This is the road leading to the Big House. If you go further, you will get to the gravel road that leads to our gravel driveway. Our land adjoins my cousins' land that adjoins Big House land. And I never thought about the similarities until about a year ago.
My great-grandfather and his brother bought adjoining acerage back in the 1880s. The McKenna brothers bought adjoining acerage in the same area in the 1800s, a little later than my folks. The similarities end there, since my folks had plantations in the south of the state and the Big House was their "summer home".
But there are other likenesses in the books to things that happened in my Family's life; some written in purposefully, some by "accident".
Brynn McKenna came into being long before Brynn Peaster. When we were expecting our third child, I was writing what would be known as "Two Houses". I loved the tough-minded, brown-eyed heroine and resolved that if the baby was a girl, she would be named Rebecca Brynn. Of course, she wouldn't be brown-eyed, I knew; Roger and I are both blue-eyed blonds. When Brynn was born, she had brown hair and eyes, so the name fit!
Brynn McKenna ends up married to Max, who is in law enforcement. Brynn Peaster is married to Matt, who is in law enforcement. The book was written decades before Matt ever came knocking at our door.
Our own Katie is the oldest of our daughters. I wrote about her adult relationship with her sisters when she was very little, but the adult Katie is very much the same now. Perhaps, I could see that strong, take-charge lady in the bull-headed little girl.
Sorrel is based purposefully on my grandmother, Beulah. Her struggle to have a child was my grandmother's own, her medical condition is the same, and her only child was my mother. Beulah also was told never to have children, and she also had a stroke in childbirth, was blinded and then died. She got to hold my mother before she died. My grandfather raised my mother with the help of the extended Family, but I'd better say right here that he is in no way like the rascally Stephen in the McKenna books! My mother was a total Daddy's girl right to the end.
Many people have asked me about the strange happening with Brynn and Fiona and the invisible singer on horseback in one of the books. Did that REALLY happen? Yes! It happened to me and a friend of mine when we were about nine or ten and, incredible as it is, I have never found an explanation for it. I know it doesn't make sense!
The mill dam was a real place in Georgia, a little north of Atlanta, where we used to live. It was on our property, built just as described, and did burst one rainy night because the sluice gate got blocked. We didn't hear it go, there were no lives lost, but the result to the creek was devastating and took many years to recover. We woke up the next morning to a completely changed landscape. People came for months to photograph the wreckage.
Family stories are the best stories and there are still a few in my memory that may yet make their way into the McKenna books. We'll see; we'll see.