The screen door slapped shut behind me. My sister’s late-night phone call echoed in my head, “She’s gone, Sandy.” I walked out into the brittle stillness. It was midnight and a full harvest moon rose high and white, casting fingers of light through the oak trees.

“Mama? Where are you?”

Silence answered.

I was alone tonight, at home in the Texas Hill Country halfway between Austin and San Antonio, with no other human soul in sight. There was only me and the vast October sky. No lover. No children. No friends. No traffic on the winding farm-to-market road a quarter mile down my rocky lane, the nearest neighbor acres away.

Warm yellow lamplight from open farmhouse windows at my back cast my silhouette across the pebbled road at my feet. I turned my head toward the heavens. “Mama? Where’d you go?”

The wind breathed the tall brown grass.

“I know you’re there somewhere. How long before we connect?”

As I bathed in translucent moonbeams, my mother’s mysterious and often repeated claim to magical powers played in my mind. “I’m a witch. A bit fey you know. It's that dark, brooding Welsh blood. Don’t think for one minute you can get away with anything without my knowing it.” Recalling the many times she had proven her intuition, I laughed and shouted toward the stars. “Surely, after telling me what to do my whole life, you won't give up now just because you've taken up residence on the other side.”

My mother wasn't, of course, a real black-hairs-on-your chin, bubbling cauldron sort of witch. Overt revelation of witchy ways would never do in my childhood home town, deep in the Pineywoods of East Texas. Even in the Twentieth Century acrid whiffs of Salem Witch Trial condemnation still lingered in the air we breathed. No spooky stuff, no knowledge allowed except straight from the Good Book. If you knew what was good for you.

Mother abided by these Christian rules even though the idea of a man hanging on a cross and bleeding to death scared her away from darkening the door of the First Presbyterian Church. Out of self-preservation she hid her aversion to church or any other way of thinking and believing which ran contrary to Old Longview Society - the country club crowd which ruled who was in, who was out and whether a woman might marry up or down.

Mother steered her life and the lives of my only sister, Jo, and me by this one inviolate commandment, “Not only can you not afford to do anything wrong, but you can’t afford to do anything that looks wrong.” Revelation of Mother’s mind-reading, prophesying, and devilishly accurate intuition was unthinkable in God-fearin’ Longview, Texas.

Even if nobody else knew about Mother’s spooky mind reading, I never doubted her when she claimed, “I have eyes in the back of my head.” So what if I couldn't see those witchy eyes? When I merely thought wrong, Mother knew it. In glorious circumstances when I was sneaky enough to manage doing wrong, she busted me and swooped down with fury. “You are somebody, Sandy! And don’t you ever forget it!” This drama played out times without number, often embellished with, “As God is my witness!” Mother had a thing for Gone With the Wind.

Following her signature Scarlett-esque tirade, a litany of impeccable family history would follow. This was scripted, predictable, varied in detail, but seldom in length. A good hour was to be expected, coupled with viewing the ancestral portraits on what I called - only to myself - The Dead People's Wall. Like water dripping on rock, Mother's metamorphic history-whipping for unacceptable behavior proved more effective than being made to stand in the corner, spanked with a slender switch from the Bridal Wreath hedge, or being sent to bed without dinner.

The Cliff Notes version of the Fine Old Family torture went like this (ad infinitum in original form). Because our industrious Longview ancestors counted a mayor in the Flewellen pioneer lineage, owned the lumber mills which built the town, and also donated lumber for the construction of the First Presbyterian Church. And because the Flewellens built the railroad, ice house, electric company, emporium, and oh, yeah...drilled those oil and natural gas wells. And most of all, because Longview wouldn’t exist unless our forefathers and other broken-hearted Confederates like them were forced to retreat from Sherman in “his Godforsaken March-To-The-Sea,” my sister and I were required to remember who we were…and act like it. Whatever that meant. I seemed to always zig when I was supposed to zag.

But I did get the message: “This family has a proud reputation to uphold!” I hasten to add; fragile as it was given the colorful lives my mother and grandmother led. Herein lay the precisely sharpened point. Membership in Old Longview Society - which Mother claimed as her unalienable birthright -required an impeccable code of conduct. Muted tones read well, and vivid moves of any sort were regarded as suspect. This presented a problem.

My mother Wilma and her mother Beth - Mamo to me and my only sister, Jo - did not blend. These two generations of Flewellen women were backslidden, shamefully bright rainbow fish swimming in a pond stocked with sensible brim. “Plain as the nose on the end of your face,” as my Grandmother Mamo liked to say to prove a point, all of Longview knew the factual truths. In this conservative land of the eternally-married, many husbands had come and gone from my mother and grandmother's lives. Responsibility for restoring honor to this family rested solely on Jo’s immature shoulders and mine.

Where did all those husbands go, anyway? None of them lived with Mother, me or Jo, at my Grandmother Mamo’s house. This was certain, yet puzzling. Throughout childhood I made it my Nancy Drew mission to discover their whereabouts, or at least a clue to their demise. Were the husband-stories buried beneath the lumpy Aubusson carpet in Mamo’s prissy Victorian sitting room? I snooped for signs of the lost husbands in every corner of her columned brick house, thick with musty antiques.

But when I asked my excellent detective-work questions of Mamo, she silenced me with outrage. Crow-black eyes popped behind wire-rimmed glasses, and straggles of fugitive black hair escaped the mesh hair net which in less troublesome circumstances squished her hair into place. Her ferocious face turned the same shade as scarlet lipstick which leaked into the creases around her lips. “You have foot-in-mouth disease, Sandy! Mind your own business. Do what I say do, not as I do! You hear me?”

Without help from grown-ups, understanding what actually happened with my own father became an especially daunting assignment. Somehow, I erased memories of him as soon as we set foot in Mamo’s front parlor when I was seven, Jo was two and Mother was twenty-six. Maybe I forgot because I finally felt safe. Or maybe I forgot because Mamo called my father bad names like honky-tonker. When she thought of him, Mamo could be cross for days and this was no fun for anybody.

My grandmother’s outbursts both puzzled and disappointed me. Modeling my behavior after Mamo or Mother couldn’t be considered. The proud forefathers were the act to follow, so they said. But dead people are hard to get to.

Besides, even if I could talk to the forefathers, I was a girl, not a boy. Shouldn’t I figure out how the foremothers acted and copy them? It was altogether confusing.

Furthermore, I wasn't inclined to believe what seemed like fairy tales about our Fine Old Family. Never just our family like the kids at school talked about theirs. Mamo and Mother said Fine Old Family with capital letters like The Star Spangled Banner or The United States of America. Even though I tried, I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. I mainly paid attention to Mamo and Mother for premeditated purposes: to extract information...when I wanted...about what I wanted to know. To me they were both stupid and mean. They embarrassed me. Mother was either angry, sad or pretending she lived at Tara, so I couldn't trust a word she said. And Mamo made the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs seem like a fairy princess.

Early on I developed a strategy for making sense of these forbidding women who ruled my life: Read a lot. Think a lot. Watch happy people to figure out how they got that way.

My attention span was limited however, since feeling bad for Mother and wishing I could fix it took up a lot of my time. Seen through my bewitched and frightened young eyes, my mother was beautiful…and still a spook you’d better mind your manners around. Five foot two with tennis shoulders, a wasp waist, horses' mane of wild auburn curls, green eyes the color of new fern, Cherokee cheekbones, sparkly teeth like sunlight on the river and a glossy red-lipstick smile, she could have been a movie star in the magazines I wasn’t suppose to touch, but did.

Now I was losing her...my mother...my best enemy...my friend.