Fence”.  Which has what to do with writing, you ask? 

            Nothing much, actually, but it has a lot to do with me.  Writing is something a writer can’t not do, you see.  Musicians sing and play instruments.  Artists paint pictures and sculpt stone.  Scientific geniuses write mathematical formulas and chemical formulas that change the world.  And writers write.  They create things that don’t exist, from small home towns to undiscovered planets; they birth characters that readers love to love and love to hate, that make them laugh and cry and dream.  And in so doing, those things that don’t really exist – do exist.  And they existed in some form or another independently of the novel or story that they live in and so existed before the writer put them there.  Every setting, every character, that any writer creates is formed of bits and pieces of here and there, now and then, conversations overheard at the check-out counter of the grocery store, the antics of the town “characters”.  Writers simply have the luxury of taking the best – or the worst – depends on what the writer’s trying to do, of course – of everything that has made them who they are.  They get to choose the flowers that they put up on the fence for all the world to see.  Oh, they’re not the real people, of course, or the real places – exactly – because we have the luxury of blending this and that to produce the other. 

            Flowers on the Fence will forever personify for me a cherished friend by the name of Gloria Kernells, who adopted me when I was in my late 40’s and she was in her early 60’s.  We’d moved from a fairly large middle Georgia city to a little town about twenty-five miles southeasterly, down Interstate 16, by the name of Jeffersonville.  Small Town, USA.  Epitomized.  Jeffersonville pretty much has whatever anybody really needs for day-to-day living, of course, but if you want big city amenities like Wal-Marts and Malls, you have to travel.  We preferred traveling about 20 miles further south to a big-little town named Dublin, by way of Highway 80, one of the Mother Highways of America.  A little ways out of town, there was a row of four houses. One of them was a brick ranch with a large, landscaped lawn, a fairly long concrete porch with white columns and white rocking chairs, a picture window in the front, an old wagon painted dark red that sat in the front between the tall pine trees – and a fence.

That fence knocked you down.  That fence got your attention; a tall privacy fence that began at the end of the paved driveway, the point where you knew the driveway led into the owner’s backyard.  It was dark red, like the wagon, and like the trim on the house itself other than the white paint on the porch.  And it was decorated.   Flowing across the entire surface of the fence about three-quarters of the way up, a twisting, twining row of large white flowers outlined in black, each flower probably a foot and a half in diameter, with green leaves and vines and big yellow centers waving black stamens, obviously hand-painted, and obviously specifically chosen by the owner shouted,  “Hey, how are you?  Ain’t life grand?”  That fence was always just purely waving at anyone who cared to look. 

I passed it for probably ten or twelve years every time we went to Dublin, never knowing the owner, but believing that I’d probably like them a lot.  Anybody with a fence like that had to have both a personality and a sense of humor.  Our first meetings illustrated how greatly I underestimated just how much personality and humor the heretofore phantom owner of those painted flowers did, in fact, possess, and paved the way for the invitation that was a pivotal point in my life.

“Come on down to my house with me and we’ll have a coke,” she said.  “I’ve got some pound cake left over, too!  I’m just right down the road, you follow me and watch where I turn, but you can’t miss it, it’s the house with the flowers on the fence!”  Just typing those words even now gives me the same little thrill of recognition I felt at the time.  After all these years, the owner of that fence was standing right in front of me, inviting me in.

I went, of course, and after a tour of the house, we sat on her back porch patio, a place I came to love almost as much as I loved that fence.  We settled in her wicker chairs with our glasses of coke and slices of cake and listened to the sound of the ceramic girl and the ceramic frog who perpetually filtered the water of the goldfish pond that was the focal point of a secret garden that couldn’t be seen from the road.  And for the first time in a long, long time, certainly since college and probably since high school, I had a genuine, come to the house and have a coffee/coke, let’s go shopping, sit on the porch, bare your soul because nobody else will ever know, girlfriend.  

Gloria was the centerpiece of our little town’s social network of ladies of a certain generation (which occasions the observation that of course there are really Steel Magnolias and Ya-Ya Sisterhoods, trust me, I know).  We lost her about four years ago.  And I miss her every day, and I always will.  I’m sorry she’s not here to read this, or to actually see the writer’s blog coming in the near future that will be titled “Flowers on the Fence” in her honor, but I’m sure she knows anyway. 

And that’s the story of the Flowers on the Fence, where they came from, and what I hope to do on my blog – highlight all life’s flowers.  And put them on my fence.  For Gloria.  With love.

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