A M Garner: Talking in Accents

The Real Bucket List

2011-11-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

It's not easy to watch a lifelong friend leave.

We had driven a hard nine hour drive from North Alabama to Gainesville, Florida, had eaten cranberry sauce and watched plenty of football, but when the text message came to my husband's phone that his good friend Dan was fading, we got up the next morning and headed back North.

Last spring, by the time Dan was diagnosed, he knew that it would be a fist fight with a wild cat to beat the cancer that had already spread all over his body, but he was willing to try. Radiation, chemo, more radiation. Hospital stays with oxygen and drips. In between he had some good times fishing on the Tennessee River and fishing on the Gulf with family and friends. But by fall it was time to serve up televised football with a side of morphine. Even heavy doses could not erase the intelligent smirk, the ironic twinkle in Dan's blue eyes.

When we arrived at his family's compound and drove down the country lane to his mother's house, his sister-in-law Kim met us in the yard. "He just told us to turn off the music and turn on the Iron Bowl," she laughed.

And sure enough, when we went inside the dark front room with the smoky fireplace, Dan's bed was set up so that all the family could gather round, and at the foot of the bed a big TV played the Iron Bowl pregame. When a wave of pain hit, his sister Pat who sat by his side and his brother Wayne, a nurse, held his hands and assured him with gentle voices that they were working on it. We sat there with the family and watched the screen as the stands filled at Jordan Hare stadium. We heard the sports pundits' prognostications. Ten or so candles flickered on the mantle. A fresh breeze from the fields just outside the door drifted through the rooms. His mother, sisters, nieces, cousins, children came and went. Silent love.

Across the road is the little white frame Methodist church which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2009. We attended Dan's wedding reception there years ago. His funeral will not be at the church, but that is not significant, only a matter of convenience. These folks have a quiet faith, rock solid.

At one point, his sister said "You know there are some things on that bucket list that are not going to get done." Apparently Dan wanted to take a chainsaw and cut down a tree that had been bothering him, probably threatening the safety of his mother's house in this tornado prone area.

I wonder about the idea of a bucket list made popular a few years back in a widely viewed film by that name. If I thought I had six months to live, I might put some things on a list I would like to see while still on this planet: The Rockies one last time, that lovely little village of St. Bresson in the South of France, plenty of sunsets. But realistically, I would not trade that for memories of Dan and my husband returning tired and full of tales from hiking the Virginia mountains, of sitting in the middle of the canoe on Gaines Mill Pond one golden autumn Sunday as all those delirious maples caught on fire with the sun and as Ed and Dan paddled us around and around the still water that reflected the trees like glass. If I had just 24 hours left, I am not so sure how important it would seem to have jumped out of an airplane or bungee-jumped off a tall bridge. I think all that will matter then is how much you showed people--family, friends, and even strangers--how much you care for them.

Dan cared with all his heart and brain.

He need not have concerned himself at all about that chainsaw. I am sure other loving hands will take care of that troublesome tree.

Watching SEC Football as a Collision Sport

2011-11-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you remember great autumn weekends where the air was cool, the light was golden, and the feats on the football field seemed superhuman and filled with agile grace.

This past weekend was not such a weekend.

It started on Friday when I went by to see our good friend Dan Byford who was in Huntsville Hospital for another round of radiation treatments. It's hard to see people you love having difficulties, but Dan is a trouper. Dan is the person who brought us back to Alabama from Virginia when he called up my husband and let him know about a deal that was hard for us to refuse. His spirit is one of grit laced with ironic humor.

From there, things went downhill.

We got a solid night's sleep in Tuscaloosa and set out for the campus by late morning. The traffic on the main thoroughfare of McFarland Blvd. was running slow, but that is better than expected for game day. We claimed a parking spot, toured the building where our son does his grad work, then began to walk across campus. By the time we hit the Quad and Denny Chimes area, we were in the thick of the tailgate scene. Actually, approaching the Quad from the North where the Guiness World's Record breaking largest gumbo ever was being prepared, it was hard to see the quad for the line of forty of so portable toilets standing as shoulder-to-shoulder sentinels, guarding the area from, well, human waste, I suppose. I had heard that a few years ago when the great Bama Roll Tide Revival began that parents had used Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library as a babysitting service, and the scene had not been pretty. Let me tell you, in the category of portable toilets, these were not your run-of-the-mill neon yellow thrown willy-nilly onto a construction site type of toilets. No, these were more of the Wimbledon type portable toilettes. British racing green. Professionally secured. Precision aligned. These were some CLASSY portable toilettes. I imagine a lot of committee work went into approving these toilets/toilettes. I almost expected to see that classic Bama "A" emblazoned on the door in burnished silver.

Maneuvering around the gumbo contests and the Largest Gumbo Ever event had not been too difficult because the fans there had food on their minds. But maneuvering around the Quad was another story. ESPN's Game Day telecast had originated on the Walk of Champions right in front of the stadium just a couple blocks away from 7:30-11:00 that morning. Those fans had sat in folding chairs for hours predawn waiting for that event. After bouncing around screaming and yelling while the Game Day Pantheon (including Lee Corso and Kirk Ohio State Forever Herbstreit) pulled their shenanigans and pretended to predict the outcome of THE GAME OF THE CENTURY, the fans were still full full full of nervous energy. Walking around the Quad with them was a contact sport. My husband and I were walking at our regular fast pace on the far right side of the designated walkway. Apparently that was not fast enough. People passed us, impatient. So we hustled up the pace. Then herds four abreast ran us off the edge of the sidewalk. So I cut down a new path, one on grass, marked with chalked edges like a football field so you would know exactly where to walk. But this led in the wrong direction, and soon we found ourselves at the intersection of two paths where people darted around like high speed bumper cars. And these were TALL people. I am only 5'1". I did not register in their fields of vision. Soon a skyscraper girl in high heeled boots (what else?) was so busy talking to her friend as they cut across the walkway against the flow that she mistook me for a lull in traffic and plowed right into me, knocking to the ground the objects in my hands, knocking the lens cap off my camera as I held it tight with both hands.

This was six hours before game time.

Duffy Daugherty of Michigan State fame once said "Football is NOT a contact sport--it is a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport."

In the SEC, being a fan is a collision sport.

We finally made it to the site of the orange Game Day bus--sponsored by Home Depot!--that we had seen pull out of the Home Depot parking lot the night before. I made my husband stand before it in about twenty different poses. Then I took pics of him with a bronze Bear Bryant. A bronze Nick Saban. And lots of other bronze pagan deities of Bama football. Of course there are A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE IN THE PICTURES. It's not as if on game day it would be possible to take any photos on The Walk of Champions without the masses being there in all the shots.

We walked down The Strip. We walked over to our friends' condo. We walked by old haunts and new in this college town. We walked to other tailgates. And everywhere we went, we had to pick our way through people walking fast and darting suddenly in the oddest directions, like they were running without the ball but expecting it to land in their upturned hands at any moment.
Hey, this is nothing new. I remember the old days at Legion Field, waiting for the student section gates to be open and being near the front of the line. By the time the gates opened, the pattern of the chain link gate was imprinted on my hands from where the crowd behind us pushed closer and closer.

More of the same during THE GAME OF THE CENTURY where we stood most of the time on metal bleacher benches that felt as if if one more fat person hopped on board a rivet would break and we would all be thrown down into the stands below.

Then, after the game was over and we were moving along in the herd, exiting The Walk of Champions, I stepped off a curved curb I didn't see coming and suddenly found myself on the ground, wondering how people were going to avoid walking on me. I knew I had injured the same leg I always injure (those old sports injuries never go away), but I walked as quickly as I could manage with my husband's help back to the car on the other side of the campus. I couldn't risk stopping in the middle of the road and being plowed into by the human traffic behind me.

Joe Namath once said "When you win, nothing hurts."

Well, hey, Joe, we didn't win.

I told Carter Monroe about the game. Carter lives in the land of ACC basketball.

"Damn," he said, "Tide/LSU is apparently a NASCAR race."

I think we need to invite him down for Talladega. He needs to witness the difference firsthand.

Emmylou was a Beauty Queen

2011-08-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

A Southern woman writer once wrote that for a man to amount to anything, as a little boy he had to have a mama applaud him. He needed a mama-woman to make over him, to smile at him with approval. The implication was that the course of a long road can be shaped by its initial direction. A tiny seedling never planted firm/happy/straight by a mama's hand had more difficulty growing up to be a mighty oak.

I am not a professional in matters of the heart or psychology, so she may have been right.

But it also sent me thinking about what shaped my generation of little girls. And--in the over-simplified, generalist manner in which I tend to think-- I came to the conclusion that we learned to be either beauty queens or cheerleaders. As a teenager, Emmylou Harris won the "Miss Woodbridge" beauty pageant and was awarded scholarship money and a tiara. I cannot help but think that somehow that had an effect on her. It is one thing to be gorgeous and talented but quite another to be gorgeous and talented and know how to stare down an audience and win their hearts. What a road she has traveled. I saw Emmylou in person for the first time onstage in Birmingham in the mid 1970s, not as a beauty queen but as a queen who also happened to be beautiful. Since that time, she has seen a lot of miles on stage with her game face on. A true beauty queen--a winner--walks out there in life knowing her worth and standing tall in the spotlight, daring you to listen and come away unmoved.

Cheerleaders were different.

A cheerleader rarely stood alone in the spotlight. Or even stood still, for that matter. Unless it was to listen to someone else and then respond, drawing the audience out of its shyness, urging the audience to clap and cheer. A cheerleader knew how to step perfectly in unison to get the job done as a team. A cheerleader learned never to point to the 'me' but to others, genuinely elated at their success. In response to an unfair judgment from a referee, a cheerleader tried to display good sportsmanship while nevertheless acknowledging the injustice. Cheerleaders didn't have to be beautiful. They just had to have heart.

"They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are but not what we may be." said Ophelia.

Some of us still keep our toes straight when we do a cartwheel. Some of us can stand in a doorway and stare down a room.

After all these years, Emmylou speaks straight to my soul. Even when all she's doing is singing back- up harmony on one cut of an obscure album, I can pick out her voice, even if her name does not appear in the credits.

Ms Biscuits and Jam

2011-06-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Early in my academic career, I heard Male Colleague A verbally put-down Female Colleague B by labeling her Ms Biscuits and Jam. It was summer session. Blackberries were ripe. Ms Biscuits and Jam had been making blackberry jam and jam's required companion, biscuits. She had talked about this. Openly. In the hallowed halls of academe. Good thing she had not been churning biscuit-and-jam's friend, butter. Male Colleague A might have called her Cow Lady. Lesson learned: keep your jam to yourself.

Or maybe not.

You reach a certain age and being called names is amusing. I wrote a blog about hunger and a reader labeled me 'sob sister'. I found that educational. I had not previously heard the term.

So at great peril, I confess to you that this weekend I turned blackberries into seedless blackberry jam. I do not like blackberry jelly. If I did, the process would be simple. Or if my friends and family could tolerate the seeds, ditto. Easy. But no. We want the shrimp without the shell, the pecan without the foul tasting wood, the full blackberry experience but without those bothersome seeds that stick in the teeth. So each summer when the weather turns Alabama hot and the insects complain loudly in the noonday sun, that's when you know the blackberries are ready.

My husband of course had other plans for me, involving yard work. Yard work in summer in the Deep South means hot/sweaty/dusty/mosquito-friendly work. There is not much that can get you out of yardwark. But making seedless blackberry jam is one of those things. Everyone wants the jam but few are willing to sit there and prepare the berries and carefully, labor intensively, work them through the sieve, separating juicy sweet flesh from those hateful seeds. When you finish, every large pan and colander and sieve in the kitchen is purple. There are purple stains on the kitchen towels, the counter, the floor, the stove, my new shirt, and my right cheek. That's all very good, though. When the husband comes in for water, it looks like WORK has been done. Then when he comes back inside for iced tea in an hour, all the purple stains are gone and there sit a dozen jars of his favorite jam. The yard looks great, the kitchen is clean, and the whole time I have spent in AIR CONDITIONING.

Ah, you say. But you had to PICK the berries, and they don't grow in air-conditioning.

