Letters to Missy Violet by Barbara Hathaway

turned to James Clyde, my oldest brother, and asked him when he was going to take a wife. But James Clyde said he was going to wait.
    â€œMissy Violet, I’m tryin’ to establish a small lumber business for myself before I takes a wife,” he said.
    â€œNow, that’s a fine thing,” Missy Violet said. “I like that, but remember to be a gentleman while you waitin’,” she told him.
    I think all the talk about courting and marriage made Papa nervous. He started talking about something else: Me! He told Missy Violet how I had gone into the woods with Mama and gathered goldenseal to help poor Mary Lee Williams. And how I had visited the little Dockery girl and little Bennie. “I think my girl would make a fine hospital nurse,” Papa said. I never knew Papa even paid attention to those kinds of things when I did them! I think he was proud of me. I felt a big grin spread across my face. A big grin spread across Missy Violet’s face too.
    â€œWell, children, it’s been a fine evening, but it’s getting late and I best be getting on home,” Missy Violet said, and rose from her seat. Mama, Savannah, and I walked her to the door. Missy Violet hugged us, and then she said to me, “Viney, two Saturdays from today, I want you, Arma Jean, Charles, Mister Waters’s boy Cleveland, Ruby Dean, and your new friend Mister Brownlee’s niece to come over for cake and lemonade. Missy Violet is going to bake the biggest coconut cake you ever did see.”
    I felt real special after Missy Violet left, but Charles tried to make me feel bad. He came over and whispered in my ear, “You too dumb to be a hospital nurse.” But I didn’t believe him. I believe if I work real hard in school and learn to read well, and learn all I can from Missy Violet about roots and herbs and babies and people, I will be able to go to that nursing school up in Chicago someday. Maybe they even have a nursing school I could go to down in Tallahassee, Florida.
    â€œThe world is changing all the time,” Missy Violet always says.