Sally Louise: A Girl of the Alleghenies

By Sharon Young

Sally Louise is nine going on ten. She lives in a rural Alleghenies's town. Her best friend is Greta. Together they work to help poor young girls get dolls on Christmas. Sally's family is very supportive. She has been inspired by Miss Simpson, a family friend. Even though Sally aspires to be a baseball player, she isn't very good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329159037

Book preview

Sally Louise: A Girl of the Alleghenies

Sally Louise:

A Girl of the Alleghenies

Sharon Young

Copyright c 2015 by Sharon Young

All rights reserved

This book or parts thereof may not reproduced in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-329-15903-7

Cover design and illustrations by Sharon Young

1

After I was born and named Sally Louise, for several years we lived in a small cabin in the Allegheny Mountains.  It seems to me the only place anyone would want to live.

When I was nine years old, my parents let me decorate the colors of my blankets, the curtains, the chest, and the wall hangings.

My bedroom has one window on the east side of the house, and the sun shines wide open in the mountain mornings.  I wish I could gather the rays in a vase to keep the sun all day.  I could almost touch the tree on that side of the house.  The leaves are shaking with autumn colors today, and I want to collect them in my basket on my book shelf.

The room is eclectic on purpose.  I didn’t know this word so I looked it up on my Tablet.  My parents had me learn words by looking them up in the dictionary.  Here's a question.  How do you find the word if you don't know how to spell it?

Flowers wallpaper my whole room.  One side is roses.  Another side is purple lilacs.  Sunflowers are on the wall behind my bed.

I cut out carnations from magazines and pasted them on the floor.  My mother gave me a hope chest, and I wasn’t sure right away what to do with it.  I hadn’t collected many memories yet.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grow up...maybe an artist.

The first object I put in my hope chest was a prayer book.  Daddy had bought it for me at Christmas along with a baby doll.  He made a small dollhouse that he fashioned out of wood.  I kiss my doll every night before I go to sleep.  I read the prayer book, but I don't understand it.

My daddy is building a real house.  He bought a couple of acres in a secluded and flat part in the mountains, but it will take him a few years to finish building.  I asked him, Daddy, why don’t you want to get this done so we can enjoy it?

Daddy paused for a minute, and then he said, "I have thought about what you just said several times, and I will tell you what I have discovered.  Getting something done has its own drawbacks because what do you do next?

If you have interests that will give you satisfaction and enjoyment, it can always be part of your life.  Otherwise, you will get too old too soon.

I wasn’t sure I understood what he said, but I knew it was important, and I keep that idea hidden in my brain.

It’s fun living in the mountains.  If somebody drives along Route#15, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania the hills turn into mountains.  If they continue north, and if they hadn’t been there before, they discover a scene that looks like it belongs on a canvas like my mama uses for her painting.

In autumn, the leaves are all different colors of crimson, orange, magenta, yellow.  It’s like many rainbows spread out like a box of crayons.

Our cabin is in the Alleghenies, and we don’t have to drive anywhere to see this gift of nature because we’re surrounded with painted leaves.

Last year, my friend, Greta and I collected leaves with all shades of autumn and put them in a scrapbook.

Mama showed us how to use wax paper, Scotch tape and glue.  We glued the leaves to wax paper and mounted them in a scrapbook, which Greta and I take turns keeping it.

My daddy is a photographer.  He loves to take pictures of me and my two brothers: Bud, who is a few years older than me and Bobby, who is five years old.

Once he took a picture of me at three years old to use for a poster to distribute for some company’s branches for their business.  They used that poster to advertise their products.

One afternoon my younger brother, Bobby, and I were playing a game near our swing set.  We tossed different things and tried to catch them before they hit the ground.

We tried to fly a kite, but there wasn't enough of a breeze.  We picked some apples, chomped them down, and threw the cores over the fence.  We played with our green Frisbee.  Bobby is only five years old, but I have a lot of fun with him.

Daddy came out from the front door and played with us.  He decided he wanted to click some pictures with us as we continued our antics.

We yelled and laughed and had fun.  Daddy aimed his camera to take some pictures when we pretended to wrestle.  He watched and caught pictures of us on film while we made different faces.  He posed us, and after he put in some more film, he aimed it at the Frisbee as we tossed it up through the trees.

Bobby was laughing at the squirrels and baby bunnies and, I ran after him.

We were not paying much attention to what Daddy was doing.  All of a sudden, Daddy screamed Run!

We thought he was kidding.   He screamed again, and he said, Something is in the sky, and it looks like nothing I've ever seen.

Bobby ran into the street, and Daddy yelled again to him.  Daddy and I scrambled together under the apple tree, and then Daddy got up and took a picture of Bobby, and the object in the sky which was almost right above Bobby.

meteor_3.jpg

Bobby ended up on the neighbor's yard across the street.  He rolled on the lawn and laid flat on the ground.  Daddy took a picture of this strange satellite while Bobby was in the middle of the road.

The object flew past our house and disappeared.  We looked at each other and waited for the first one to speak.

The three of us sat on the front porch and took turns looking at the sky.  We kept looking at each other as if to say, What was that?

It was a flying saucer, Daddy said, but I don't know exactly what kind of saucer.

After several minutes, we went into the house and turned on the TV to see if there was a report of something in the sky.

There wasn't.

No one spoke of it at first.  We sat together in the den and decided not to tell Mama because it would just scare her.  Daddy tried everything he could to suggest that whatever it was, it was harmless.

It didn't work.

When I went to bed that night, I left my light on in my room.  Daddy came in and hugged me good-night.

He said, I don't think it was anything from another planet.  It was probably some kids on Sampson Street.  They often set off fireworks or cap guns.

He didn't seem to me as I looked at his face that he thought it was nothing scary.  I guess we pretended to figure out a way to deal with it.

To this day, I still don't know what that was.

I learned something.  I realized how much I don't know.  Daddy, Bobby and I never spoke of it again and never told anyone else.

However, Daddy was able to sell that picture of Bobby running in the street.  It was too original and interesting for Daddy to not use it for a contest.  The newspaper printed it, and Daddy said it was probably a Frisbee.

Daddy takes pictures for businesses in the Alleghenies.  He does portraits of people who are excited to have their image with a backdrop of the mountains.

I go with him sometimes. I watched him take pictures of the governor of New England once.  I remember what my dad sometimes said to the people to relax.

Give me an honest smile. You have a lovely face, but I want to see more of it in profile.

That’s how I learned the word profile.  Some people look at me as if I shouldn’t know that word, but my parents believed in teaching us English so that if we ever wanted to write a book or something, we would be prepared.  My mama had tried to write a book when she was younger.  That’s why she realized that with some teaching from her could help us write books someday.

Other things Daddy might say when he was taking the mountain photographs, was Did you by chance bring a sweater or something else for your portrait?  It’s a good idea to take extras.  Then you can choose.