Ella Minnow Pea Read Online Free Page B

and now, in the absence of written guidelines, remains a virtual impossibility. Others have whispered of a military coup. Yet the Island L.E.B. is handsomely paid and well provided for. I can see little to entice these officers to overthrow a government that has for the most part been both friend and ample provider, let alone an exemplar of political stability for most of its one-hundred-and-thirty-year history in the hemisphere.
    We have at present no recourse but to mind our p’s and bury our q’s, and try our best to eke out some crumbs of normalcy from our turvied lives.
    Without, I am sad to report, an island newspaper. The editor and publisher of
The Tribune
, Mr. Kleeman, has, in one grand andglorious protest, put out his final issue, and ignoring his family’s rich island heritage, voluntarily departed this cursed sandbar. But not before publishing and leafletting this town with hundreds of copies of a most special swan song edition, carrying the apt title, “The Bees’ Lament”—being a delightful four-page conversation between two bees marooned upon a keeperless farm. The paper—I wish I could have sent you a copy, but destroyed it quickly after Mum and Pop and I shared a tearful laugh—contains, below the masthead and the aforementioned title, the frenetic repetition of a certain letter—four thousand, perhaps five thousand glorious times!
    I do respect Mr. Kleeman for his protest, yet am disappointed by the cowardly exit. He has left this town with a yawning communicational chasm—a great lacuna which I see no one stepping forward to fill.
    I wish you could come for a visit. We have room for you here at the house, should you desire to stay for a while to seek employment, or perhaps find volunteer work at our library. Happily, its doors are still open. Most of the books are gone, though—the periodicals as well. But many of the musical albums remain (without their jackets or labels). And the picture books that still reside here are quite colorful and not all that unpleasant to look at.
    Give my love to your mother. (Perhaps I will see you soon?)
    Your cousin
,
    Ella
     
    NOLLOPVILLE
    Tuesday, August 22
    Dear Ella,
    I just may take you up on that invitation! You know how I feel living up here—so removed from things.
    I look forward to visiting with Aunt Gwenette and Uncle Amos as well. I cannot wait to see your father’s burgeoning collection of petite vases and jugs!
    Did I mention—I have become a volunteer teaching assistant, and am helping Mother at the school. I miss the library, though, and the opportunity to read whatever I wish—whenever I so desire. I compensate for this loss by reading your letters over and over again; and Mother and I have taken to writing one another—if you can believe it—from one room to the next! She tells wonderful stories of our mothers’ childhoods—all their little adventures—beachcombing for shells and driftwood, chasing sand crabs about (How cruel the two of them were as children!) and building majestic sand palaces at low tide.
    I know it was necessary when I was a toddler and Father had gone away, for Mother to move us to the Village to take the teaching job, but I have never warmed to this dismal and dreary place, and I will be happy (Do not tell Mother.) to leave it and never return.
    Ellakins, I must tell you: I have taken to sitting in a favorite spot on a secret hillside outside the Village to think. And dream. And watch the shapings of the clouds and feel the caress of our soft, late-summer wind wisps. Some evenings I do not return home until long after dark. Yesterday I was even naughtier than usual: I carved the dreaded letter in the bark of a lonely mimosa, carved it with a kitchen knife in great broad slashes of impertinence and had myself a delicious clandestine laugh. And I must say, it did me a world of good.
    Perhaps I will take a page from your book and recite poetry.
    I think sometimes of departing the island for good. But I’m not so