Yes, but they grow on a vine my husband's grandfather planted fewer than a dozen steps from the door. Smart guy :-) No need to grab a hat and insect repellent and head for the boondocks. You can pick them in your pajamas on a cool sunrise, a cup of coffee waiting on the deck.

So call me Ms Biscuits and Jam if you like. No sweat. Really. No sweat at all.

And my message to Colleague A. My seedless blackberry jam is much much better than any sorry poem you ever wrote. More people will enjoy the purple joy of my seedless blackberry sweet tang on their tongues than will ever recite your limp dishwater words.

Boy Weekend

2011-05-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, the boys need a break.

This past weekend, my Saturday morning was going to be blown anyway since I had to dress up in the black wool academic regalia gown and march the graduates through their paces. Obviously I could not leave town or be any fun on Saturday. Perfect weekend, my spouse decides, for a fishing weekend.

Boy weekends, I gather, start early. Like on Thursday night, if possible. Earlier that day, I had been sent on foraging missions for the guy acquisitions needed for a guy weekend. Lots of red meat. To grill. The only vegetables suitable for a guy weekend are corn on the cob and baked potatoes. None of this sissy arugula salad stuff. And sandwiches. Lots of meaty cheesy sandwiches, I assumed for lunch on the fishing boat.

The fishing boat buddy arrived very early Friday morning, or maybe it was just late late late on Thursday night. He had started things off with a night-fishing expedition with yet ANOTHER fishing buddy up on Wilson Lake. Now he was ready for a fresh new fishing buddy on the next Tennessee River lake down the chain. All these guys are married. Apparently there is nothing better than getting together with like prisoners for a rebellious weekend of R and R. No shaving, no yard work, watch all the sports you want, fish whenever you like, forget the exercise routine. Even if there is a storm coming and lightning in the distance, there is no nagging sweet female voice to say "Honey, are you sure you should be out in a boat in that weather?" No one to say "don't even THINK about gutting that fish on my clean counter." And on guy weekends, you can leave the toilet seat up the entire weekend.

And apparently you can smoke cigars. A lot of cigars. Inside.

"Why inside?" I asked when the boy weekend was over and it was OK for me to enter back into the picture. To clean, I assumed. I walked into the camp, and immediately the unmistakable scent of cigar smoke clung to my skin/hair/clothes, permeated by lungs.

"Too cold to smoke outside."

"But you were FISHING outside?"

"Which is why we needed to come INSIDE to warm up."

But at least this cigar smoke aroma was not the cheap cigar stink of my youth when everything returned to us from my aunt's house had to be washed because cheap Hav-A-Tampa molecules clung to it. Even a returned empty clean DISH had to have the cigar smell scalded off.

No, this was infinitely better than that. Fruity, smoky, earthy, and with a hint of testosterone thrown in. I learned a lot about cigars in about five minutes. I saw all the various cigar rings to prove there had been a veritable cigar smorgasbord. Here are some other things I gleaned about boy weekends from what my husband said casually in conversation.

1) On boy weekends, if your boat malfunctions, it is not necessary to turn red in the face and complain in a loud voice and end up kicking the boat trailer tires when your attempts to fix the problem do not work. On boy weekends, you just pull the boat out of the water, stand around looking useful while you eat an entire sack of Maple Nut Goodies, and you let your fishing buddy friend fix the problem. Problem solved :-)

2) On boy weekends, boys can actually wash dishes for themselves. And cook.

3) At the end of a boy weekend, it is not necessary to become sad because the weekend is over and you are looking around at all the chores you did not complete to perfection, sigh. In fact, at the end of a boy weekend, you can look around at your lot, trashed from high winds, and shrug and say "it'll be here next week," go back inside, and watch some more sports.

Maybe I'm ready for a boy weekend myself.

But with a pedicure. And the toilet seat down.

New Ground

2011-05-08T16:38:00.000-07:00

Growing up, we called a 'new ground' a swath of land that had just been cleared. There were certain crops that grew best in a new ground. My grandfather cleared a new ground down by a creek for his tomato, canteloupe, and melon fields. A new ground was rough and naked, the land pocked from tree root balls, and of course in Coosa County which had good soil but too many rocks, there would be years and years of plowing up rocks and removing them from the land before the new fields were tame. Clearing a new ground was hard work. The land looked like there had been a war between man and nature and man had not won but was claiming the victory anyway.

This past Thursday I drove down the west side of the state, on my way to a conference in South Alabama. I went via Tuscaloosa, where I needed to deliver some items to my son who lives there. I sent a text to my friend Philip Shirley. Philip and Virginia are transplanted Alabamians living in Missisippi. Philip sent my text message back with line breaks.

Tarp Cities

Driving South
through the cotton flats below Russellville where it rained tarpaper,
to the vanished town of Phil Campbell
where one man said "I saw it come out of the woods
about a hunderd foot away, black smoke like a tire fire,"
to a flattened stretch near Berry,
blown apart houses and contents,
to the part of Tuscaloosa sucked up
twisted and laid bare,
I saw church groups under tarp cities
cooking hamburgers
on grills for a week now,
the smell of raw snapped pines
still in the air. And I had to think:

Why are you here?
Why are any of you still here?
Take pictures and leave.
There is nothing left
except heartache and work for bulldozers.
Further south, near Skyland,
the old damage--three weeks gone--
now an old wound,
the leaves on the downed trees
brown as a scab.

After the conference, I drove up through the heart of Alabama from Greenville an hour and a half below Montgomery then north through Birmingham to Hanceville to Cullman where I headed northwest for the Mississippi/Tennessee line, passing through Moulton on my way to the Shoals, the fall-line of the Tennessee River.

I saw so many new grounds that I lost count. Land where the trees were ripped up and missing, the very grass sucked down to the bare dirt. Other strips where forests were pushed over in one direction, then a half mile up the road, the tiny corn seedlings unharmed and the homes with green lawns and flowers.

Learning How to Eat

2011-04-26T12:18:00.000-07:00

I am rural, Southern, and slow to catch on.

But no one ever had to teach me how to eat.

Back in the winter a book rep gave me a copy of EAT, PRAY, LOVE, and I threw it down in disgust when the protagonist had to go to Italy in order to learn how to eat. Hey, I know the food in Italy is incredible, but she was from NEW YORK. They have really good food there, too.

I would not bring this topic up, but this re-learning how to eat thing seems to be catching on. People suddenly 'forget' how to eat and have to be taught again. Forgetting how to eat has become the metaphor du jour for forgetting how to live life to its fullest, forgetting to be in the moment and enjoy it.

I can be in a really sad place in my life and still have a memorable food moment.

My earliest memory of a death in the family is when my uncle died. I was four. I remember the strawberry layer cake, four pink layers with the same pink shade of icing. In my mind, I see it sitting on the kitchen counter in my grandmother's kitchen. I envision it from the low perspective of a short 4 year old looking up at the cake. By the time I was 9 I had the recipe for that cake and had made it in a three-layer version. I still have the recipe for that strawberry cake and think about it each and every spring.

Everybody knows that in the South when somebody dies that the very best cooks dust off their very best recipes in order to minister to the suffering.

Just today I saw a blurb for Julianna Baggott's (under her writing name Bridget Asher) new novel THE PROVENCE CURE FOR THE BROKENHEARTED.

"An absorbing, beautifully written tale about life, death, love, food, and the magic of new possibilities." - J. Courtney Sullivan

Food and the magic of new possibilities.

Hmmmm. Bring it on.

Just so long as somebody hasn't forgotten how to eat in a place like New York City and has to be taught how to do it all over again.

home

Out of My Mind: When Mobile Homes Start to Look Good

2011-04-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday my husband left to get a haircut at 9:30 AM and returned at noon to tell me out-of-the-blue he had just bought a trailer. A used mobile home. Not a travel home but a used 14' by 52' refurbished dwelling-type trailer.

Those who disapprove of trailers always SAY the same thing. "Sixty percent of dwellings flattened by tornadoes in Alabama are mobile homes." But what they are thinking is this. Dang, they're ugly. It is best not to speak this last thought out loud, however, because way more than sixty percent of the people of Alabama still alive and not killed by a tornado have at one time or another lived in a trailer. You don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

I should have suspected something was up when a couple of weeks ago as we were driving down Gunwaleford Road in Lauderdale County my husband, deep in thought, murmured. "Under the right circumstances, a trailer looks pretty good." Gunwaleford Road is a showcase of Alabama trailerdom. It is like the living encyclopedia of inhabited trailer history. Expensive double wides, 1950s rusted turquoise models, travel trailers used as permanent residences, you name it. One 4th of July weekend I will never forget, a towed, full-sized trailer sat at a jaunty angle half in Gunwaleford Road and half under a live oak where the large hulk of the trailer had somehow slid almost completely off its towing mechanism. Driving down Gunwaleford Road, one had to slow down and navigate around the abandoned trailer and get a good look at it. It appeared as though it had already been abandoned for a decade before this last fateful voyage, its windows open, faded curtains flapping in the breeze.

Something was up, alright, but I failed to take note.

The 'right circumstances' turned out to be that Goody Hill (not his real name, but you may remember him from my fiction), has been run off from his rental house in town by Shauntrice (not her real name, but she was Goodknight Hill' s wife, remember). Now Goody is homeless and he and my husband have a scheme. Goody has two acres of land left to him by his daddy and granddaddy up in the country, two acres just begging for a trailer. My husband knows better than to come ask me, a woman elbow-deep in income tax documents, trying desperately to find a few more deductions. My husband just pulled out his checkbook, closed his eyes, and wrote. And now Goodknight Hill has a trailer.

When my friend Virginia Shirley heard that my husband had bought a trailer, she wrote "Anita, have you lost your touch, dear?"

Yes, Virginia, I have. Obviously. And also, by the way: there is a Santa Claus.

So yesterday around sunset, my husband and I ride with Goody out to see the two ancestral acres.

And this is the part of the story I am not expecting.

When I wrote about Goodknight Hill in fiction, I did not know that Goody HAD two acres. I certainly did not know where it was.

But when we pass the church (Goody points to it and says he was once a member) and turn into what the sign says is "Hill Lane," it was just as I had described it in the story. In the story, Goody and the husband narrator of the story have a footrace down this very sandy unpaved lane. In the story, there is an abandoned frame house "falling down in a tangle of bare vines and saplings" and a bent cedar almost in the road, victim of a long ago ice storm. And here it is, right in front of me--land/cedar/house/vines--just as I had imagined, just as I had thought it would be, the house even on the same side of the road as I had seen it in my mind.

A lovely spring evening unfolds as we walk around on the two acres, Goody showing us all the possible places to put the trailer.

Later, back at home, I share my fiction deja vu with my husband. We explain it away as coincidence. We're in Alabama. Everyone has a falling-in 'home house' somewhere.

But the reality is that there are no lanes on Gunwaleford Road. All the houses and trailers are right on the road. There are no long sandy lanes with an abandoned unpainted frame home, covered in re-growth, on the left, a bent cedar serving as a landmark for a footrace.

The reality is: I am in another world when I write. Or out of my mind.

Which, let's face it, we have all suspected for a long time about ourselves when we write.

Station Wagon Woman

2011-03-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

When you live in the far Northwest corner of Alabama so close to the Tennessee and Mississippi state lines that you could throw a stone and hit another state, it takes a while to drive to other places in your home state. I like to put the radio on 'scan' on these long hauls. Lots of gospel music, preaching, and slick car commercials. Some smooth soul sounds. An occasional old time bluegrass hour. NPR for news. But wherever you are in Alabama, there is always a country music station, loud, proud, and rowdy.

On a recent drive back from the state capitol in Montgomery, I hit one of these clear channel country stations blaring out a honky tonk inspired song about a "Pick-up Man". If you've heard the song, you know. The first person Romeo hero in this narrative is a man who indeed picks up women--in traffic jams, for instance, where he has picked up a couple of wives. But what makes him irresistible to the opposite sex is his choice of motor vehicle. The "pick-up man" drives a pick-up. As in 'truck'. Get it? The pick-up man is a pick-up man. Wink wink.

