Lee’s Tidewater mother, living deep in the mountains, had saved from her youth sixteen different recipes for oysters. In the chapter “Recipe Box,” she discusses her mother’s collection, and we see how a recipe collection can serve as a journal, or a time capsule. “Dimestore” is beautifully written, as one would expect, and moves from topic to topic, sometimes yielding unexpected rewards.
I’d learn proper table manners which would then be tested by fancy lunches at The Club on top of Shades Mountain.” Here I’d learn how to wear white gloves, sit up straight, and walk in little Cuban heels. Lee’s mother was not a mountain girl she was Tidewater Virginia and thought Grundy a primitive place, turning Lee into a tomboy, so she sent Lee each summer to her aunt Gay-Gay in Birmingham for “two weeks of honest-to-God Lady Lessons. It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.” She loved it: “reveling in my own power–nobody can see me, but I can see everybody.” She watched, silently, as customers argued, snuck embraces, or shoplifted! Thus, she says “I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible. She would also sit in the second floor office and look down through the one-way glass window. As she combed their hair, Smith invented life stories for all of them, what would happen to them after they left her care. Like any kid, she had “chores” such as grooming the dolls. Smith’s father, for half a century, ran the local “Five and Ten Cent Variety Store” and Lee as a child hung out there after school. Of course her memoir, “Dimestore,” begins in Grundy, with stories of childhood in that fairly isolated place surrounded by “mountains so high, so straight up and down, that the sun didn’t even hit our yard until about eleven o’clock.” Many of Smith’s best have been set around there, including “Oral History” and “Fair and Tender Ladies.” There are 13 novels now and 4 volumes of stories. When the physical past is destroyed, it has to live in people’s memories.
This was a great idea because the town, located on the banks of the Levisa River, was so often flooded it had to be moved! Her father’s dimestore was in fact blown up. With local English teacher Debbie Raines, Smith organized an oral history of Grundy “Sitting on the Courthouse Steps” in 2000. Readers of Lee Smith’s many novels know of her love for the home place, the town of Grundy and the surrounding Appalachians in the southwest corner of Virginia. Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
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