Not Sissies

When Maya's Granny was a young girl called Joy, just about 12 years old, she moved to El Paso, Texas, with her Little Mama and Daddy and brother Forrest and sister Colleen. El Paso is a town out in the desert, just across the river from Mexico (which is an entire different country). It is very hot there and it hardly ever rains.

Well, on the same street where Joy and the rest of her family lived, almost next door, there lived another girl just one month older than Joy, named Linda. Linda lived with her mother, Fern, and her father, Tom. Even though Linda was a year ahead of Joy in school, they became good friends. They were the only girls their age for blocks around, and neither of them was a sissy. A sissy was a girl who made sure to keep her dresses clean and walked quietly when she went places and acted like a lady. Linda and Joy didn't do any of those things. They got their clothes dirty and sometimes they even came home with caterpillars in their pockets and they ran wherever they went and they acted like tom boys.

Linda loved horses and was all the time pretending to ride a horse or to be a horse. And Joy loved space ships and planets and was all the time pretending to have a space ship or be a planet. And Linda and Joy liked each other so much, that Joy would pretend to be a horse with Linda, and Linda would pretend to be a planet with Joy.

They would spend all day, every day, outside. They would run and climb fences and trees and spin around being planets and dig holes and have a very good time.


And they would spend the night with each other and giggle and call complete strangers on the telephone and ask them if their refrigerators were running, and if the strangers said yes, then Joy and Linda would say, "you better catch it before it gets away" and they would think that was the funniest thing a person ever said. They would laugh and laugh and laugh. Of course, if Fern and Tom had caught them doing this (they never dared do such a thing at Joy's house, because her Daddy scared them more than Tom did), they would have been in big trouble. Actually, Granny isn't very proud of having done this, but she did and so she mentions it. And they would stay awake long after the grown-ups were in bed, giggling and telling secrets and carrying on. Then, if they were at Joy's house Little Mama would come in and if they were at Linda's house, Fern would come in and say, "Girls, be quiet. Your father is trying to sleep. If you wake him up you will be in real trouble." and they would try to be quiet, but just a minute or two later, they would be laughing and giggling again.

In A Nutshell follows.