"Then the privy door banged open.
"Filling the doorway and then some was Mrs. Dowdel. A copy of the Farm Journal and three corncobs were in one of her fists. I hadn't seen her up close. I'd never wanted to be anywhere near this close to her. Her specs crept to the end of her nose. We were nose to nose.
"She didn't welcome surprises, and I came as one. All she'd wanted to do was use her privy, and here I was barring her way, naked a jaybird in my own personal web."
Tied up tight in Grandma Dowdel's privy is eleven-year-old Bob Barnhart. Bob is a combination of preacher's son, new kid in town, and walking target for the town bullies. (I immediately surmised -- correctly -- that there is a new crop of Burdicks and a son of Augie Fluke's amongst this generation's crew of ruffians.)
Bob's dad has gained the first pulpit "all his own," and he and Bob's mom have moved Bob and his two sisters into the next-to-last house on the street -- the street on which the last house is still occupied -- here in 1958 -- by Grandma Dowdel.
"'But as the saying goes, if you can't get justice,' Mrs. Dowdel remarked, 'get even.'"
After taking a taste of A SEASON OF GIFTS to be reassured that it was the real deal, I decided that there was time enough to permit the luxury of going back and rereading A LONG WAY FROM CHICAGO and A YEAR DOWN YONDER before digging in and savoring this next chapter in the world of Grandma Dowdel. It's coming up on a decade since I'd read the stories told by her grandchildren Joey and Mary Alice, and those first two award-winning books are, still and again, an absolute pleasure and a joy to read.
"'Hoo-boy,' Ruth Ann whispered. 'That's the oldest-looking woman I ever saw.'
"Mrs. Dowdel nodded. 'She was only about three years behind me in school.'"
A quarter-century after we last laid eyes on her, Grandma Dowdel is no less of a force to reckon with -- particularly if you are a troublemaker, cheapskate, or a fraud.
To some extent, A SEASON OF GIFTS is reminiscent of one of those specials they put together a decade or so after some long-running and beloved television series finally goes off the air. This is somewhat ironic because if there is a subtle-but-important issue hinted at in this book, it is the isolating effect that the dawning age of television is already beginning to have upon many families in Grandma Dowdel's rural community.
Nevertheless, so many of the characters and so much of the mischief that we came to know and love -- thanks to LONG WAY and YEAR DOWN YONDER -- are still alive and well in 1958. To experience them all once again is certainly a reason to rejoice.