I have noticed that the pick-up truck is not the only sexy motor vehicle romanticized in contemporary country music (let's not forget the song "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy"), but since the pick-up is no doubt easier to drive on public roads, it has won out in popularity. Just this morning I pulled into the parking lot of my local grocery store, the one that prominently displays snuff and chewing tobacco, and right in front of me pulled a jacked up burgundy number with the front vanity plate reading "Bad Ass Boys Need Bad Ass Toys". You don't want the description of the young shirtless driver. Way too cliche.

I always had dreams of driving an old pick-up truck. One like my daddy's. Daddy was a man who believed a vehicle should never be improved with after-market gee-gaws and gadgets. Whatever rims and hubcaps Ford or GM put on at the factory was what a vehicle should have until it made its final trip to the crusher. I thought the column shift and bench seat were fun. I didn't care that it had no air conditioning. Then I saw Tom Hanks in "Castaway" and realized that the sexy artsy Texas chick driving the classic old pick-up with her winged logo on the tailgate had ruined it for me.

Chic old pickups are for chicks. I'm just a station wagon woman.

Driving a station wagon has not been cool since Doris Day moms in the 50s drove wood-paneled Chevy BelAirs as they chauferred kids to dance class and cub scouts. Still, a station wagon has some good points.

1) They generally get better gas mileage than most mini-vans, SUVS, and especially those great big pick-up trucks.

2) They can haul just about anything a pick-up truck can haul and keep the load dry while doing so. One exception is a refrigerator, since a refrigerator has to travel standing upright. For that, you have to have a pick-up truck.

3) Your teenage kids will not try to borrow your car.

4) In fact, no one will try to borrow your car.

5) When mini-vans and SUVs are in the shop because the on board DVD movie system is on the blink, you'll still be driving your station wagon. It never had a movie system.

6) While other people drive by the car dealerships drooling over the newer models, you will not waste time on such covetous materialism. If you bought a new car, what would you do with the station wagon? No one would buy it. You'd have a hard time giving it away to charity.

7) At my fave store (the feed and seed), I know exactly how to back up my station wagon to the loading dock to pick up the hay/feed/mulch/straw/etc. Great visibility. Plus when I get home and throw open the hatch, the load is on MY level: the short person's level.

And then the #1 reason for owning a station wagon:

8) As the dog ages, the lower station wagon tail gate is not so difficult for him to jump into the back of the station wagon and shake all that muddy river water onto the gigantic vinyl mat.

Somebody ought to write a song about it :-)

Halfway Between Equality and Richville

2011-03-10T18:50:00.000-08:00

There is hunger in Florence, Alabama.

You wouldn't think so to drive through this pretty little town with its thriving downtown and well-kept historic neighborhoods. At night when the restaurants are buzzing, it's hard to find a homeless person on the street.

Florence does not have the kind of grocery store where union labor stocks the shelves with freshly made sushi and baby watermelons straight from a Chilean summer. For the last two decades I have shopped at a neighborhood grocery store where snuff and chewing tobacco are prominently displayed and where the hourly-wage workers know nothing about 'bargaining power'. Organic milk--or organic anything, for that matter--is not available at this store.

The reason I have shopped here for the past twenty-three years is because it is close to where I live. I have never lived in a subdivision nor do I ever intend to. People from the "section 8 houses" (government subsidized) walk to this store daily for food and cigarettes. Because it is a small store-- easy to get to and easy to walk around in compared to the behometh Walmart located on the outskirts of town-- the elderly like to shop here. College students pop in for cases of the beverage du jour. But mainly it is the grocery store of the working poor. The featured items prominently displayed include a lot of saltines, white bread, cheap breakfast cereal, canned vegetables, and store-brand boxes of macaroni and cheese.

Through the years I have seen a lot of young mothers, usually with their babies in their grocery carts, sorting through envelopes of clipped coupons as they shop, working hard to save a dollar here or there. I have seen fast food workers still in their uniforms in the check-out line with a cart full of the makings for chili or spaghetti. Later in the afternoon, the construction guys come in for a six pack and something to throw on the grill. Very rarely have I been in line behind someone using food stamps or WIC cards.

This Tuesday I saw something at this store I had never before seen. It was around 4 pm and parents had just picked up children from school. This is a popular time for people to grab a few items before heading home to make dinner. I was there myself for toilet paper, some grapes and a bag of rice, not an entire cart of groceries. As I picked up a basket and headed down the first aisle, a kid, maybe 8 years old, in badly fitting glasses, pleaded with his mom to buy a jar of mayonnaise. "But we're out!" He had picked up the mayonnaise from the sale floor display and held it up to show her the product as he pleaded. "You said!" he accused. "It's on sale." He held the jar of mayonnaise like a sports trophy above his head before he shifted it down to cradle it in a 'baby-doll' position. Whatever the mother said was whispered, but the kid in the glasses put the mayo back on the display and they headed for the checkout, a loaf of sliced bread the only item in her hands.

I don't think the reason they did not buy that jar of mayonnaise was because it was not organic.

Then on my way to find the toilet paper, I strolled by the meat counter. A man and woman in their 30s with two kids under the age of five held court at the hamburger section. They looked serious. They had obviously been in the store for a while because their cart was already relatively full of bags of potatoes, cans of green beans and corn, some dried beans, and several packs of the brand of hot dogs on sale this week. The dad had bought a store-brand grape soda from the cold drink machine, took a big swig from the can, and then handed it to the little girl, telling her to share it with her brother. When the wife showed him a package of hamburger meat, it was time for a conference. You could tell that they were adding up the cost of what was already in their cart and trying to decide if they could afford the hamburger meat. But what killed me, really killed me, was the pleading look in her eyes as she asked her husband if they could buy it, as she tried to rationalize the expenditure, there at 4 pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Florence, Alabama. She would really like to have the hamburger meat for her family, but they must first consult the rest of their grocery list and see if there would be enough money to buy it and the rest of the necessities they would need that week.

My grandfather was an accomplished gardener. By the time I was old enough to ride the school bus to his farm in the afternoons, he had two gardens. One was to supply food for his family. The other was to give vegetables to anyone else who needed food. One of my aunts was outraged by the people who came by to fill up bags with tomatoes, green beans, corn, and onions, people she had labeled as 'sorry people'. "They're just using him," she would say. "Just too lazy to make a garden for themselves." My grandfather smiled at my aunt and never said a word as he kept on cutting lettuce and pulling onions and radishes out of the ground and putting them into the trunks or back seats of the cars of anyone who stopped by and asked. My grandfather's farm was--and this is God's truth--halfway between Equality and Richville. My brother found the road sign the state of Alabama bulldozed when they widened the intersection there at my grandfather's farm. To the left: Equality. To the right: Richville. We were located halfway between the two.

Coosa County is a great poor man's county. Halfway between the struggle for equality and whatever lay on the other end of the spectrum. When my ancestors gave up owning slaves and moved there, I am not sure they knew what the future held other than hoping it was something more fair. Happier times, if no longer Richville.

It worries me that we seem to be drifting more and more toward what Jimmy Santiago Baca described in 1977 as "only a few people got all the money in this world, the rest count their pennies to buy bread and butter". My father came back from WW2 and never told us anything at all except that he had seen a man shoot another man dead over a wheel of cheese. Later we found out that Daddy had been in several major battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, and that he had sat on a snow-covered 'bench' in Germany all winter as he ate his provisions only to find in the spring thaw that the 'bench' had been a frozen dead mule. We found out that he was wounded twice and one of only two people from his platoon to live through the entire war. But of all the horror he must have seen, of all the unspeakable horror there was in WW2, what he wanted me and my brother to know was this: given the right circumstances of hunger, people will do what they feel they have to do.

Butter or bullets is not a new dilemma, but in the meantime as our country figures out the latest round of this, maybe this is not the time to rub our gourmet acquisitions in the faces of others. As Julianna Baggott's recent FaceBook post read: "Dear food gloaters who upload pics of their (gorgeous) meals, as Sister Mary Bertha would say: Did you bring enough for everyone?"

Sunday Lunch: Memory vs Reality

2011-03-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

Is there anything more Southern than sitting at your mama's table for Sunday lunch? You know, that meal you thought about as the sermon ended and the closing prayer dragged on and on. It was a meal worth spilling gravy on a silk tie.

To be truthful, I always knew what the menu was and never sat in church wondering about it. In fact, I did not sit in church very much at all. Growing up, I thought the world was divided into two kinds of folks: those who attended church, and those who stayed home to cook 'dinner'. My grandmother, we all knew, used the cooking excuse as a way to avoid church attendance, but I never heard anyone worry about the state of her soul when the state of her fried chicken and lemon pie were so divine. All my grandfather had to do upon his return home from church services was to take off his hat, wash his hands, and say a blessing. It was a compromise of religious differences they had settled into over the years.

Yet there were always plenty of hands around to help my grandmother make everything fresh and from scratch. Having seventeen people sit down to eat was not unusual (I remember because my job as a child was to set the table), and the children sat right at the table alongside the grown ups. Here is where I learned about politics, the weather, crops, the New York Yankees, snipe hunting, local folklore, and fishing. Lots about fishing. Where fish were biting, what they were biting, and how they should be cooked when caught, for starters. What I did not learn sitting at that table: gossip, hearsay, rumor, or anything at all dealing with the covered parts of one's body.

Attending church services is still a big part of Sunday morning in much of the rural South. But I'm not so sure that Sunday lunch at Mama's is practiced very much these days. Where we live, church members often try to persuade church leaders to schedule services to end early enough for those attending to make it to the local restaurants before the lines get too long. I've eaten at some of these restaurants, so I can tell you this is a real shame. It pains me to think some child will remember as her Sunday lunch the instant pudding at Ryan's and that her parents were in a panic to get there before the lines were out the door.

I have always enjoyed planning and preparing Sunday lunch. I like getting up early on Sunday to get the meal started. I like getting out my grandmother's scratched and battered walnut flatware box and picking out which serving spoons and place settings we'll need. I like going out into the yard in my robe on a cold spring morning and cutting for the table baby's breath and a few jonquils and the fragrant hyacinths my husband's grandmother gave me for my birthday years ago. When they'd finished blooming, I just stuck the bulbs into the rich black soil of my backyard, and every spring it's as if Grandmother has come once again to grace us with her presence at our table. The blue of the hyacinths reminds me of the blue of her eyes. She could be a tough old lady, downright mean at times, but she was an excellent dinner guest.

Here is a piece of menu advice if you are thinking about re-visiting the tradition of Sunday lunch or creating a Sunday lunch for the first time. Stick with the favorites. Sunday lunch is not the time to experiment with odd spices and too many new recipes all at the same time. This past Sunday, I tried a new recipe that was so bad that we sulked around all afternoon trying to think of ways to get the memory out of the house. Even dessert didn't help, and everyone knows that Sunday lunch is never Sunday lunch without dessert and coffee.

None of us ever knew how my grandmother made that lemon pie. For the last thirty years we've tried to piece our memories together to make a recipe, but nothing yet has come up to that standard of blissful excellence.

The Kind of Old Person You Want to Be

2011-03-01T05:36:00.000-08:00

I am not sure how this is a "talking in accents" Southern blog entry except to say that growing up Southern insured that I had a close relationship with all four of my grandparents and that from family stories I can tell you trademark witticisms--family 'catch phrases'-- of most of the rest of my ancestors back to the beginning of recorded history.

In most Southern families, these are usually buzz words for cautionary tales. Say for instance, you are shoe shopping with Aunt Edna and suddenly forget where you are and begin talking loudly about your cousin Amber's bad meth problem and the way she and her drug addict husband have taken out credit cards in Amber's daddy's name that it has taken Amber's daddy months to straighten out. Aunt Edna simply says one thing: "Well, she's another "Augustine" for sure." "Augustine" being code for: "yes, honey, there is that criminal strain in our bloodline, but this kind boy who just hauled five shoe boxes of boots out of the store room for you to try on and whose mouth is agape really should not be privy to your monologue about how Amber and her drug addict husband showed up at the Baptist church and--summarizing and giving just the Readers' Digest Condensed version of their sins-- took a record 45 minutes to confess."

Point taken, Aunt Edna.

