He had a friendly, likeable face and a shining bald head, its little feeble hairs now illuminated in the bright light like a glowing halo. There was an audible gasp, for there in the mirror, to everyone's amazement, was the side of a rose - the delicate pink of its petal's edge, the shadowed curve, and the pale bulge at the base of the bloom.īob Rigsby looked up and stretched his back. 'And now I'm going to put in just a liii-ttle bit of cobalt blue right here,' said Bob Rigsby, dabbling in his watercolors, and in the angled mirror above his painting table they saw the back of his freckled hand make several little dashes at the paper with the brush, then steady, and then the blue leaked out the tip of the brush, spread across the paper, and soaked gratefully into the oval of rose madder still wet from the last stroke. With the author's permission, npr.org reprints the story below. It's a Thanksgiving Day tradition on All Things Considered for commentator Bailey White to read an original short story. She is the author of Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and Quite a Year for Plums. White graduated from Florida State University in 1973, and has taken a break from teaching first grade to pursue writing full-time. She has one brother, who is a carpenter and boat builder, and one sister, who is a bureaucrat. Her mother, Rosalie White, was a farmer, and worked for many years as the executive director of the local Red Cross Chapter. Her father, Robb White, was a fiction writer and later a television and movie script writer.

She still lives in the same house in which she grew up, on one of the large tracts of virgin longleaf pine woods.

Bailey White was born in 1950 in Thomasville, Ga.

Bailey white mama makes up her mind