4/Write a letter to Meg in “Down at the Dump” telling her what you think about her relationship with Lummy.

Meg,

I’m so sorry to hear about your Aunt Daise.

If the red-hot grief of losing someone who understands you is not hard enough to bear, I couldn’t blame you for mourning the even gloomier, greying knowledge of being surrounded by those who don’t understand you at all. Believe me when I say that I know your feelings, Meg. Losing my own mother was–well, even the words of poets evade me. Realising there was nobody else in the world who would see the world the way we could see the world was more than half the agony.

Just keep shining, Meg. And know you are loved.

Yes, your parents are the incarnate of taupe walls and 4.5-star motels and always carrying a spare pair of flesh-coloured high heels in the boot of the second-hand Jag (the colour of ‘flesh’ always being white, of course). However, I’m sure they do love you with brightest beige they can muster. It’s simply a sad fact that you love in kaleidoscopic shades transcending the human eye.

And you were – and still are – loved by Daise with the same otherworldly passion you have.

And loved by Lum, it seems. Your last letter said as much.

Even your love for Lum outstretches Daise’s love for that fine, though pitiable Mr. Cunningham. Lum, too, is quite fine (picture me now, friend, winking at you and nudging you in the ribs with a tickled elbow and suggestive smirk). You see that Lum can defy pity, just as Mr. Cunningham could not. Lum asks for none of our sorrow; he’s a proud, poor, unpitiable boy. And maybe that is the solid shade of faithful rigidity you deserve: the blackness in the finite, in the bitchumen roads he’ll travel. Not Hogben beige, but rather a Lum-like absence of colour (or his desire for that absence) to balance even half the light you emit.

I can picture your cherry blossom cheeks and hidden smile at reading these very sentiments.

And you’d be right to hide that smile, Meg. Perhaps for only a few years more…perhaps for a lifetime. Keep your blushes and your smiles for Lum in the crevasses of your soul. Daise didn’t have those crevasses I believe; she couldn’t contain that luminosity in the ravines of her spirit. Whether it was because her compassion held no penchant for secrecy or because she felt true light shouldn’t be quietened, she didn’t have the capacity for protection. She only knew exhibition of that precious, unchiselled jewel underneath her skin.

But you know, Meg. You know how to protect what must be protected.

Because it isn’t the night-black certainty of Lum’s unwayward path to the semi that concerns me. Rather, it’s others’ “concern” that concerns me. We both know the folks of Sarsaparilla, Meg. We both know the affronted stares and the utterances under the breath. If you’re not concerned for you, be concerned for the both of you: the unity of you and Lum. That’s what makes people look twice. That’s what made folks look twice at my parents. Same as you and Lum: the white and the black and the world in between. The world’s what drove them apart, too, eventually.

Don’t misunderstand me, Meg. I am so happy you have found Lum. He’s your match in more ways than none. But this world can be cruel. And you’re both so young. You’re strong and clever enough to understand that. Give yourself time in the cool shade of this boy. He’s so eager to escape this place that all he’s got now is the right one on whom to wait: you.

Your friend,

Mebs