That said, let me also point out that most of the family witticisms recorded in the oral histories of Southern families are probably from OLD PEOPLE. Pay attention to that. What that says is this: no matter how young and cute and smart you have been all of your life, what your family is going to remember about you is something you say when you are OLD.

All I know about my grandfather's grandfather Miller who lived to be 95 years old is this one statement. "Old people are either old and sweet or old and hellish." Family history reports that Grandfather Grandfather Miller was of the latter type.

My Great Grandmother Boyett, on the other hand, was reported as being kind, gentle, sweet, loving, good-natured, and always with a smile on her face. Good thing, because the other women of the family aged into bitter crones, capable of blistering car paint with their withering tirades and guilt-inducing whines.

My own mother was going for the Great Grandmother Boyett sweetness model and was doing an admirable job of adopting the 'gentle and smiling' thing until she fell and hit her head and checked out for the next world. I really hate that. It would have been easy for me to think of her perseverence into the world of "old and sweet" as she aged and used that picture in my mind's eye as my own role model. As it is, I have a struggle on my hands.

I can do a reasonable impression of the 'old and sweet' most days, but Spring just ticks me off. Two weeks ago there was snow on the ground and I walked around like Susie Sunshine having a positive attitude about it. People were dying on the highways because not only did they not know how to drive on black ice but the State of Alabama was doing precious little in the way of highway maintenance. Yet I was able to smile and be positive and gush at the beauty of frozen precip.

Then yesterday morning I got up and everywhere I looked around town gorgeous fluffy white and pink trees had popped overnight into extravagant bloom. AND IT WAS NOT EVEN MARCH YET. Danger buzzers went off in my brain. Don't these fool trees know that they have no business doing this, that there WILL be a freeze and they will transform into brown slimy bruised trees just as suddenly as they had morphed into prom dresses. What I really (and I mean REALLY) felt like doing was marching up to that gigantic pink tulip tree on the lawn of First Christian Church and really giving it a piece of my mind. A finger-wagging telling-off school teacher talking-to.

But do I really want to be remembered that way? Should the local newspaper take a picture of me doing this and publish it as a human interest story, would that then be my legacy? What kind of old person do I really want to be: old and sweet? Or old and hellish?

I really have some serious work to do.

The future is much closer than we think.

Good Biscuits

2010-10-14T05:42:00.001-07:00

It just makes me sick to think of myself as a foodie, those people who use their cell phone cameras to take pictures of every dish at every meal, posting them on their FaceBook pages. But I have to admit, there are two experiences that can really improve an otherwise depressing day: a top notch book of short stories and (dare I admit it) a good biscuit.

It has been a feast week around my house this week since I scored some fine collections of short stories at the Southern Book Festival in Nashville last weekend. Ron Rash's and Brad Watson's duet reading in one of the courtrooms at the state capitol was made even better by the fact that they each read a piece of a story by a favorite author before reading their own stories. Rash read from William Gay's work, and Watson read from Barry Hannah's. I brought home Rash's Burning Bright as well as Watson's Aliens in the Prime of Life. Both are deeply satisfying.

Which leads me to that other deeply satisfying food for the Southern soul: good biscuits. Yesterday in the grocery store as I was casually browsing the flour, there it was: WHITE LILY UNBLEACHED SELF-RISING FLOUR. Biscuits are in my future. I feel safe saying that I know biscuits as well as I know short stories, which is to say: on more than just a first-name basis. We're talking intimate knowledge here. I think and breathe short stories. I feel them in my blood. My life has unfolded in a series of short stories. I have friends who named their first-born Flannery, for crying out loud. Well, biscuits and I go back even farther, even deeper than that. Short stories did not appear on my horizon until Captain Kangaroo had Mr. Green Jeans read to us from a Little Golden Book. Biscuits were part of my life well before I could walk. I made biscuits as a child with my mother and both grandmothers. I had my own little biscuit pan.

Now here is the next question from the foodie snobs: "What KIND of biscuits?" they will ask. What these people are getting at is this: are your biscuits made from organic local flour milled on a small farm within easy driving distance of Alton Brown/Frank Stitt/Scott Peacock/Sister Angelica? Do you use lard, and if you do, did you personally meet the pig and shake hands with the butcher who slaughtered him and rendered the pure white sweet shortening? Did you make your own buttermilk from whole pasteurized (but NOT homogenized) milk from grass fed cows less than 50 miles from your home? Or, better still, do you have your own milk cows?

At one time or another, I have been able to answer 'yes' to all of the above. But a fine biscuit is more than just the sum of its heirloom, pedigreed parts.

In the South, in the past, the type of biscuits people ate indicated much about their backgrounds. In Virginia, the beaten biscuit with the right kind and cut of ham still carries a certain cachet. In the Deep South, the cathead, buttermilk biscuit along with sawmill gravy was standard fare of the working, hard-scrabble farmer while the more delicate baking powder biscuit cut out of rolled dough using a biscuit cutter was eaten by more refined folk.

I do not discriminate against a biscuit because of its origins.

The Hardee's in Loretto, Tennessee, makes the best country ham biscuit I have eaten in quite a while. The large biscuits are an ode to flour and buttermilk. They are baked in a hot oven and their crispy brown crusts are basted in butter while they are still hot. I suspect lard, sugar, some alien ingredient such as "cotton seed oil extract derivative" and storebought buttermilk are key ingredients. I do not care. Just thinking about them makes me want to skip class, grab my dog, and drive across the state line for them.

In the meantime, here is a HIGHLY unauthorized version of my niece's recipe for super easy but super good biscuits. Sorry, no pictures. You're just going to have to imagine it. You know, like: in your mind.

Regan's (Unauthorized, Highly Modified) Easier-than-Pie BISCUITS

2010-10-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:
White Lily UNBLEACHED Self Rising Flour (1 part)
Whipping Cream (2 parts)
Buttermilk
Butter, the best you can buy (Cabot's)

Day in Advance: Pour whipping cream into a jar large enough to hold it and 2-3 T of buttermilk. Put top on jar and shake well before placing in a warm spot for 24 hours or until the whipping cream has soured and curdled ('clabbered'). Yum.

1. Get out your great-great grandmother's bread board and measure into it twice as much flour as you have 'clabber'. Don't bother sifting the flour. Just take a whisk and stir it around a bit. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F, making sure the rack is positioned in the middle of the oven.

2. Make a 'well' in the center of the flour and pour in most of the 'clabber'. Gently, gently, gently fold the flour up into the the liquid. Slowly. Introducing the flour into the liquid and giving it time to absorb, coaxing it, not beating it into submission. Take the reserved liquid and sprinkle it onto the places where there is obviously too much flour. After a minute or two, you will be able to lightly knead the dough (turn it and fold it) about twice. The less you handle the dough, the more tender the biscuits.

3. This next step is up to you. If your great great grandmother's bread board came with a rolling pin and you still have it, you may want to gently roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface until the dough is about 1" thick and cut the biscuits with a biscuit cutter dipped into flour after each cut, being careful not to 'twist' the biscuits as you cut them. Maybe your family tradition is to pinch the dough off in large walnut-sized pieces and shape them with the rounded cups of your palms into round biscuits, patting them a bit to flatten them after you place them onto the greased baking sheet. It's your choice. For some reason, I always place handformed biscuits touching each other on the baking sheet. Cut biscuits I always have well separated.

4. Bake in that preheated oven until lightly golden brown on the top and bottom. The time will vary according to how big and how thick you made your biscuits and how true your oven temp is. Just turn on your oven light and watch them. Is that so hard?

5. Melt 2-3 T of that Cabot butter and baste the tops and sides of the hot biscuits as they come out of the oven. Serve them piping hot and pass plenty of butter and homemade preserves such as seedless blackberry or fig with lemon and vanilla.

Regan's (Unauthorized, Modified) Easier-than-Pie BISCUITS

2010-10-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

Getting My Hands Back

2010-09-22T12:35:00.001-07:00

I have not had the full use of my hands, for the most part, since 1977. A month here or there I could completely use them. But mainly, I've been handicapped. By choice. I chose to have longish fingernails, and since my natural fingernails are rather small and way too flexible, I have been a slave to fingernail polish and work habits that either used sturdy gloves or involved some kind of outstretched finger posture in which the fingers were glamorous straight appendages. Growing up, I was never a glamorous straight appendage kind of girl. I always wanted my hands completely involved in mud pies, threading a worm on a hook, potting a plant, making pie crusts. Well, OK, I would WASH my hands before making the pie crust. Even I didn't like grubby little hands.

But a few months ago I asked the woman giving me a pedicure why the sudden pedicure craze. Was there not a similar manicure craze? She informed me that she did many more pedicures than manicures and that a sizable percentage of her pedicure clients did not seem to take the same interest in their fingernails as they did their toenails. They wanted their cuticles neat, but the actual nails on their hands short. Whereas with the toes, they wanted longer, more luxurious looking nails with flamboyant, stylish colors. She went on to say that she saw this as a natural response to our national obsession with hand-sanitizers and hand-washing. "People don't want long fingernails," she said, "because they see them as dirty."

So all summer long my nails have been getting shorter and shorter and shorter until the Auburn/Clemson game last Saturday night when, oops, they got as short as they can possibly get :-) Just a thin white curve of parenthesis at the end of each finger.

I am trying not to flaunt this in the face of the Nail Police (i. e. Husband) who sees long nails as proof of proper grooming and the lack thereof as slovenliness. Hey, my nails are groomed. They are just not long . Neat cuticles and one coat of base coat.

But what these hands can DO. The dough hook on the Kitchen Aid mixer is not nearly as much fun as hand kneading, for instance. Last weekend I had fun with pie crusts.

And then there is the piano. Try playing a Mozart sonata with your fingers all stretched out straight. Then cut off all your fingernails and use your individual fingers like tiny little hammers.

More and more and more and more. It's all coming back to me.

Shoe: Mid-air

2010-07-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

I don't think "waiting for the other shoe to drop" is a Southernism, but it approaches the feeling I have had for the last ten years, knowing that my husband had been diagnosed with a severe case of a pre-cancerous condition for which there was no treatment, no way to go back in the other direction and erase the bad cells, just wait around until it turned into cancer and see what had to be removed. Did I mention this concerned his esophagus? A toe you can remove and still hobble around, but an esophagus?

The experience has been like falling off a very high cliff in very slow motion.

And to complicate matters, every year my husband lived with this condition the chances increased that it would become life threatening. It was like we were in some weird kind of cancer roulette that we could never escape from playing.

And it's not as if the problem were ever far from our minds. We could never blissfully ignore it for any stretch of time. There were meds to take at precise times every morning and night. A list on the refrigerator of what to eat, what not to eat, and when to eat it (forget eating out since restaurants can rarely tell you what is in their food). Each night we slept in a bed that is noticeably higher at the head than at the foot, like sleeping on a hill on a camping trip. Then there are the periodic biopsies and cute Polaroids of the stretch of affected esophagus. We would get out our little gallery of previous Polaroids and compare them. Is the affected area actually darker here? Larger now than it was five years ago?

When you wear a pair of ill-fitting shoes, you never really know how bad the pain is until you take them off.

This week we took off the shoes.

After ten years of waiting, finally a treatment has emerged that studies show to be successful.

Of course, living in the South, we had to drive to a city five hours away to receive this treatment. No problem. We would have driven to Alaska, if that's what it had taken.

Last Wednesday my husband had his second successful treatment, and the doctor predicted that when he sees my husband in December that the bad tissue will be 100 percent gone. And then, with corrective surgery, my husband will be off his meds for perhaps up to 8-10 years before more surgery may be required.

Last night in bed my husband rolled over onto his stomach and cradled his pillow. "This is how I used to like to sleep," he said, his face happy, expectant, hopeful.

He didn't have to tell me. I remembered.

My Life With Bugs

2010-06-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf has awakened almost everyone to environmental issues. People who have never had one thought about gas consumption or pollution have now been forced to see the tar balls on those stunning white sugar sand stretches in Alabama and Florida. All those fun fishing trips to the coast have come to a halt. And who knows when fishing can resume? Or if.

