pomegranates, peaches, pecans. Nobody cared what we ate from the vines and trees. The fruit was often small and worm ridden, but a wasp sting on a green apple was the least of our concerns.
We loved this place that was not our life. We loved its normalcy and the flowers that bloomed all over the place. We loved the fact that our grandmother looked and acted like other grandmothers. She did not mean to withhold that which we craved—she had no way of knowing how much we longed for her treats, and for her grandmother-liness. At midmorning she would commence to preparing dinner, the midday meal—creamed corn, fried ham, biscuits, boiled okra, green beans, stewed squash, rice, and tomatoes. The vegetables came from the garden, which she plundered before breakfast, before we arrived. We ate until we could hold no more, but not piggishly. We were on even better behavior at Grandmama’s than at our own iron-ruled house.
The ancient longleaf pine outside the concrete steps of the back door dropped piles of needles, making a rug around itself, and it was often our job on Saturdays to rake the straw up. Grandmama kept her tools in good working order, so when called to rake we might choose from many instruments—bamboo and flimsy, iron and heavy, tin and light. A heap of leaves and straw is irresistible to a child, who will run and leap into it, over and over, and sometimes burrow to the ground, emerging covered with pine debris, looking like a porcupine. Especially when cousins were visiting, we made ourselves houses from the pine straw. We outlined rooms like an architect’s plan—kitchen, living room, bedrooms—constructing the walls of pine straw, leaving gaps for doors between the rooms and for doors to the outside. We piled the walls as high as they’d go.
When our house of straw was built, we played charades through the rooms, cooking in the kitchen, making beds, sweeping with our rakes. We sat in the rooms and talked about what we would become one day, teachers and nurses and engineers and truck drivers. In our imaginary house under the blue sky, we lived out not our dreams, for we were too young to know dreams beyond those inherited from our parents, but a continuation of the lives we had already entered.
As an adult, I walk the same yard where I pretended to sleep on a straw bed, and I walk through walls I would not have dared ignore when I erected them of nothing, and now I do not live in the imaginary house but in the real house the imaginary one was modeled on. It is a dream I never dreamed, and if someone, an aunt or my grandmother, had told me that it would come to pass, I would not have believed them. As a child I never would have believed it would be my great fortune to live in the real house, the one made to last lifetimes, not an afternoon, the one full of chocolate pie and gingerbread, and endless peace.
What is it in us that wants to return to the dream of childhood, to reenact it or fix it? What is it in us that keeps coming back to that potent place? Sometimes I am afraid the house will burn to the ground, the way the original house burned, the way we were finally forced by oncoming dark to destroy our imaginary houses and haul the straw in Uncle Percy’s wheelbarrow to the burn pile.
The outhouse fell. The smokehouse fell. Three of the pines in the yard blew over in a storm, like towers of cards. An apple tree fell. The chicken coop fell. The sassafras in the field fell. My grandmother fell. I don’t think the house is a dwelling anyone ever thought would last. Yet it stands, and because it represents what lasts, or what so far has lasted, I was happy to live in it. Something from long ago was yet alive, both inside and outside of me. Finally, the two were one.
Living on the family farm, I was surrounded by all the ghosts of my ancestors, with their undying desires, although all I knew about most of them was the stories that were told, long after their deaths. How all my mother remembers of my birdlike great-grandmother, Mary, was one glimpse she got standing on tiptoes, peering into her casket. Mary’s husband, Walt, was a tall man who loved to work with wood. By day and by night I could feel the presence of those who had also known and loved this land, who had brought my life into being, whose names were written in stone in the graveyards or lost forever. I lived much closer to the dead than the half mile to the cemetery would indicate.
I had a dream once in which my grandmother, who was as small as a child, was lying in a sickroom, close to death. My grandfather and Uncle Percy were in the room as well, but as ghosts, Granddaddy hovering tall over the foot of the bed, and Uncle Percy on his knees beside it. Uncle Percy was holding his forearms open in front of his chest, imploringly. “Come on, Mama,” he was saying. “Come with us.” Granddaddy, too, was begging her to join them.
I had walked into the room to check on her and saw at a glance what was happening. “No, Grandmama, no.” My voice rose. “Don’t listen to them.” I began to beg her to ignore her husband and son.
“Honey, go sit in the other room,” she told me, “so I can hear what they’re saying.”
After a few minutes I rushed back into her room. The ghosts of the men were gone, and Grandmama was lying still. I ran to her, panicked, calling her name, and gathered her up in my arms.
“I’m taking you to the hospital now,” I said, knowing I needed help. Something in me was trying to keep my grandmother alive.
Now it was my duty and my honor to be the keeper of my grandmother’s house, to uphold, rebuild, and sustain it, and to decide what parts of it to replace when they deteriorated. In the house I found myself bending—to wash dishes at the low sink, to slice summer squash on the counter, to add a column of figures on the pine table Granddaddy built. I bent to enter the screen door of the front porch, to duck under the drooping branches of the pine, to water small plants. It was as if, still, I was bending to greet my grandmother, to embrace her, to keep her. In that bending I was becoming her.
The corn crib, shaded by chinaberry.
Finding Wiregrass
Out walking on the farm I found a few clumps of grass that made my heart lurch. Unsure at first, I ducked under the electric fence that keeps the cows in and put my knees into the hot dirt.
Wiregrass.
Funny how a few clumps of grass could make me want to do a jig out there in the cow pasture.
When Cracker settlers first crossed the Altamaha River into what had been Creek hunting grounds, they found a forest we can now only imagine. The entire Southeastern uplands grew longleaf pine, 93 million acres of it from southern Virginia to east Texas. Now you can find little pieces; but out of 93 million, only 3 million acres of natural forest (meaning forest that regenerated naturally, consisting of trees of all ages) remain.
The longleaf pine can’t be talked about as a tree, really, but as an intricate and intriguing ecosystem. The original forests held a legion of animals that had evolved to live in them: red-cockaded woodpeckers that bored out cavities in old-growth heart-pine trees; fox squirrels; and stunningly docile indigo snakes. Gopher tortoises, a long-lived species of land turtle, dug long burrows in the ground that became home to more than 300 other species, especially when the woods burned. Diamondback rattlers found refuge in the holes, along with gopher frogs, gopher snakes, scarab beetles.
You can’t talk longleaf without talking gopher tortoise, nor tortoise without indigo snake, nor the snake without gopher frog, nor the frog without flatwoods salamander, nor salamander without Bachman’s sparrow. You can’t talk mole cricket without talking indigo snake. The list goes on and on.
Although a pine flatwoods usually grows only a single species of tree, an incredible diversity of flora can be found in the ground cover. But one kind of grass grows most commonly beneath longleaf pines, and that is wiregrass—tough, wiry, flammable. Mixed in with the wiregrass, a panoply of grasses and
