Making of a Writer (9780307820464) by Joan Lowery Nixon

new poem, I’d take it to school before classes began, and the word would quickly spread. At least half a dozen girls would sit on the steps of the administration building and quickly copy the poem. Then they’d let their friends copy it, and their friends would continue to share it. I sometimeswondered how many lonesome boys overseas were made to feel just a little bit better because of the loving poems their girlfriends sent them.
    I felt a strong sense of satisfaction. I was no longer writing just for my own pleasure. I was writing for others, to fill a need.

Chapter Eighteen
    Everyone’s teen years are hard. Everyone’s teen years during World War II were harder. Teenagers were edgy. Adults were edgy. But it wasn’t just over the war news. Little things played a strong part. Mother was highly vocal about it.
    “Why are you asking for another roll of toilet paper already? Don’t you realize that I have to shop at all the grocery stores in the area at least twice a day to try to find toilet paper for sale? There’s not enough toilet paper because we’re at war!”
    “I don’t care if you hate squishing orange dye into the white oleomargarine. We can’t get butter, and the legislature went along with the dairy lobbyists, so margarine has to be sold white. The military gets all the butter. We’re at war.”
    “Don’t ask again if you can learn to drive. Age has nothing to do with it anymore. Gasoline is rationed, and we can’t get rubber for tires because we’re at war.”
    At times I wondered if I’d ever be able to please my mother, but I began to understand emotional ups and downs and realize the strong part emotion played in what we both thought and did.
    Nanny was not only my roommate, she was also my buddy, but at times I had problems with her, too.
    Late one night a suspected Japanese submarine had been sighted off the coast near Santa Monica, and our coast guard had fired at it. Nanny described the action to me the next morning. “I stood right here at our bedroom window and watched the bullets trace red lines across the sky. I was terrified. I didn’t know if we were being attacked or we were defending ourselves.”
    “Why didn’t you wake me?” I moaned, unable to believe I had slept through the battle. “This was part of history, and I missed it.”
    Nanny looked surprised as she answered, “It was a school night. I wouldn’t wake you on a school night. You’re young. You need your sleep.”
    I planted and tended my victory garden lovingly. There would be a show of our produce at school, and I was sure that one of my cabbages, which was growing more gigantic by the moment, would win a prize.
    The day of the victory garden show arrived, and I went out to cut my cabbage.
    Someone had been there before me, and I knew who. We had met one of our neighbors the week we had moved into our house, when my mother found her in our rose garden, cutting an armful of roses for herself.
    “It’s all right,” Mrs. R. had said, smiling and waving her shears. “You have so many roses, we can all enjoy them.”
    She continued to enjoy a variety of our flowers, along with lemons and cherries from our trees and mint and herbs from our garden.
    When I saw that my cabbage had been taken, I stormed into the kitchen. “I’m going to walk around the hill to her house and ask for it back,” I insisted.
    Nanny shook her head. “You can’t do that,” she said. “It would embarrass her. It wouldn’t be neighborly.”
    “But it’s my entry in the victory garden show.”
    “Take something else. There are some nice onions in the garden,” Nanny said. “You can’t be rude to a neighbor.”
    “She’s a crazy neighbor!”
    “But she
is
a neighbor, and we must be polite, so take something else to school.”
    Mother backed Nanny up, and reluctantly, I had to agree. Retrieving the cabbage wasn’t as important as sparing Mrs. R.’s feelings. I entered three onions in the show and won only a third