On a personal note, I find that even though my involvement in environmental awareness has been pitifully small, as a Southerner who loves the land, maybe even I can be labeled "tree hugger". When my husband and I bought our first new car in 1980, we chose the model that got the best gas mileage (47 mpg) and didn't blink that it didn't have air conditioning. When we bought lake property twenty years ago, it took us fifteen years to buy a water toy that required gasoline. We had three canoes, one sailboat, and six windsurfing boards. Our kids were almost grown before we broke down and bought a fishing boat with a Mercury outboard. We didn't like the way oil products looked when spilled in the water. We were odd.

But whereas we may be odd as a couple, I'm pretty sure my husband is secretly convinced I am beyond odd and over into Crazyville. I don't really like to use a clothes dryer, for one thing. I don't really feel comfortable in central air-conditioning, for another. And then the worst of all: I don't really mind bugs.

In the spring, every spring, ants appear at my kitchen sink. It's one way I know spring has arrived. They do not invade my stored food in the pantry. They do not wander around the house. They just like my sink. Sometimes there will be a strawberry top that I forget to grind up in the disposal. This really excites them and they begin turning out in droves. I sprinkle cleanser in the sink and leave it for a few hours and the ants disappear. I don't see a problem with this.

Similarly, in the fall, spiders like to show up in the corner of the downstairs bathroom. They like to build comfy webs on the front porch and work their way through the facings around the French doors in the family room. Spiders are just a part of a house. Their webs remind you when it is time to vacuum more than the floors.

And then there are the roaches. We live in the historic district where large roaches sometimes called Palmetto bugs live in the trees and will fly into your house at night if you leave the door open while you're getting in the dog or going to the car for the second bag of groceries. In the day time they apparently sleep, but when the sun goes down, they have a party out in the back yard. Once I burned some brown rice on the stove and raced the pan out into the yard so that the smoke would not smell up the house. The next morning when I went to retrieve the pan, there were no less than fifty roaches having a picnic. Burned basmati must be roach chum. With this kind of outside population, every once in a while, some of them try to make a run into the house. I don't like them, but I can pick them up and sweep them back outside when I see one.

Here is where the two heads collide in the marriage . I grew up in the country where I saw plenty of bugs, wasps, spiders, worms, bees, hornets, and garden pests. I would rather live with a few than spray poison in my home to kill them. I don't want to breathe the poison. I don't want to walk in the poison. I don't want my dog rolling around in the poison.

I think I know how my other half feels. The only acceptable insect in the house is his boyhood butterfy collection, and they've been dead quite a while.

For some people, a live insect in a house is the surest sign of slovenliness. Ants spread disease. Bees and wasps are Satan's handmaidens. And all spiders came directly from "Arachnophobia".

My concession to the roach thing was to spray a protective barrier around the perimeter of the outside of the house. Now when the roaches get inside, they are in their wobbly death throes, crawling around in a drunken, dying frenzy.

My mother-in-law's exterminator paid us a visit. For some reason, he thought we needed his services.

Whenever I doubt my principles on this, I think of the older woman I met at the roadside vegetable stand in Richmond. She was the typical older Virginia housewife, the kind who swept her porch morning and night, starched and ironed her white curtains every spring and fall, who knew when to can Hanover tomatoes, make applesauce, wait for the first snowfall to take her Oriental rugs outside and give them a good beating facedown in the drifts. I was standing at a bin of Silver Queen corn, complaining under my breath at all the corn worms eating through the silks into the rows of kernels, trying to find a dozen ears fit to buy.

She gave me a withering look and loaded up a sack with all it would hold. "The worms are how you know it's good," she said without smiling and in that unmistakeable Tidewater accent. "Won't kill the worms, won't kill you."

No one would have had the guts to call her a tree hugger to her face. She would have boxed their ears and whacked them over the head with an ear of corn.

New Video of County Rd 14 Tour

2010-05-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

Be sure to see the new video with all my favorite photos from Coosa County and my voice guiding you through the tour.

Go to www.amgarner.com Then hit the magenta words at the bottom HEAR ANITA.

Have a fun trip!

Books-A-Dozen

2010-03-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

Carter Monroe issued a dare and if I were a betting woman I could have made some money off this one. I knew it instantly.

"Go to your local big bookstore and find the poetry section. What you'll probably find is that the greatest number of books by a single author are books by Charles Bukowski."

Maybe in your South, CM, but not in mine. Remember, we are so far away from an interstate highway that nothing but Mom and Pop grocery stores want to serve our inhabitants. Our idea of a chain food store is one that also has stores in Gravel Hill, Slow Market, and Hog Level.
My guess is that the only reason we even have a big box bookstore is that the chain actually originated here. Kind of. In a way.

Always anxious to prove myself right, I drove out to our local Books-A-Million. For Florence, Alabama, this can be the highlight of the day, something to truly look forward to. The coffee guy brewed me a fresh one and I took off on my stroll around the store.

My first stop: the information desk. I buy a lot of poetry books, but I usually buy them at poetry readings and get them signed by the authors. I had never looked for poetry in the store before.

"Where is the poetry section?" I asked, in a normal voice.

Five people turned from the books they were inspecting to look to see what crazy woman had asked for the poetry section, maybe to see if they needed to call the police.

"Over there," the worker pointed. "Underneath that sign that says Poetry."

There are a lot of shelves in four foot sections in Books-A-Million. A whole lot. Even the regional section takes up maybe four or five of these 4' x 6' sections. Poetry had one. Which may sound kind of generous until you realize that the books were spread out like they were rare and delicate objects in a museum, too risky to let them touch. There were so few of them that they were not slotted onto the shelves with the spines showing. They were placed solidly against the back of the shelves, the full covers on view. And even at that, the shelves looked sparse.

But here is what you really want to know: what passes for poetry in Florence, Alabama.
Keats, Whitman, Donne, Dickinson, and the Brownings all had nice little books that would be a pleasant addition to a sick person's basket of goodies. Then there were the poems for romantic occasions: Rumi's Love Poems. There was Dante, a 'new' translation of the Bhagavad Gita,
several misplaced prose books on finance, Helen Steiner Rice's GOD'S PROMISES FROM A-Z,
Bartlett's, Yeats, Eliot, POEMS THAT LIVE FOREVER (over 300,000 copies sold, America's Favorite Poems of Love, Humor, Faith, and Inspiration), Lord Byron, Tennyson, Khalil Gibran, more Dante. The books were not listed alphabetically at all or by any other system I could fathom. Then suddenly there were about 8 titles by Maya Angelou, and interspersed around, 3 titles by Billy Collins. Tucked away on the bottom shelf were Tupac Shakur, Leonard Cohen, 2 titles by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, and then THE FLASH OF LIGHTNING BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN by Charles Bukowski, the rest of the Bukowski books having previously flown off the shelf in an earlier mad buying frenzy, no doubt.

I sat in the aisle for quite a while sipping my coffee and looking at the covers. I got up and picked up the big thick 20 dollar Pablo Neruda and decided to buy it. Just as I was turning to leave, a slim little volume caught my eye, buried beneath two other books at the edge of the shelf, the cover turned 'just so' so that it was carefully hidden. TALES OF TRAVEL EROTICA FOR LESBIANS, Vol 2. But from the looks of it, it was a prose book.

Teaching "The Cherry Orchard" before Spring Break

2010-03-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

My students today were like handsome, well-trained horses. With pleasant expressions, they tried to sit still and endure my enthusiasm for Chekhov's dark humor and wit. But this was the last class before Spring Break began. No one wanted to talk and prolong things. And as the hour wore on, like polite horses growing impatient, they kept earnestly looking into my eyes, silently conveying their need to be let loose into the pasture where they could race up and down the lane at breakneck speeds. Or in this case, hop into the car already packed with swimsuits and sunscreen and speed off to the Gulf.

I tried to warn them: Don't be a Madame Ranevskaya, attempting to medicate the pain in your life by running off on romantic trysts to Paris with a man incapable of loving you. The way to love yourself is to take charge of your finances. Be realistic. When the world changes and the tsunami comes, stand alert and ready to stay afloat.

Right. That's exactly what they'll remember this week. That will be foremost in their minds as MTV films Girls Gone Wilder at Panama City Beach. In fact, I am sure they will mope around their hotel rooms, sipping tea and contemplating poor Madame Ranevskaya and the poignant Firs. All week long.

But just in case they do not, I have a plan for April ( that cruelest month) that should win them over. Baudelaire, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. After spring break, pollen, the spring equinox, and Daylight Saving Time have attacked their young, healthy bodies and given them a taste of their own mortality, that will be the perfect time to introduce ennui, "The Second Coming", and wasteland imagery. I can't wait for that cold, gray spring day with dreary, heavy rain to pull out "Spleen" with its prison bars of falling rain, its bats and spiders in the moldy recesses of the basement brain. I can't tell you how many times the weather has cooperated on the days when I have taught that poem . How many times have I read aloud the lines describing the prison bars of rain falling straight down while nature humors me and the dark low clouds outside pour while, inside, we watch the water stream off the roof in straight bars six inches apart? When you are cold and wet and have just walked across campus without your fancy decorated rain boots you forgot and left back in your large bedroom closet at home, so unlike this cramped dorm room closet you have to endure, and you have three more classes after this one, ennui may seem like a pretty good idea after all.

There is no need ever to grow bored teaching the same literature year after year. After all, the students keep changing, so there is always something new to look at. And they are so much stronger than I am or have ever been. Their clear brown eyes watch me, waiting for a sign that they are now allowed to leave. Their long legs, folded and cramped beneath the desks, fidget.

Teaching is not a bad way to spend one's life.

Unless you are in California where I hear 23,000 teachers were fired today.

But we are in Alabama where it takes ten years for whatever wave begins in California to reach us, where we have ten years to say 'no' to the trip to Paris, take charge of our finances, be realistic, stand alert, and stay afloat as the tsunami approaches.

Right.

How I Know Spring Will Come

2010-02-18T06:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, snow was still on my car. Still.

This is a very big deal here in Alabama where all of my life the jonquils have bloomed for my early February birthday. At the very least, those green shoots of daffodils should be a foot tall with the 'bump' of flower head making its way up the stalk. But they are still stumpy, afraid to take the risk. Yesterday morning when I went out to start my car and drive to work, my windshield was still covered by a solid sheet of ice with 1/2 inch of snow dusted on top. The yards and fields look 'beat down' and gray.

Then late yesterday I got a hurried email from my husband. "Let's spend the night at the camp so I can be on the river by dawn."

Easy for him to say.

I made dinner, packed up food for the cold empty camp that has seen no human residents for months, packed an extra blanket for the dog. When we arrived, our words made a frozen fog in the air. We turned on all the heat full blast, considered making a roaring fire, plugged in the fuses for the pump, and held our breath. We had water. Nothing was frozen. But the heat inside the chilled rooms was slow coming. We slept under two down comforters in our pajamas, our fleece, and our socks.

This morning the floor was still icy and the shower was warm only if your body didn't come into contact with the tiles. A steamy mug was welcome more as something warm to hold rather than to drink.

But the bright sun was up early, and my husband was like a kid at Disney World as he packed his gear and rubbed his face with sunscreen.

By tomorrow the high should approach the sixties for the first time in quite a while.

Maybe there was a reason the fat sliver of moon last night sported a great big grin. Maybe spring is on its way after all.

FOOTBALL (What else?)

2009-12-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

Why would a Southern blog about writing have an entry about football?
For one thing, my old VCU buddy Dick Mercer just finished reading UNDENIABLE TRUTHS and wondered why there was not a SEC football story in the collection. Dick, a big Michigan fan who used to fly the Big Blue M flag every game day, remembers all our heated discussions about the the bowl system vs playoffs, SEC vs Big 10, Michigan vs Alabama. In our kinder moments, we would share our fondest football memories. Dick has little reason to cheer these days. He claims that he has lost his taste for college football since it's become a game dominated by big money. Right.

Hey, Dick, if you're reading this: Sour grapes, buddy. If Michigan were headed to the BCS Championship Game in the Rose Bowl, I think you would be dusting off that Big Blue flag of yours and planning a big party for Jan. 7, forgetting all about how unfair the system is, forgetting the implied stance that right-thinking, morally-superior universities spend their dollars to fight real problems such as global warming, not on fun and pigskin games.

