That Old, Sweet Song

I land in the South with a sore neck and red eyes. After a few hours of dodging cars that never use blinkers for merging, I finally turn onto the dirt road that takes me home. Out the window, the main garden is in full bloom: heads of corn reaching for the sun, beans sagging off of fixed poles, peppers and tomatoes shining red in the mid-morning sun. I stop the car and pick the makings for my all-time favorite lunch (BLT with garden-fresh tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob, and a cold glass of milk). Past the garden, boards fresh from the lumber mill are stacked high. I can smell the sawdust, potent after a recent thundershower. I walk to my house, which is surprisingly unsheltered after losing the familiar oaks out front last winter. I think about how strange it feels to mourn the loss of a tree, but it had the best foot holds for climbing.



Inside, little has changed. My room still is decorated with failed attempts at art created in high school and a Walt Whitman poem I haphazardly, yet passionately, painted on the wall one late night. A few books I couldn't bear to give away line the bookshelves. My mom has tried to make it seem more inviting by filling the empty picture frames on my desk and putting new sheets on the bed. I go wake up my brother, and get a leave-me-alone grunt. So I do as I'm told and leave him alone with his sleep palsy from a late night at work. Mom is cooking food for the wedding. She apologizes for the smell, remembering that I would leave the house for hours at a time when I was a kid because I hated the smell of chicken boiling. It doesn't bother me now. We talk. She leaves to go help bake cakes, and I decide to take the new puppy for a walk. We go explore the creek, which is barely a quarter of the size I expected. Years of drought have left a listless trickle, the waterfall dried to bare rocks. Obie (the pup) doesn't notice how lackluster the stream is, and we both leave wet, dirty, and smelling like dog. He finds a wild turkey in the bushes, and some of the most horrible noises I have ever heard ensue. I might have let him continue the pursuit if it had been Thanksgiving, but we've already got one bird on the burner.

After spraying my clothes down in a vain attempt at red clay removal, I roam some more. I walk over to my great-grandparents' homestead. In the yard, Grandaddy is installing an aisle and chairs are being sowed in rows in anticipation for the ceremony. The place has been cleaned up, but the dilapidated barns are still pretty magical to explore. They hold old doll heads (I don't know where the bodies went), random garden tools, pieces of furniture and cars, horse tack, the old rusted tractor, and hundreds of mason jars that most certainly contain botulism by now. I sit on the tractor for awhile, and listen to sounds begin. Afternoon brings a cacophony of katydids, crickets, and frogs. Much different, but perhaps louder, than the traffic I hear out of my bedroom window every night in the city.

From Ansley's Wedding

From Ansley's Wedding

Daddy Jim and Ma Mamie, my great-grandparents, lived here and worked the land, sustaining themselves and making money with what they could sell at the farmer's market. Signs of this past are still around. After the winter loses its bitterness, the ground is blanketed with blooming jonquils. These were planted in order to have something to sell in the early spring, when few vegetables were ready for harvest. Ma Mamie scavenged asparagus, baked cakes and cut jonquils to sell at the market.

All this she would load in the buggy every weekend. The work horse that drew the buggy outlived my great-grandparents long enough for me to vaguely remember it. I don't remember his name, but I remember (fondly) that he had a flatulence problem. When that horse hit a gallop, you could hear it coming. It's too late for the jonquils to be in bloom, but I make a mental note to come home in the spring next time.

From Ansley's Wedding

There is a yellowed newspaper cutting, framed and hung in my grandmother's basement, that tells of how people would travel for miles to buy Ma Mamie's cakes. Coconut, caramel, pistachio. The recipes have been handed down, via first-hand kitchen experience, through the generations. My grandmother is busy baking the same cakes for the wedding tomorrow. All I can say is the newspaper was right, they are fucking delicious.

From my tractor perch, I can see the sky turning gray. It looks as if there will be another afternoon thundershower: the kind of Georgia summer storm that soaks the land and makes a lot of noise, and then leaves as fast as it came. I head back home to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. I pass the second garden which has been taken over by hundreds of sunflowers, Ansley's favorite.

From Ansley's Wedding

From Ansley's Wedding