Memories of a Place Called Wickett
At the end of the 1948-1949 school year, we moved to Wickett, Texas, where my cousins Sydney, Tommy Dan, and David Lynn lived. Wickett was made up mostly of Gulf Camp—thirty or forty neat white cottages for Gulf Oil employees in a fenced area with grass and trees. The other houses in town were far apart along a few dirt roads. We moved to a small unpainted house with a sad struggling tree in front and a yard full of scraggly yellow grass in back. I read Tom Sawyer sitting on a cellar door in that scraggly back yard. We never dared open that door. Billie Ann Bien, my first best friend ever besides my cousins, came to play, and we tagged each other around the malnourished tree.
