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Chapter 15 The Conversations in the Family,  I remember that Lizzie’s troubles were discussed with more worry by the Hawkins family than any other issue, because of being so painful, so long in duration, and so beyond their control. But another issue preoccupied them in . Should the Hawkins siblings let the Ranch House—the Lake House, where they were born—fall all the way down, as had the Currie house, or should they try to get hold of someone to repair it? Unlike their father and grandfather, who had managed the Hawkins Ranch while living on the place, the Hawkins sisters ran it while living in town. They did not need a headquarters on the ranch itself, and the house had fallen into neglect and disrepair. The question now on their minds was whether to let nature take the house all the way to its extinction. It would be a natural transition, familiar to anyone who went into the country and viewed old houses after their proud purpose had come to an end. People of the Gulf Coast were used to seeing the process of destruction and considered it a part of life itself. Driving out into the country, one could always see the remnants of some deserted dwelling located in a once convenient place at the corner of a field now unused. The winds of seasonal northers would have torn at a corner shingle and exposed the house’s interior to rain until nails and planking loosened and the structure began to lean and finally fall. The process took time to happen, but inexorably it did happen. If time and change had divested a structure of all its practical purpose, then its only remaining purpose must be an attachment to the story the structure might tell, but was the story now worth the lumber and the nails? The Hawkins family returned many times to the question of the Ranch House, rather than settling the issue all at once. As a child I overheard snippets of these conversations, and through the years I got to know 108 young lady ranchers the leisured way the family decided things, especially worrisome things. In conversation, they would try out a new idea or course of action; only eventually would they set off in one imagined direction or another until they felt the worry beginning to ebb. If they shared a feeling of comfort that rose up like an unsought breeze, they would know they had all decided. Their ways were never brisk; they would never have called a meeting in order to decide; efficiency they made a lower rung in the order of being. Then, too, the family’s sense of time always suggested to them that there was plenty of it. Often their deliberations took place at leisure times when they were together anyway. They enjoyed spending time together, because they were friends as well as kin, and they had been brought up to be good company. Some of the conversation about the Ranch House took place at Matagorda Beach on Sunday afternoons just before sunset, while the adults sat around on camp stools bending over paper plates and cautioning the children about the undertow. “You see over there where the river runs into the Gulf and the water changes to that reddish color? That current will just pull you right out to sea.” The river was the Colorado, which rises north of Austin and makes a diagonal slash across the middle of Texas through Austin, Columbus, Wharton, and Bay City and finally empties south of Matagorda into the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the conversation probably took place on the grounds of the Ranch House itself. Around , on weekend outings, we sat around a fire built in the yard rather than going into the house to make a fire in one of the many fireplaces, because the corner of the house had fallen off its supporting sill, heaving up the dining room floor and setting it at a steep angle, unsafe to cross. The house was not safe to enter, to say nothing of the danger to anyone venturing to climb the winding staircase to the second and third stories. The condition of the house was something we could hardly ignore on such an outing. The Currie house, a favorite Hawkins family picnic spot, served as a reminder of what the Hawkins Ranch House was likely to become. Its ruin was within a dense wood west of Liveoak Creek...

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