Kingdomtide

Начало книги

I no longer pass judgment on any man nor woman. People are people, and I do not believe there is much more to be said on the matter. Twenty years ago I might have been of a different mind about that, but I was a different Cloris Waldrip back then. I might have gone on being that same Cloris Waldrip, the one I had been for seventy-two years, had I not fallen out of the sky in that little airplane on Sunday, August 31, 1986. It does amaze that a woman can reach the tail end of her life and find that she hardly knows herself at all.

I sat by the window and my dear husband, Mr. Waldrip, sat on my right. He had his hands busy fiddling with a ragged cuticle. My husband was a kind, bird-faced man and he wore strong glasses. He was born in Amarillo, Texas, to an awning salesman and a midwife. I first ever laid eyes on him in the summer of 1927 at a county dance in the town hall. This was after his family had moved the some sixty miles east from the big noisy boomtown of Amarillo to little ole Clarendon, where I was born and raised. He was a terribly handsome boy, tall and dark-haired. However he wore a little blue cap that made him look mighty silly. We were both only kids. I had just turned thirteen. He gave me a pitifully wilted rose he had stolen from Mrs. Mckee’s garden.

Читать дальше →