Miss Ruby Died Last Night

Smith says, "I took them home and read them, and it was just real clear that if she'd had a chance to be educated and not have five children she might have really been a writer of note. She was a wonderful writer. Someone who had married and had lots of children, and she just stayed home and wrote. So many women . . . have been the custodians of culture, jotting names and dates on the family bible, writing incredible diaries, and at the same time making sense of their lives. So I began to think about a novel that didn't really have a plot, just somebody's life, beginning to end, told in letters." Ivy Rowe's life is a rare achievement. She begins as a young girl who wants to be a writer particularly about love: "I take an interest in Love because I want to be in Love one day and write poems about it ... I want to be a famous writer when I grow up. I will write of Love." And although she writes letters for all of the life we know of her, in her last letter she writes, "I never became a writer atall. Instead G have loved and loved and loved." Her letters share these loves of people and of things and of moments, richly detailed and sensitively and poetically perceived. At the end of the novel, in a letter to her daughter who has become a writer, Ivy suggests the letters and life are the same: "It was the writing of them, that signified." It is the living of life that is Ivy's glory and her ever-fresh and eager embrace of it. Early her father teaches her the essence of spring from the sweet taste of bark inside a birch. "Now Ivy, this is how spring tastes. This is the taste of spring." The motif continues through the novel, and "spring comes on forever" for Ivy Rowe and any readers of Fair and Tender Ladies. _________-Joanne Brannon Aldridge Miss Ruby Died Last Night The dogs barked, and the warm October sky didn't fall, later that night freezing frost homesteading her rotting porch, the tin-can flowers weeping in their gloom, the South losing a beautiful spinster as daybreak diffused through the pines. It wasn't a sword or sleeping pills. They found her smiling in her cotton feedsack dress. She hadn't been home for a long time, always wanting to go. And now, as sunshine catches her faded linen bonnet, she is taking the direct route, the dirt road with red-eyed tenders holding open childhood's rusty swinging gate. Let her down easy. She was good to the boardinghouse tenants, the drifters, the little people she loved so well. We will miss her in her long silence, a handful of people coming to see her off, a few random remarks, then it is over as another dying autumn laughs in the dark. -Errol Miller 70 ...