Sadie Ann Melton That summer at Grandma and Grandpa Melton’s South Carolina farm would be a season from which I would thereafter mark time. The prospect of actually living there for an entire summer loomed before me like a chocolate treat. Nowadays, I would compare the indulgence to a Snickers bar. Then, it was a creamy milk chocolate Hershey’s bar – simple, just like me before I acquired a taste for nuts and caramel and anything rich and gooey. That came years later. Anyway, that spring ushered me into a far more complex world than I’d ever imagined. And considering that my imagination was quite colorful and rampant, the nuances I faced would prove to be, at times, cataclysmic. Until then, life had been dealt to me generously and kindly. In merciful increments. Then, in late May, our live-in babysitter/housekeeper, who mainly tethered us to home’s general vicinity and moved the dust around in our house, up and quit. Clodette, a friendly, robust, caramel-complected teen suddenly, on a weekend leave, ran off and got married.
