Out of Red Dirt

"I am red dirt, acorns and elm trees, 'little lambs eat ivy' under the bay window, bubbly tar...and sixty-four frilly dresses . . . surrounded by four adoring brothers in the Daily Oklahoman." Little Nell (aka Sue Nell) took root in the iron rich soils and near the waving wheat and dripping humidity of Oklahoma in the 50's and 60's. She learned to "pick up from the left and serve from the right," (or is it "pick up from the right and serve from the left?") under the watchful eye and...
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"I am red dirt, acorns and elm trees, 'little lambs eat ivy' under the bay window, bubbly tar...and sixty-four frilly dresses . . . surrounded by four adoring brothers in the Daily Oklahoman." Little Nell (aka Sue Nell) took root in the iron rich soils and near the waving wheat and dripping humidity of Oklahoma in the 50's and 60's. She learned to "pick up from the left and serve from the right," (or is it "pick up from the right and serve from the left?") under the watchful eye and bow tie of her grandfather, Oklahoma City's chief executive, Mayor Allen M. Street. She tasted tea and boiled custard with Grandmother, and pulled Nanny's toes after a "stwaberry" breakfast prepared with care by Papa, a lady's man. Sue Nell was Lula's, "Bright Eyes, shining in the dark" as she rode on her hip and listened to Jesus songs while frying chicken and rolling out biscuits. Summers, Little Nell rode old Ranger with her dad, Gramps, and trusted him "just around the next bend" and once into a raging forest fire near their Old Cabin on Cowbell Hill in the Colorado Rockies. These are the stories of her early childhood, of the people who shared with her Emily Post and Ann Landers, who led her down paths of delinquency and into daring adventures, and of those who gave her a "nascent sense of injustice" in the land of sweetness and wind that "comes right behind the rain."