My Sister: My Fact Checker for Life

Recently I posted a photo of my sister, Laura, and me on Facebook. We are standing in front of the fountain at The Mary Washington Inn, a famous old hotel and spa, in Abingdon, Virginia. We met at the Inn to take a sentimental journey back to Glade Spring, a neighboring village, where our mother grew up and the site of many family memories.

The house in the background of my photograph looks colonial and well-kept up. I told my sister that our friends, many of whom commented on the photo, probably assumed that beautiful house was our Mother’s. My sister grew incensed and insisted I tell our friends that house in the photograph was not the one of our childhood. I understood her adherence to the truth, for Laura has checked my facts, embellishments, etc. all her life.

I even credit her insistence on truth for changing the direction of my life. This occurred when I was 13 and achieved my greatest honor: I was crowned 4-H Dairy Princess of Onslow County.

For the night of my coronation at City Hall in Jacksonville, N.C., I wore a gold satin evening gown that had belonged to our mother. Since the gown was strapless, we had a matching gold coat made that looked very Jackie Kennedy, or so I imagined. Laura and my parents were sitting beside me in the audience when the 4-H announcer called my name to come up on stage.

I mounted the stairs and took my place with the rest of the 4-H royalty, the Dairy King and Queen, as well as the Dairy Prince. There I was on my throne. Gazing out at my subjects, I absorbed the audience’s attention and heard little of what was said.

How had I won this honor? I wrote an essay about keeping my family safe from the alligators that lived in Elizabeth Lake, the small lake in front of our house. These alligators, originally purchased in Florida as souvenirs, had been carried north up I-95 by townspeople. When the poor creatures grew too big for the terrarium or bathtub, folks dropped them off at the lake. Abandoned, these orphaned alligators knew nothing about living in the wild, nor were they used to fending for themselves. So, they crawled across the street to our backyard, turned over our garbage cans, nudged in, and feasted. My essay described how I built platforms for our garbage cans to keep the alligators out.

During the reception after my coronation, Laura disappeared. Later I learned she’d gone to the lobby to read my essay on display there. On the drive home, she sat across from me in the big backseat of Dad’s Cadillac. In the front seat, Dad had the radio playing low. He and Mother sang along to an old tune about getting smoke in your eyes.

“You lied,” Laura hissed at me. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes fiery. She looked as if she was about to explode.

“You’re just jealous,” I whispered and smoothed the skirt of my evening gown.

At that moment, she could take it no more. She stood and leaned across the front seat, bringing her head between Mother and Dad. “Ellen never did any of the things she wrote in that essay,” she said. “She never built any platforms for the garbage. She lied.”

Without turning around, Mother said, “Sit down, Laura.”

“Did you hear what I told you?” Laura’s raised voice almost drowned out their song.

She was trying to ruin a beautiful moment in our family’s history. Mother and Dad were proud that their oldest daughter had been singled out for greatness. They wanted to savor the evening.

Mother looked over her shoulder. “Sit down this minute, Laura, and hush.”

Laura sat, leaned in to me, and said, “You lied. You never did any of those things you said you did in that essay.”

“I meant to,” I told her.

From that point on, I decided I better stay away from articles and essays that purported to be truth. I would write fiction. While that of night of my coronation I didn’t appreciate my little sister’s fact checking, I came to admire her strict code of honesty: she wanted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Fast forward more than fifty years to our trip to Abingdon, when we stayed at the Mary Washington Inn. From there, we drove to Glade Spring to the house our mother grew up in. In my memory this house was a stately two-story sitting high on the hump of a hill with a lush green sloping lawn, outlined in a tall boxwood hedge. I remembered the feel of the thick moss beside the spigot against my bare feet and the lonely whistle of the train in the middle of the night.

In October of 2020, the house looked down on its luck. The hedge, the trees, the grape vine that hung from the back stoop to Grandmother’s root cellar—all were gone. We drove past the old house one way and then the other. The view never improved.

At one point, I wondered aloud if I could knock on the door and ask the people living there if I could look around.
Maybe the rooms hadn’t changed that much.

“Not during a pandemic,” my sister said.

I was flooded with joy that for a few moments I had forgotten this awful pandemic. And it was a reminder that Americans have lived through tough times before. Our mother certainly had. She grew up during the Depression and remained careful with money all her life. She managed to go to college during WWII and onto to Washington, D.C., where she met my dad, who took her away from Southwest Virginia.

Laura and I were born in Alabama, my dad’s home, but like those alligators on Elizabeth Lake, we were brought north to North Carolina, the home we came to love, which is the truth as I know it.