The above comment is, of course, trash talking. Smack talk. A smart-ass taunt. Commonly about sports. Smack talk is an American verbal pastime, not just a Southern one.

But my oh my how the words have flown since Saturday's game where the SEC's Crimson Tide of Alabama, the underdogs according to those who bet money, outscored the SEC's Florida Gators 32-13. It's like sundown and a full moon at the insane asyllum. Everybody's suddenly got a rant. When emotion runs high, the verbage runs on and on.

And it's not as if I'm seeking out these diatribes. I get on FaceBook to check a message from a non-Southern, non-SECfootball-fan friend and WHAM, smack talk. The majority of my FaceBook friends are not Alabamians, and a great many are not Southern, but I was amazed how many commented on Saturday's game. This is what I gleaned: there are people from all over the USA and other English speaking countries with satellite TV who apparently were not impressed with the media version of Tim Tebow and his showy public prayers. To them, Tim Tebow was a synonym for self conceit. I did not see any vulgar or pornographic comments regarding Florida's defeat. I saw a lot of relief from those who were now not going to have to continue watching what television has been showing them over and over this season and last: Tim Tebow, self-satisfied, reveling in his almost single-handed brute physical defeat of yet another "lesser" team. Of course he always threw in a few phrases such as 'god bless' at the end of his sound bites. After all, one would not want to appear full of hubris or lacking in humility.

SEC football is not an international sport, but television is no longer regional. My daughter in China gets most of her news from the BBC. She can watch any Alabama game in real time on her computer. I wonder what I would think if I were from another country and, unable to understand the words, only saw the visual images of last Saturday's game. Tim Tebow with Bible verses painted underneath his eyes, Tim Tebow who loves this violent bone-crushing game of football, Tim Tebow becoming more and more agitated as it became clear that one way the other team was winning was by keeping him out of the game, Tim Tebow crying when his team was defeated.

According to my friend Philip Shirley who was at the game and who writes about Alabama football, Tebow was the gentleman after the game, waiting to congratulate the winning team.

TV didn't dwell on that.

But all of that is behind us now. I feel a Thelma and Louise style road trip coming on. To the Rose Bowl. A serendipitous journey across Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the bottom part of the USA, all the way to Pasadena. The two characters arriving tired, dirty, and strung out on Red Bulls. Their mouths agape like Andy Griffith as they stand there looking at the stadium with its palm trees and mountains in the distance. I'm thinking novella. With a screenplay later.

But I'm going to need some "body experience".

Anyone want to help me drive?

Check it out: www.amgarner.com

2009-11-02T18:44:00.001-08:00

If You Love All That's Southern

2009-10-30T06:43:00.001-07:00

It's official: the new website is up and running: www.amgarner.com
You can read selections from UNDENIABLE TRUTHS plus my interview with Rank Stranger Press.

Also, a new, fun video of Southern Gothic: Philip Shirley reading his short-short story "Charisma" at www.philipshirley.com

That's What I Like About the South

2009-10-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

My new collection of short stories--UNDENIABLE TRUTHS--will be released November 1, and I can't deny that beneath my calm exterior there is an ember of excitement. No one could ask for an easier, more fun publishing experience than working with Carter Monroe and Rank Stranger Press. I still cannot figure out why a post-avant poet (Carter) would spend time and energy publishing a Deep South and rather conventional short story collection. Carter's own signature poetic persona is Billy Putrid: think Berryman's DREAM SONG narrator with a punk rock slant. I think of my own narrators--dog killers, forgetful ghosts, wistful country music musicians--and scratch my head. One thing is for sure: Carter can't walk a straight conversational line. If he calls to talk "business", before he is two sentences into the conversation, he will be telling me about the local North Carolina sausage he ate for breakfast. Or singing the lyrics to some obscure blues song. Carter has a great singing voice and is not shy about using it.

Carter attracts friends like a lost puppy. People would do anything for him, eager to jump on the bandwagon of his projects. This has worked to great advantage for me personally since his good friend Kristin Fouquet is not only a fine flash fiction writer but superb photographer. Kristin's photograph of a street musician is on the cover of UNDENIABLE TRUTHS. I could not have dreamt a better photo for the cover. If you are not familiar with Kristin's work, go to her website www.kristin.fouquet.cc and look at a few samples.

I keep waiting for the first shoe to drop, not the second. I keep waiting for Carter to freak out, for the galleys to come back in some hierglyphic-looking font, the spacing suddenly wrong on every line. I keep waiting for something to be DIFFICULT. But with Carter as weatherman, directing the fronts, I don't think that's going to be the case. I think a hurricane could shoot on-shore in North Carolina, drop 50 inches of rain, float Main Street Rag's press out into the Atlantic, and Carter would think about it, laugh about it, and forget about it.

Carter Monroe has nothing to prove and no one to impress.

And maybe that's what I like about the South.

The Squash Parade

2009-07-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

Although I only saw the film "Doc Hollywood" once, several years ago, it was one of the few movies I actually saw in its entirety when my children were small. As I remember, it was not a particularly good film but one of the few movies of that time period I didn't sleep through. Any film that starts out with a gorgeous Porsche roadster plowing into a wooden fence has my attention. O, the heartache! O, the waste! And then the question: can the Porsche be repaired?

Other than the wreck and repair (twice) of the roadster, I can't tell you much else about the plot of "Doc Hollywood," but I remember it served up a slightly off-kilter, comic comparison of life in the fast lane vs. life as I've always known it: life in the dirt lane. Other than the Porsche scenes, there is one other scene I've never quite forgotten. The little town had a parade honoring its most successful agricultural crop, the squash. The movie offered a solid rendering of the small town parade. Nothing like the Macy's parade on Thanksgiving or the Parade of Roses on New Year's Day. Just the local folks hamming it up, walking down the middle of main street and waving to their neighbors, some folks pretending to be dignitaries, another walking down the street leading a pig on a leash.

Through the years, I have remembered this movie scene as I have lived many Fourths of July in the manner the folks in the Bend of the River celebrate. Even those of us who have never been to D.C. or Boston to see the grand fireworks shows and to hear the Marine Band or the Boston Pops conspire on a summer night to make us feel some kind of patriotism deep down in our souls, well, even those who have never seen it in person have watched it on television, thanks to satellite dishes. So I think we know we are missing the mark, but that's not stopping us.

Two "must do's" during the daylight hours of July 4 in the Bend of the River are fishing and swimming. If it is a hot day, dig your worms early, go out and catch an entire stringer of crappie and as many big bass and you can. After you are thoroughly sweaty and sunburned, it's time to go swimming to cool off. The best place to swim, of course, is Smithsonia Light, a tiny island with its own tire swing and shell shallows. Where we fish, I'm not telling. The hog-sized bass that got away on Saturday must be a lake record, and we plan to go back with a better plan very soon.

The other daytime activities vary. Before dawn, the smoker was loaded with ribs, so you know at some point there is pork to eat, but in the meantime there is a swing on a shady screened porch, and next to it is a stack of unread books. There are three canoes, a sailboat, and of course the yard is strewn by this time in July with windsurfing equipment just waiting for 15-20 mph from the South. There is croquet, badminton, a White Mountain ice cream maker, ceiling fans, and a lot of crushed ice and drinks to go with it.

By the time dusk falls, we are applying the sunburn gels and watching the pre-show of the lightning bugs (fireflies)rise up from the lawn. For the last three days, kids have run down to their docks with fireworks 'teasers': a string of firecrackers, a handful of bottle rockets, an occasional Roman Candle launching its glowing red, green, and blue fireballs fifteen feet at the most into the air. About the time the lightning bugs reach the treetops, we grab our flashlights and lawn chairs and head out for the dock. We don't actually know for sure that there will be a fireworks show, but we're feeling lucky.

There are sparklers, Birthday Cakes, screaming MeMe's, more Roman Candles. By 9 pm a flotilla of bass boats, pontoon boats, and a few cabin cruisers have assembled about 200 feet out. When the first of the real fireworks appears--this year it was a large golden chrysanthemum shower with the report of a cannon--traffic comes to a halt on the Natchez Trace bridge. It's time to watch the show.

We don't know exactly who pays for this, but we suspect one of our neighbors must have an interest in TNT, the local fireworks company. This is not the kind of fireworks sold at the neighborhood Southern fireworks stand, a grubby trailer guarded at night by a mean dog and a guy with a shotgun loaded with bird shot. This is the kind of spectacular, coordinated fireworks show that could only be attempted by someone who has read the rulebook and served an apprenticeship. The show starts out slow but works up by degrees. People are catcalling and whistling, clapping and rebel-yelling. The double star helix in red-white-and blue creates a war-like yell of appreciation. So what if it's not Boston and instead of the Pops playing the cymbals in the background, someone has cranked up their stereo with Sweet Home Alabama for the forty eleventh dozen time? For the Bend of the River, it's grand.

Even the next morning early, kids are still running out onto the piers shooting off firecrackers and bottle rockets.

And I'm thinking I need to buy a copy of "Doc Hollywood" as my very own.

I need to see that Squash Parade one more time.

Homage to Frank's Peas

2009-06-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

I've been dreading writing about this but can no longer put it off. Our longtime friend Frank Johnson, grower of pink-eyed purple hull peas par excellence, died suddenly in January. At the funeral (which had the largest attendance of any funeral I have ever attended, despite the cold blustery dark day), our neighbor Tim Sharp gave me a solid handshake and looked me dead in the eye before he delivered this warning: "We're gonna miss Frank."

I had already thought of that.

My husband and I are relative newcomers to County Road 2. We've only been there twenty years. No matter that my husband's ancestors who came here from Virginia before Alabama was even a state are buried less than ten miles away. For a couple of generations, the family had been back living in Virginia, so when we purchased the run-down river camp twenty years ago so our four-year-old twins could learn how to fish, swim, canoe, and just plain play outdoors, we were outsiders, unaccustomed to the code of conduct of the area. For example, back then when we drove down County Road 2, we did not perform the de rigeur raised-index-finger greeting. (When you're driving down Co. Rd. 2 and meet another vehicle, you don't smile and wave, you simply raise your index finger and maybe give a slight nod. It does not matter if you actually recognize the vehicle or the driver. To be on the safe side, you perform the raised-index-finger greeting to all pickup trucks and dirty SUVs you meet on County Road 2, thereby avoiding slighting anyone.)Twenty years ago, Frank Johnson immediately took us under his wing, our guardian angel on Co. Rd. 2. Frank not only showed us the lay of the land, he took care of our land.

Back then, Frank was still using his dad's old red tractor which he lovingly maintained like a museum piece. He never let our property grow up in tall weeds and saplings. For twenty years, without ever once having to be asked, Frank drove the mile of so from his farm down Co. Rd. 2 and bush-hogged five times a year: right before Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then right before the first frost. If he happened to show up when we were actually there, we would have a cold Coke (Diet Coke after he developed diabetes)sitting on the front porch facing the river, and Frank would tell us all the news that was worth repeating. He knew who had bought what land, who was about to build a bigger lake camp, who was running for county office and whether or not they were likely to win. If he knew the kind of news some people like to share about other people's hardships and vices, he never repeated it. If a couple divorced, for instance, the divorce was an unavoidable fact, but the cause of a divorce never mentioned.

I don't remember the exact year of Frank's first phone call telling us the peas were ready, but at some time many years ago Frank started planting a large field or two--one of corn and one of field peas--to share with everyone he knew. EVERYONE. And Frank knew lots of folks. Rich or poor or in-between, black or white or old or young, all had the same invitation to come pick peas while the picking was good. I will be honest. Frank's corn was just so-so and its quality depended on what rain the skies had provided. But Frank's peas were simply the best. Just the right combination of soil, sun, and pink-eyed purple hull seeds I guess.

On Memorial Day, I pulled the last two packs of Frank's peas from the freezer and got out my own guest list. I used another Frank's recipe (Frank Stitt, THE SOUTHERN TABLE) and made Pink-Eyed Purple Hull Peas Salad. The broth, which was to be discarded, was so rich that I froze it to eat by myself at a later date with some cornbread. I'll say my own little prayer of Thanksgiving at that time for Frank, his generosity of spirit, his kindness, and his peas.

