“In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams... that is where you and I shall meet.” ~ Lewis Carroll

Clarabel Lucy 1980s-1990s

Chapter One

When I was little, my dad read me fairy tales. Snuggled against his enormous chest, with his powerful arms around me and holding the oversized book, I listened to his rumbling voice while running my fingers over the colorful pictures. My favorites were “Sleeping Beauty” because I liked the idea of being tucked away in brambly darkness until I’m discovered by a handsome prince; “Rumpelstiltskin” since the queen was clever enough to fool a nasty imp; and “The Princess and the Pea.”

Peas are my least favorite vegetable.

One fairy tale, “The Fir-Tree,” made me cry. At Christmas time, the tree is chopped down, carried into a manor house and decorated with candles and ribbons and shiny baubles. The children ooh and aah at its beauty and open their presents around it, which makes the fir happy. But once the holidays are over, the decorations are removed, and the poor tree is discarded in an attic until spring arrives. Then, with its branches withered and needles falling everywhere, it is hauled outside, cut up for firewood and burned.

“Why are you crying, princess?” Daddy asked. (After watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I’d insisted on being called “princess.”)

“It’s so sad.” I whimpered against his flannel shirt. “The tree didn’t do anything bad and yet they chopped it all up.”

Daddy shifted position to better observe me. Raising my chin with the tips of his calloused fingers, he gazed into my eyes. “You can always change the ending. Tell me what really happened to our tree.”

So, I did. The little fir is visited by a hideous-looking monster, who complains that he is tired and asks, “Might I rest beneath your branches?” When the fir agrees, the monster turns into an elegant prince who magically replants the tree, which eventually grows to be the biggest, straightest, and sparklingest fir-tree in the entire kingdom.

“I like your story much better, princess,” Daddy said. “That’s the story we’ll always tell.”

“Yes,” I agreed, feeling quite pleased with myself.

Even at age four, I was a sucker for happy endings.

* * *

Daddy, Dottie—my mother insisted everyone, including me, call her Dottie—and I lived in a ramshackle Victorian which Daddy nicknamed “the Duchess.” The Duchess looked about right to house Casper the Friendly Ghost and his spectral trio of naughty uncles, though Daddy had started renovations, which involved a lot of tearing and hammering and scraping of things. Located on one side of our massive stairway was a parlor, dining room, kitchen, and bath. To our left, separated by a velvet rope, was Ute Creek’s Historical Museum, which like much of the rest of the house, was pretty much a work in progress. Its lone occupant was Blix the Wonder Horse. Strong, stuffed, silent and Ute Creek’s most famous resident.

At one time living, breathing Blix the Wonder Horse had enthralled audiences by solving math problems, spelling out names of objects with his nose and even predicting the bombing of Pearl Harbor weeks in advance. Upon Blix’s death, his owner had him stuffed and returned to Ute Creek, his original home. Forevermore, Blix, ears pricked forward, one foreleg raised as if pawing the air or pointing to a letter on an invisible block, held pride of place in the cavernous room.

Dottie was obsessed with creating an honest-to-goodness museum though I had no idea why since her stated ambition was to be a “Hollywood Movie Star.” Still, she gave her fundraising spiel to everyone she met.

“Ute Creek has such an exciting history.” In addition to Blix, “the town held Chautauquas here every summer. Teddy Roosevelt…blah, blah, noise, noise, blah cattle drives…donations…tax deductible.”

Dottie seldom had anything interesting to say so even when I did understand her, I pretty much shut her out. Except when it came to a direct question, criticism or a screamed, “Clarabel Lucy, get over here!”

Yes, my name is Clarabel. Like the cow.

Mooooo.

Even as a kid, I sensed Dottie was nuts. Maybe not in the clinical sense but in the sense that I really wished I could have chosen a different mother. A lot more like Cinderella’s fairy godmother and a lot less like her wicked stepmother.

I was the outcome of an “oops” pregnancy, which had forced my parents to get married before Dottie’s eighteenth birthday. As my mother reminded me from the age I could marginally understand such things, I was the reason she had been denied her destiny, which seemed to be time traveling back to mid-century Hollywood where she would be a nineteen-eighties version of her favorite actress, Debbie Reynolds. (How someone with no discernible acting or singing talent was going to be discovered in a tiny town tucked in a picturesque valley outside Colorado Springs is a mystery.)

After endlessly replaying her favorite musicals—Singin’ in the Rain, Unsinkable Molly Brown, and I Love Melvin—in which she tried to recreate Debbie’s dance routines and songs—Dottie often lamented, “If I don’t get out of this one-horse town, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

Even as a kid, I found that statement amusing for a couple of reasons: 1) My aforementioned assertion that Dottie Lucy had already lost her mind and 2) Setting aside the equines Old Man Pettigrew boarded on his ranch just beyond town limits, Ute Creek’s lone claim to fame was one horse.