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Chapter 18 Meta and Jim Meta, the eldest Hawkins daughter, was highly in favor of proceeding with renovation of the Ranch House and impatient to get on with the project. If Sister was propelled by dismissing the practicalities, Meta was propelled by the consideration of them. She thought dithering too long was to lose an opportunity. “It’s just going to wrack and ruin if we don’t do something about it, and we ought to get started on it.” Impatient impulse was her way. “Just do something, even if it’s wrong,” she would say. Meta had the same fair complexion as her sisters but redder hair. People teased her as a child and pretended to light a match from her hair. Her skin was fair, but her eyes were brown. She was the only one of the Hawkins siblings who had children. When she was thirty years old my brother Frank was born, named for her father, Frank Hawkins. When she was thirty-eight I was born, delivered at home by Dr. Livengood. Another child, a little boy, born between Frank and me, died at the age of two. His smiling baby picture in a wooden frame was always on her dresser. He was called J. C. for James Claire, my father’s name. Fifty years after J. C.’s death, I happened to ask my father about the cause of death. Exercising control of his emotions, he said, “I always laid it to a cow we had.” J. C. had infant dysentery and died of dehydration and shock in . Meta described herself as a jack of all trades and master of none. She had amazingly nimble, long slender fingers and enjoyed working up Chopin etudes, which she never quite worked up to finished form. Her piano practice and the lessons she sometimes took as an adult were not toward the end of playing the waltzes and swing pieces her bridge partners Lurline Wadsworth and Irby Stinnett often played to provide impromptu dance music. Nor did she seem to favor the sentimental tunes that Sister played. 126 young lady ranchers Meta’s playing was more for the purpose of reengaging a discipline she had enjoyed while a piano student of Philip Tronitz at Kidd-Key College in Sherman. I had some oil paints in tubes that our artist friend Georgia Mason Huston had given me, and to my surprise one day my mother took them up and painted a beautiful full-blown rose on a green tin laundry hamper. I had no idea that she knew how to do such a thing. She must have learned the trick in taking china painting, which all the sisters had taken up at one time. In this or that cabinet we had creamy yellow pitchers, teacups, and small trays each covered in flowers and having one of the Hawkins sisters’ signatures: Meta, Janie, or Lizzie. Of the pieces with Janie’s signature Meta said, “I really doubt that Janie ever finished hers; I think the teacher probably just finished it for her.” After breakfast every morning Meta made her progress through the yard, stopping to uproot a weed or take the head off a dead flower. The yard man was ever present and under her direction. She had no hesitancy in giving firm directions or, when she thought necessary, an equally firm reproach if there had been some misjudgment by which a young plant had been taken for a weed and uprooted. Routinely, the breakfast table, the luncheon table, and the Sunday dinner table had flowers from her yard. Sometimes the lowly zinnia was all; at other times she arranged camellias and roses. She had a kumquat plant in the side yard and was always “outdone” when the school children stripped it clean of its orange thumb-sized fruit. “Meta sets a good table,” was said of her by other women who set good tables themselves. She knew what good food should taste like. She knew how thin and in what diameter hot cakes should be served—the size of a teacup and with plenty of egg and not too much flour in the batter. Biscuits should “have no insides.” She was unshrinking if she needed to point out to the cook that the biscuits had been rolled too thick and had too much baking powder, that the pie crust was a bit tough this time, or that the meringue had grown thin and watery. But at the end of dinner...

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