A Spear of Summer Grass

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Deanna Raybourn. A Spear of Summer Grass

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Paris, 1923

The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even amongst Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather’s savannah manor house until gossip subsides.

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But there were the others. The Colonel’s withered old mother, Granny Miette, her keeper Teenie, and Teenie’s daughter, Angele. They were the guardians of my childhood summers at Reveille, and they kept the old ways. They knew that not everything is as it seems and that if you look closely enough, you can see the shadows of what’s to come in the bright light of your own happiness. Time is slower in Louisiana, each minute dripping past like cold molasses. Plenty of time to see if you want to and you know where to look.

I never looked in those days with Johnny. When I opened a closet and something fluttered out of the corner of my eye, I told myself it was just moths and nothing more, and I hung lavender and cedar to drive them away. When I peered in a cupboard and saw a shadow scurry past, I said it was mice and bought a cat, the meanest mouser I could find. I sent to Reveille for golden strands of vetiver and carried the dry grass in a small bundle in my pocket. It was the scent of sunlight and home, pungent and earthy and cedar-green-smelling, and I sewed a handful of it in the uniform that Johnny put on in 1914.

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