Many people have interesting childhoods, eccentric relatives, go off to college, and set out as adults to make their way in the world. Few people are as keenly observant or can write as compellingly about these experiences as does Helen Blackshear in this inviting memoir. Here we are invited into extended Southern families and are given glimpses of a world that no longer exists -- of genteel women's schools, of college towns when they were small communities, of first car trips and first suitors and a young girl's coming of age. The author recalls us back to her world in the early to...

Though little known today, Sidney Lanier (1842-81) was considered by some critics the leading writer of the post-Civil War New South, the greatest Southern writer after Edgar Allan Poe, and "a man of heroic and exquisite character." Lanier was a Georgian, but he spent two years after the war in Montgomery, Alabama, trying to restore his health after contracting tuberculosis while a prisoner of war. He also was principal of a school in nearby Prattville. In the 1930s, an elegant public high school was built in Montgomery and named in Lanier's honor. Author Helen Blackshear taught literature to...

Helen Blackshear's poems are about the simple things we all share -- a love of family, childhood memories, enjoyment of trees and gardens, the pleasures of friendship, and the dark days of loneliness and loss. She said the poems in this collection were her autobiography, written over a period of sixty years of a fully lived life. Some of her poems inspire laughter, while others reflect the grief she both witnessed and felt. Her love of history resonates in poems about the Creek Indians, the Civil War, and conflicts in the modern world. From the myriad of experiences that inspired them, her...