The World You Live In

2009-05-04T06:13:00.000-07:00

In the May 2009 THE ATLANTIC, Jeffrey Goldberg in an article "What Now?" poses questions about how the average person on the street views the current economy. Goldberg quotes a Nobel laureate "'You no longer know the world you live in,'" the laureate told him. "Right now, it's unclear what rules apply. I'm surprised Americans aren't more panicked."

As a writer, it is true. I don't know exactly what rules apply right now. Certainly publishing is falling off a cliff, and the ground in front of us is uncharted territory. Last year I had an agent tell me that she no longer was interested in fiction and would only look at my completed non-fiction manuscripts. When I whined that I had worked hard on my short fiction and wanted to see it in print, she asked "What for? It's embarrassing."

"Embarrassing?" My throat went dry. I felt panicky. "Embarrassing?"

She then explained that my short fiction was fine as far as short fiction goes, but she felt the form was dead in the water. Kind of like writing Shakespearean sonnets or imitations of Browning's dramatic monologues. Fine in its own time, but not what the world reads now. She really liked my non-fiction and wanted to see only that in print, wanted me to build a reputation on that.

I wonder what changes I will see in our Professional Writing major here at my university in the next five years. Several courses in our major come from the Communications department, courses preparing students to join a print newspaper organization, writing the types of articles that print newspapers have depended upon for a century or more. Basic News Reporting. Feature Writing. But now that the print journalism world is shrinking fast, now what?

And then there are the creative writing courses we provide in the English department. Short fiction. Poetry. Novels. I see the courses in film writing/screen writing remaining strong as they stand. But what about fiction and poetry? If no one is publishing these forms, who will keep writing in them? Of course the compromise may be Kindle. Or perhaps there will be no compromise at all. Maybe the world will cling to its respect and high regard for paper and ink literacy, its love of writing in the margins for the benefit of our grandchildren. Try writing in the margins on Kindle.

The course that I am placing bets on is New Media Writing, a course in which the image and the electric medium are the tools. Longwinded, verbose, multisyllabic: out. Short, concise, image-centered: in.

And as far as the Nobel laureate's surprise that Americans aren't more panicked about the economy: well, a few of us are Southerners. We live every year through tornadoes and hurricanes. We've seen our mountain forests decimated through over-cutting, The Hand of God (which plant biologists identified as Chestnut Blight), and now acid rain. We've had to work at share-cropping and coal-mining. In the last twenty years, we've lost over 500 of our named mountains to mountain-top removal methods of mining, where the trees and all vegetation are removed and nothing is left afterwards except a plain of bare rock with some fake green grass seed mixture sprayed on the top. The money from this devastation never stays in our region. Our grandparents who had any money in the bank during the Great Depression lost every penny they had scraped and saved while the banks kept right on expecting mortgage payments on time. So what's new? Or "What now?" as Jeffrey Goldberg asks, upset that his broker will not return his calls.

Did he really think his broker was his friend?

The South will suffer right along with the rest of the world, but it won't be the first time.

Prosperity has never felt very real to most of us with accents anyway.

Leaving Wind

2009-04-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

As fortune would have it, last week the air-conditioning stopped working in our house here in town. Since it is already hot here--high 80s in the afternoons for about five days in the row--we simply HAD to drive out to our redneck camp on the Bend of the River. This is the time of year when final exams hit and the yard in town needs a ton of TLC, and then there is the pressure washing away of the winter's dirt, etc. etc. etc. We threw some jeans in a bag, remembered to load up the dog, and left the fertilizing of the roses and planting of the impatiens for another day. Or perhaps even another life if the truth be known. Once we pull into that long driveway leading down to the river and close the chain behind us, time expands at exactly the same rate that it contracts when we are anywhere else.

So what do we do there? Well, for starters I read alot. And cook, which means pouring over very good cookbooks. Then there is the swing that faces the sunset every afternoon on the long screened porch. I like to write in that swing. It's the same swing I sit in when my husband decides the wind is strong enough to windsurf. He likes an audience, someone to admire the fact that although his hair is mostly gray, he is still agile and has great balance. The dog and I sit there and watch his good fast rides, the way the board splits the water, the million dollar smile on his face we can see from halfway across the lake.

Windsurfing seems like a fairly anti-intellectual activity. There's a board, a sail, a fin to keep you from slipping around too much on the surface of the water. Actually, there are MANY boards, and MANY sails, and MANY fins. And wetsuits, drysuits, water shoes, gloves, etc. It takes more gear than one might realize in order to windsurf. But then there is some intellectual Zen mental activity, too. Here again, more than one might think.

Such as the first cardinal rule of windsurfing: Don't leave wind to find wind. I think we first heard this about twenty years ago on the Outer Banks. People used to go there to surf the Canadian Hole, the ocean, the Sound. There was the angle of the wind to consider. Would it be best to be at Avon or around the Hatteras bend at Ocracoke? Where was it blowing the hardest? So many decisions! So much wind! We were on the Atlantic side, sitting up near the dunes, when my husband wondered out loud "Where should we go?" before he verbally recited the list. Where would be The Very Best Place to be right now: that was what he wondered. That's when someone turned to him who had just had a great little run and smiled. "Don't leave wind to find wind." Since then we have heard this wisdom at more than one windsurfing destination. Whether on the Tennessee River in North Alabama or sitting in a beach park on Maui, when windsurfers begin wondering about greener wind pastures, as long as there is enough wind to fill a sail and push a board, someone will smile and repeat the refrain. "Don't leave wind to find wind."

There is at least one dab of wisdom involved in being in the present tense, making the best of the hand you've been dealt, willing to be happy where you've landed.

After five or so days---who was counting?--we came back into town to check the AC. Someone had flipped the wrong switch under the house in turning on the sump pump. One tiny flick of a finger and we were back in the AC business.

On the drive back into town, my husband had said "As long as the wind was blowing, who cared if there was AC?"

The Horseshoe Bend Regional Library Bookmobile

2009-03-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

A great writer friend called this weekend, excited about writing a piece about a trip down memory lane. Her first job was at a Carnegie library in her Southern hometown. The Carnegie libraries were wonderful gifts from a wealthy benefactor. What a treasured windfall for impoverished regions: a beautiful brick library filled with first-rate books.

This of course spun me down my own memory lane trip. Many, in speaking of their Southern towns and cities, say: 'We've got everything. It may not be top level, but we've got it.' In my rural south, we didn't have much of anything. Not even enough people to warrant a free brick library. What we did have was the Horseshoe Bend Regional Library Bookmobile. It pulled up every Thursday in front of the WPA era rock building that housed the Extension Service and 4-H Club. Miss Evie Wade, the retired and beloved 2nd Grade teacher who had taught every kid in the southern part of the county for the last 50 years, sat at a desk in the room where the books were shelved. She would call your mama in her thick genteel Georgia accent if you did not return a book on time.

The 4-H Club and the Horseshoe Bend Regional Library Bookmobile were the sum total of offerings for us rural kids for the entire long stretch of hot summer. For 4-H Club, the summer offered time to fill up the pages of a record book, a ledger type affair where 4-Hers recorded all the work they had accomplished for whatever projects they had signed up for. I despised sewing and anything requiring me to sit still for very long. In a desperate move, with nothing at all appealing to me in the 'girl' category, I signed up for Food Preservation. Surely, I thought, I could do that. My mother, delighted, supplied me with a stove-top pressure canner and what seemed to me a half ton of fresh green rattlesnake snap beans bought from local farmers. Snap beans--for those of you unknowledgable in the rules of pressure canning--require a gazillion minutes at the highest pressure. This means to process green beans the stove had to be turned up on highest heat and the pressure canner meter's needle monitored carefully. If the needle was too low, the temperature would not have been sustained long enough so that six months later the family might die of botulism. If the needle moved too high into the RED ZONE, the pressure canner might blow up, leaving the kitchen in shambles and me in a burn unit. I was 10 years old.

So my memory of the entire summer is this. In the mornings I would wash green beans and worry over them, making sure all the troublesome strings were removed before I snapped them ready for the sterilized canning jars. Then later in the afternoon in the un-airconditioned July Deep South kitchen, I scooted the kitchen stool just as far away from the stove as I could and still be able to see the position of the meter's needle. There, perched on the stool, I greedily read every Laura Ingalls Wilder book I could lay my hands on, all the way from childhood in the deep pioneer woods, to the prairie days, to the wonderful These Happy Golden Years when she became a happily married young woman. I read other books as well, lots of them, and magazines like American Girl and The Saturday Evening Post and The Atlantic. I read grown up books, too: The Hounds of the Baskervilles, collections of horror stories involving ghost ships in the Atlantic, and several books I knew I was not supposed to be reading. The ghost books made me shudder cold as sweat tickled down my back. Fortunately my busy mother trusted me to sit there and can beans and dutifully record the amount in my record book and pretty much left me alone as long as I did not blow up the kitchen or seriously injure myself.

Recently I heard the wonderful poet Louie Skipper describe the state library in Montgomery where his working mother parked him when she had to go to the state capitol for meetings. I at first was envious when I heard this and all the incredible books he read at such an early age.

But Laura Ingalls Wilder was probably the right choice for me at the time. She made being a pioneer girl seem exciting and glamorous. Eating roasted pig parts and swimming in ponds and getting leeches: I could relate. She made it seem normal to be a girl who loved to run wild in the woods.

Meme: THE 25

2009-02-26T12:43:00.000-08:00

I do not usually participate in the getting-to-know-you, getting-to-know-ALL-about-you exercises that make the rounds. But I did feel guilty the other day and post this one. I think it has enough 'accent' for this blog.

SINCE A FEW OF YOU ASKED: 1 thing that is 25 things long
1. I like cars.
2. All cars: old ones, new ones, in between ones.
3. I cannot get rid of my old cars. I just add to the collection occasionally.
4. In the office parking lot, the oldest, dirtiest car is always mine.
5. My cars all have clean oil, right up to the full line.
6. There are not enough spaces in my garage to park my cars.
7. There are not enough spaces in my driveway to park my cars.
8. The sum total of the worth of all my cars--if I were to sell them--would not pay for a trip to Paris.
9. Or even Orlando.
10. Maybe Gulf Shores, for a couple of days.
11. I have so many cars that I have to have two auto insurance policies since they won't all fit on one policy.
12. The very few cars that I have owned in the past but which I do not currently own: I know who owns them and where they are parked.
13. I lend my cars freely for extended periods of time to those who need them. I don't ask questions.
14. My insurance agent does not know I lend my cars for extended periods to whomever asks.
15. I feel a special kinship with my mechanics.
16. I look for cars like my cars in movies, and when I see them, that place in the brain that is stimulated by heroin and/or the sight of a loved one.....well, you get the picture.
17. So far, I do not have any cars resting on blocks. So far.
18. Some of my cars are parked in the driveway of the house next door.
19. Actually, there is only one car currently parked in my garage, and that car does not even belong to me, but sometimes I walk past it and use the sleeve of my jacket to wipe off a spot.
20. Country of origin does not matter. I love all cars equally.
21. But I will have to admit there is something about the blended aroma of German leather and petroleum products that is incredibly moving.
22. A car with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer is like a two-year marriage--what do you really know about it?
23. My father once became so angry with a car that he poured a large can of gasoline on it and then flicked a lighted match in that direction.
24. The car did not belong to my father.
25. Other than a few anger management issues, my father was the sanest person in our family

New County Road Tour Photos Below!

2009-01-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

Scroll down to see the newest County Road Tour pics. This time: Geocaching on County Road 14. Also, very very soon there will be a blog about Pink Heel Splitters, Alabama Hickory Nuts, Washboards, Three Ridges, Pig Toes......

raised on robbery: making the best shortbread

2008-12-12T10:31:00.001-08:00

"I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my gro-cer-ieeeeeees" is the Joni Mitchell line that runs through my mind a lot from Court and Spark. December translates to my life in the South via food, friends, and family. It takes a lot of focused effort to cook and eat your way through a Southern holiday, and I don't mind spending the time doing it.

