Diana Gabaldon · @Writer_DG
5th Nov 2013 from TwitLonger
#DailyLines #MOBY #WRITTENInMYOwnHEARTSBlood #Book8 #thethingspeoplethinkaboutintimesofstress
If it weren’t for the coloring book, I might not have noticed immediately. In third or fourth grade, Brianna had had a coloring book featuring scenes from the American Revolution. Sanitized, suitably romantic scenes—Paul Revere flying through the night on a galloping horse, Washington crossing the Delaware while exhibiting (as Frank pointed out) a lamentable lack of seamanship…and a double-paged spread featuring Molly Pitcher, that gallant woman who had carried water to the heat-stricken troops (left-hand page), and then taken her wounded husband’s place to serve his cannon (right-hand page)—at the battle of Monmouth.
Which, it had dawned on me, was very likely what the battle we were engaged in was going to be called, once anyone got round to naming it. Monmouth Courthouse was no more than half a mile from my present location.
I wiped my face once more—this gesture did nothing for the perspiration, which was instantly renewed, but judging from the state of my three soggy handkerchiefs, was removing a fair amount of dirt from my countenance—and glanced toward the east, where I had been hearing distant cannon-fire most of the day. Was she there?
“Well, George Washington certainly is,” I murmured to myself, pouring out a fresh cup of water and returning to my work rinsing out bloody cloths in a bucket of salt water. “Why not Molly Pitcher?”
It had been a complicated picture to color, and as Bree had just got to the phase where she insisted that things be colored “real,” the cannon could _not_ be pink or orange, and Frank had obligingly drawn several crude cannon on a sheet of paper and tried out everything from Gray (with shadings of Black, Blue, Blue-Violet, and even Cornflower) to Brown, with tints of Burnt Sienna and Gold, before they finally settled—Frank’s opinion as to actual historicity of cannon being diffidently advanced—on Black with Dark Green shadings.
Lacking credentials, I had been relegated to coloring in the grass, though I also got to help with the dramatic shading of Mrs. Pitcher’s raggedly streaming clothes, once Brianna got tired of it. I looked up, the smell of crayons strong in my memory, and saw a small group coming down the road.