Maybe I Could Write a Vintage Romanc....

**Our first car was a 1956 Baby Blue Chevy with standard fins.**
With publishers asking for “vintage romances,” I believe I qualify to write one. First, though, vintage? The fifties? Not what I had in mind. Vintage to me means the Victorian Era, the Deep South before the Civil War, the Roaring Twenties, perhaps. But yes, the 1950 decade does fit the guidelines. It’s just that I remember the time so well—how can it truly be vintage? Oh, well, I will ignore my distress over this revelation and try to write a story. Now, let me see…what do I remember?

**Me in fourth grade--my smart-aleck period. Check out the saddle oxfords.**

I grew up on the South Plains, in the northwest portion of Texas. Often, I relive and reminisce about the place I called home, where the sand blew in the spring so hard that we wore headscarves to keep our hair down. We ran to the car with the sand stinging the backs of our legs because Mother didn’t allow us to wear jeans to school. A few of my classmates and I have kept in touch all these years, and we believe there, on the flat table-top Caprock, where the sky looked like a big blue bowl turned upside down on a sea of green cotton or brown plowed dirt, our roots run deep and strong and firm. There’s something sacred about it, holding the clean, pure air and sky and land in our hearts.

It was the best of times, “the Nifty Fifties”, labeled conservative, a classic American era, in which all was right in our country. But we, as well as the entire population, were in the throes of dying innocence.

**Ahhh, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Lived too fast, too hard, died too young**
We might attribute the rumble of the approaching social revolution, which culminated in the sixties, to Elvis, the hydrogen bomb, the McCarthy hearings, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

America would never be the same.

**I was in high school before we could afford a television set.**
The fifties decade remains permanently imbedded in my heart and mind. With vivid clarity, I remember those years as a time of forming values and beliefs and a way of life. Our family was typical—a father who worked, a mother who kept house and tended to us girls, and we lived in a house built by our own Daddy’s hands. We lived the life we later watched on television, then in the form of sitcoms. Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Happy Days—weekly episodes of a family who ate dinner together every night—called supper in Texas—with the father in charge of the household, and the mother teaching the children to wash hands before eating and mind their manners.

**I swear! I had a dress just like this one!**
I just know I could write a romance novel set in the fifties. Now, to find the time.

Thank you! 

Celia Yeary

Romance…and a little bit o' Texas

http://www.celiayeary.com/  

TEXAS BLUE-eBook and Print

SHOWDOWN IN SOUTHFORK—eBook

ALL MY HOPES AND DREAMS-eBook and Print