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When she went to South Texas as a County Home Demonstration Agent in 1940, Aletha Barrett was in culture shock. Raised in the gently rolling green farmland of Northeast Texas, Aletha was unprepared for the vast sandy expanses and different societies she found there. From unearthing baby rattlesnakes to exploring the unknown spiciness of Mexican food, every day was a learning experience. Ever an adventurer, Aletha ventured deep into Mexico when it was largely unknown to North Americans. Over the course of several trips she witnessed what might have been a murder in Mexico City, endured the then-perilous Pan-American Highway at the mercy of a drunken bus driver and stayed in Acapulco when it was a tiny village with just two hotels. In later years, after marrying and having a family, Aletha always said she was going to write a book about her life in South Texas, but somehow the right time never came. After Aletha's death, her daughter Janis Susan May, a writer and novelist, was going through her papers and found an outline, some notes and a rudimentary chapter or two. Janis Susan had been raised on her mother's stories and knew them by heart, so working from the notes she completed the book. It was, she says, the best testament she could envision to the memory of a remarkable woman. Download a FREE excerpt!
Aletha Born near the tiny town of Trenton, Texas in 1911, Aletha Barrett was the first of four daughters. Both sides of her family had pioneered that part of North Texas several generations before. Learning was prized in the Barrett family, but Aletha was prevented from getting her degree when the Great Depression made it necessary for her to go home and work on the family farm. Ten years after leaving college, she was able to go back and graduate and eventually be hired in 1940 by the Extension Service as a County Home Demonstration Agent. Aletha left the Extension Service in 1944 to marry Donald Wright May, a journalism teacher at Texas A&M University and her high-school sweetheart. They moved to Amarillo, where Donald had accepted a position with the Farmers' Co-Operative. Two years later their daughter Janis Susan was born. Aletha was delighted to be a stay-at-home wife and mother, though during those years she wrote a monthly magazine column. After the family moved to Dallas, Donald, a former teacher of journalism at Texas A&M, began his own advertising agency and Aletha became the bookkeeper. Don May Advertising existed for 17 years, 16 of which it was rated by AADA as being in the top 300 in the nation. The business was closed when Donald fell ill, and Aletha devoted the next 18 years of her life to caring for him. She also took care of her elderly mother for many of those years. After both of them had passed away she took life easy. She was a long-time member of the Cosmos Review Class and helped form the North Texas Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt. Aletha loved to travel; she and Donald had traveled widely, and as long as her health would permit she and her daughter traveled often, even fulfilling her childhood dreams of seeing Istanbul. Her last years were a trial of arthritis so painful she sometimes could not move. In 2001 Aletha Barrett May passed away in her daughter's home, just days short of her 90th birthday. Janis Susan Janis Susan May was born in Amarillo, Texas, the only child of Aletha and Donald May. She was a precocious child who read anything handed to her by the age of 3, wrote her first story at 5 and by 9 was working in her parents' advertising agency. Janis Susan is the first to admit that she does not handle boredom well, and so has had a most varied career, ranging from banker to supervisor of accessioning for a biogenetic DNA testing lab, actors' agent to travel agent, opera singer to novelist to jewelry designer... and more too numerous to list. She was one of the original 50 or so women who began Romance Writers of America in 1980 and one of the 8 member Organizing Committee which founded the North Texas Chapter of The American Research Center in Egypt. She founded the NT-ARCE Newsletter and was editor/publisher for 9 years; during this time the Newsletter was the only monthly publication for ARCE in the world. Janis Susan published her first novel in 1979, but quit writing in 1995 to care for her mother when Aletha fell ill. In 2001 - at an age when most women are becoming grandmothers - Janis Susan married for the first time, after being proposed to in the moonlit gardens across the street from the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. She and her husband, a dashing officer in the Navy Reserve several years younger than she, had met through ARCE. Three weeks after their marriage, Aletha died. Two years later, when Janis Susan's husband was called for active duty in Iraq, he told her while he was gone she should go back to writing. She did, and since then has sold five novels and two novellas as well as this memoir of her mother. She has also been contracted to write on the history of archaeological illustration before 1798 as a part of a textbook. Janis Susan and her husband live in Texas with a miniature white poodle and a black and white tuxedo cat, both aged and slightly neurotic rescued animals.
The Land of Heart's Desire is a woman's transitions and accounts of her life and adventures. The stories were passed on to Aletha's daughter, Janis May, who took her mother's outline and notes and penned the treasured stories that had been passed to her. To keep her dear mother's memory alive, she sketches a journey of an amazing woman, and her lifetime and struggles. This is a pleasant and enjoyable story into many years of a woman that lived life to its fullest. I can understand why she wished to keep her mother's memory alive.
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