Cousin Tallie

My cousin Tallie was a real-life award winning beauty queen from age six to eighteen The kind who seems a cardboard cut-out Southern stereotype all big hair and hype manicured nails and well arranged... assets but in reality there was much more to Tallie Her favorite movie was Fried Green Tomatoes and as far as movies go it was good but I never understood until much later why she loved it so At first I thought she was obsessed with the dish she just 'had to try' fried green tomatoes with fried catfish... But it was actually more about “Towanda!” the primal, female battle-cry And there was something electrifying heartbreaking and mystifying in the way she had the nerve to let loose a hullabaloo screaming “Towanda!” without reserve fully, freely like a woman on the very edge with nothing left to lose and that was true Tallie'd been abused but somehow nobody chose to see that part that she actually had had a heart that someone had torn apart Now Tallie's a badass with blue-green hair and a hard edged manner devil-may-care she has a tattoo for each person she held dear far and near dead and gone and no one knows why she's evasive, withdrawn as they spew out their judgments in-between their slow Southern matter-of-fact yawns With all the details noticed while picking her to pieces how did they miss the moment her innocence was taken faith in mankind shaken How the barefoot, crazy-haired Tallie running free, suddenly stopped entirely, sparkle gone certain sadness in dark eyes and full-grown this woman appeared world-wise And while they wonder who the father of her latest offspring could be I wonder where the adorably incorrigible little Tallie is- that used to be