Virginia In the Window
Hal Bennett
Looking back, I realize that my mother was always at her very best during snow, although she was always exquisite all of the time. My mother—our mother, really, for there were six of us depending upon her for life support, our father long ago having deserted the fold—but I suppose that being the youngest, at 12 going on 13, gave me a special sense of ownership about my mother for which I was always being slapped down gently and politely behind her back by others of the family who also thought that they owned her.
But all of us were wrong in that respect, for my mother was nobody's property, although she had long ago given herself to gentleness, good manners, and extraordinary common sense. She was a poor woman from Virginia, which meant that here in Cousinsville, N. J., and anywhere else in even a semi-civilized world, she would be considered a lady of excellent good breeding if not of solid means. For even Virginia's "worst"—if such a thing existed in the Old Dominion— would always be thought to be at least a cut above everybody else's very best.
So my mother thought, so we all thought and acted in the way we treated each other and our neighbors, our friends, and our guests. Even the bullying of my brothers and sisters against me carried a warmth and gentility about it that made the torture somewhat easier to bear. If we had been from some place like South Carolina or Georgia, then blood would have been flowing like rivers through all of our eight rooms on Decatur Street in Cousinsville. But because we came from Virginia, we treated everybody with consideration and respect, even if they didn't deserve it; to have done less would
