The ugliest that I’ve even been was on Easter Sunday the year I was twelve years old.

Mama promised me that we wouldn’t have to Montgomery to get me a store-bought Easter dress.

I could get it in Brundidge at Belcher’s Dry Goods Store.

Easter Sunday was the one Sunday in the year that everybody had a new Sunday outfit

Not normal Sunday clothes. Girls had to wear frilly, Sunday clothes, shiny shoes with a strap right across the top of their feet and socks with lace around the cuff. And we had to wear gloves and a hat on our heads and carry a pocketbook.

I didn’t want everybody looking at me lack that!

I didn’t like to try on dresses and then come out of the dressing room and turn around and let everybody say how you looked.

Either the dress didn’t hang right or the color didn’t do anything for me or it wasn’t long enough to cover my knobby knees.

“The sash makes her look sway back,” Miss Florence said. “Now that she’s beginning to fill out she could us a little more fullness.

The dressing room was about the size of a broom closet with a mirror on one side.  There wasn’t enough room to bend over and you couldn’t step back far enough to see yourself except from the knees up. I was trying to get undressed when Miss Florence tapped on the door.

‘Come out and let me see how pretty you look,” she said.

I didn’t look pretty and I wasn’t coming out. But before I could get the dress on, she jerked open the door.

“Do you need any help?”

I squealed and covered up everything you can cover up with two hands and a knee.

I decided right then and there that the two-piece outfit Mama picked out was going to be my Easter outfit.

And, if I never got another Easter outfit, that would be all right with me.