There are many witty breakdowns of the Southern food groups, all focusing on pork fat, caffeine, etc., but for my part, let me just say that my genius-inspired artistic materials have always centered around butter and sugar. I can make a clove-studded dry cured Virginia ham (preferably home-cured Kentucky cut) with the best of them, along with the required homemade yeast rolls or beaten biscuits, depending upon which Southern state we're in when Christmas arrives. But my heart, darling, belongs to that cocaine of the Southern palate, that white powder of progress: Sugar.

Classically, shortbread is a late arrival in my family Sugar history. Sure, I remember it from childhood, but back then the real stars were the Lane Cake--a two layer, rather low but impressively spread out white cake with a fruit and
bourbon filling, frosted with fluffy white 7 Minute Frosting with a blizzard of freshly grated coconut--and the classic tall pristine white fresh coconut cake whose process began when you went to the store to pick out the very one right coconut that would yield enough juice to make the basting syrup for the layers. I have made my grandmother's fresh coconut cake many, many times, and it never takes me less than a solid day. Then there was the Christmas morning windfall of sugar as my grandfather dusted off the punch bowl and began beating with a hand rotary mixer the dozen eggs he always started with for the first bowl of egg nog. At Thanksgiving we had dinners, but at Christmas we had sideboards. I didn't really understand the necessity of shortbread until much later in life. But that didn't mean that I didn't take to it with any less cell-level love.

The following recipe has evolved over the last three decades. Christmas does not begin until the first batch is in the oven nor does it end until that magical point in January when we look in the shortbread tin one last time and find nothing but a few good crumbs.

Shortbread As We Know It

1 lb. best butter, room temperature, NOT chilled
1 c. sugar
1/4 c. rice flour
4 ½ to 5 c. organic, unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp. good quality double-strength vanilla

Cream butter and add sugar in a good stand mixer, beating until well blended. Add flour, one cup at a time until the mixture won’t hold any more flour and stay
“bonded.” It should feel like Play-Doh. (The crumbs must bind together when pressed, so never use cold butter, tempering it in the microwave if you have to.)Too much flour, and the dough will be too crumbly; too much butter and the finished cookie will be too crunchy and not dense enough to the tooth.

Pat mixture into a clean, perfectly dry jelly roll pan (must have sides).
Pat until smooth, then take the back tines of a fork and draw lines
across the dough. Bake at 300 degrees for about 30 minutes or until
lightly golden. Watch your oven. If your oven is too hot, the bars will become too brown on the bottom. If your oven is not hot enough, the bars will stay pasty and pale and will never turn out right. Adjust accordingly. What you are looking for at this stage is a light tinge of gold. When bars reach that desired shade, remove pan from oven and turn heat down to about 175 degrees. Take a sharp knife and cut the dough into the size squares you want. (I personally like about 1 ½ inch squares.) Do this now while the dough can still be cut.

Return pan to oven and leave about an hour. Remove pan and take all of the little squares and turn them on their sides so that air can flow evenly around them. Return pan to the oven once again and leave for hours. It’s even OK to turn heat down to 150 degrees and let the pan sit in the oven all night. Do a taste test. If the squares are mellow throughout and not doughy, then they are ready to pack
into airtight tins.

Shortbread has to “cure,” kind of like a ham. It is better a week after you make it. Make it about 50 times and you will truly understand the difference in brands of flour, butter, and different ovens.

In California they serve warm shortbread with desert wine. In Virginia they serve it with tea. I’ve never had it served with anything it did not somehow suit better than anything else on the sideboard, perhaps with the exception of CHEESE STRAWS, but that’s later......

Facebook VS Blogspot: Voyeurism VS Writing

2008-11-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Most of us have very limited time to burn. Ten minutes here and there, at most. Reading blogs used to be a favorite pastime when I had five minutes before my next class. For the last few weeks, Blogspot has been replaced by, well, yes, I'll admit it: Facebook.

When I signed up for Facebook back a few years ago at my students' insistence, I checked back in after a couple of months (!) and saw that my daughter had written on my wall. "You're on Facebook?!". Most kids have the good sense to ignore their parents' requests to be 'friends'. A generational thing.

But in the last few months, more and more of my writing friends have succumbed. Some obviously are doing it in order to promote their next book. Others of us who do not have books coming out any time soon in the known timeframe of this universe, why are we suddenly using cute college-teen phrases and posing as cool people?

I will admit that I spent an hour or so adding a photo, filling out my info page, then rewriting a portion of it. The real surprise for me is how much time I have spent acquiring 'friends'---something that reminds me of cheerleader elections in high school. And then there's that other thing. Now when I log on to my computer, my first impulse of the day is to check Facebook to connect with the trivial details of people's lives, most of whom I have only met and barely know. Suddenly there is a poet in Kentucky who has become a part of a soap opera in my brain. Is she cold today? Is it 'spitting snow', as she said her grandmother called it? She had said she was sick, is she better now and back teaching? My inquiring mind wants to know.

Facebook appeals to the voyeur in me. No matter that the people undressing in front of the window are performing a careful not-very-revealing striptease, staged for all the world to see.

Ultimately, I will be back in Blogspot full time. Walking around in people's brains is more my style.

And now my ten minutes are up. Time once again for the real world (and not the one on TV).

White for Harvest

2008-09-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Alabama poet Jeanie Thompson titled a book of her poems WHITE FOR HARVEST. That came to mind yesterday as I walked out the front doors of a small church on Gunwaleford Road. I had just attended a worship service. Frank Johnson--the man you have read about before in this blog, the man who grows a large field of peas every year and invites all his friends and neighbors to help themselves--Frank was there. Along with his nephew and a couple of sisters-in-law.

It had been that kind of September weekend you wait and hope for. After a cool night of sleeping hard with the windows open, I awoke to a slight chill that was shooed away with a cup of hot coffee. I smiled to think of yesterday's football games as lavender wisps of fog burned off the surface of the lake with the first warm rays of morning sun. The leaves on the trees were still green, but a few low branches on the waterfront sweet gums blushed with color. As the sun climbed, the sky became a deeper shade of blue. Not quite October blue on blue. But getting there. The last of the migrating hummingbirds buzzed the feeders that I would take up at the end of the day, wash, and put away until next year.

On and off for the last twenty years that my family has been coming out Gunwaleford Road, the people at the small church a half mile away have asked us to visit. Today I ate a leisurely breakfast on the screened porch, showered, and peered into the closet to pull out what might pass as church clothes. We timed our arrival so we could get there late and sit in the back. Our plans failed when the preacher, Brother Melvin, spotted us and shook our hands, pulling us right up front to sit on the second pew. A man who arrived at at the same time we did, a barrel-chested man wearing a football jersey,sat right behind us.

It would not be right for me to tell you everything that happened. That's something you need to go see and decide for yourself. There was no piano, no stained glass windows. No electric guitars or choir robes. The barrel-chested man turned out to have a baritone voice that needed no microphone, no amplifier. After the song leader led several standard songs from the hymnal, the barrel-chested man walked to the front and sang from his heart, the rest of us answering his call, line for line. You didn't have to have a hymnal to sing that song: if you had lived that song, you would know how to sing it, the barrel-chested man just supplied us with some words. Then Brother Melvin took his place at the podium and defined synecdoche better than my literature professors ever had. He gave it a French pronunciation; they had used the Latin.

On the way out the door after the service, tall Frank Johnson waited to shake my hand. I told him the truth, that I was going to eat his peas for lunch. He laughed out loud. I noticed he was wearing a big yellow Obama pin. I asked him why the only Obama sign I had seen was the one in front of his sister-in-law's house. "They steal the signs at night and throw them away" was all he said, with a smile.

And then I am walking out those two front church doors, out of the protected shade of the church building out into the bright hot sun. After my eyes adjust I see, just across Gunwaleford Road, mile upon mile of rolling rows of white cotton, all ready for the machines to come and pick it and take it down the road to the gin. All that cotton, its bolls burst open, was at its peak, just sitting there, waiting. By November the rains will have come and all that's left will be mud and stalks, the lay of the land exposed to winter. But today the fields were white for harvest, perfect and hopeful, under a warm blue sky.

more on accents: Northern CA and Marvin Gaye

2008-08-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Northern CA and was struck there by how much better the people in France understood my French than the people in CA understand my English. Every time I went into a store, if I had a question, WITHOUT FAIL the clerk would have to ask me to repeat myself, usually more than once. I decided in some cases it was because the clerks had not grown up speaking English and the only English they had ever heard was CA English, that smooth, delicious laid-back well-modulated English of Northern CA. Beautiful stuff. Pied Piper English. In France, I perhaps kept my phrases more compact, no chance for misunderstanding. Only the woman at the counter of the patisserie made me repeat after her the name of one delicacy until the word flowed off my tongue precisely. And she did this with kindness, not confusion, not flummoxed by what I had originally uttered.

Of course, while I was in CA, the Olympics caught everyone's attention. We could not help ourselves and had to stay in the hotel a couple of nights catching Micheal Phelps win the gold. Again. But what affected me more than Phelps' performances were the Nike commercials with a snippet of Marvin Gaye's performance of the national anthem at the 1983 NBA All Stars game. I had not heard it since 1983, but I had never forgotten it. Never. I had heard it only that one time, but I had played in my mind 100 times the way he had sung the lines like poetry, and I could actually hear in my mind the way he had delivered the words, the syncopated beats and chord changes he implied with "land of the free and the home of the brave." I had wanted to hear this for a very long time and (this is the pitiful part) did not realize all I had to do was go to You Tube!

There are better posts all over the internet for this, actual people who were present at the game, sitting just feet from Marvin as he sang, listening to the drum machine, feeling the audience grow more and more excited and inspired. All I can say is this: in a cold farmhouse in Virginia on a small Sony TV screen, Marvin Gaye sang to my heart in a way few poets have. James Dickey reading the last lines of "Cherrylog Road" at the Folger Shakespeare Library stage in D.C. on a Halloween night comes close.

Marvin could have sung the ingredients list off a ketchup bottle and made me understand levels I'd never guessed or dreamed possible. The ultimate accent that trumps them all.

Pound perhaps said this best when he said "music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance: poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

To see Marvin sing, key word search "Marvin Gaye" and "national anthem". It's the You Tube video with Marvin standing by himself on the wooden floor, right before the game.

Writing and Food

2008-06-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

What better combination could there be than a smart writer who is creatively and philosophically involved with food? Do you really trust or believe those writers who claim to become so immersed in their writing that they forget to eat for a couple of days? Too cerebral for me.

For the last month I have been dancing with food, playing with it, plotting, dreaming. I have read Barbara Kingsolver's ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE. Twice. Summer has exploded--and so have the stalls at the local farmer's market. I am in love.

Kingsolver punches all my childhood food buttons in her premise that food should be local whenever possible, that shipping basic staples of the American diet such as eggs, milk, and vegetables long distances uses oil unnecessarily. We should rediscover where food comes from, how it is grown, she says. Make your own cheese, she urges, from local milk. I am ready, BK. But right now I'm too infatuated with the first local peaches, basil, parsley, new potatoes, baby green beans, and all those tender varieties of squash, those gorgeous yard-long bunches of sweet onions with their luxuriant green tops for gumbos and ratatouilles. And is there anything, anywhere more delicious than those first cherries and organic blueberries?

Last night turned cool at the river so that the screened porch this morning felt chilly as April. But earlier in the evening had been a different story. After a hot day, we were tired and in no mood for a heavy meal. We pulled out the White Mountain ice cream freezer (our second, we've already worn out one), some local milk, and a pint or so of dark sweet cherries. By the time the sun had set and the night sounds of insects came alive in the canopy of trees, we opened the metal cannister from the salty ice and carefully removed the dasher.

Sweet frozen cream with a hint of vanilla mixed with hunks of tangy cherries, frozen al dente (to the tooth, to the bite,remember). These are the memories that sustain a writer in the cold, dark days of Februaries to come.

Billy Bob, Eve Ensler, Natasha Trethewey, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, and the Lowe's Home Improvement Center

2008-05-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

In a few more days, Spring Semester 2008 will just be memories. And what a semester it has been. Not only have I been to the AWP smorgasbord of writers in NYC this semester, the Alabama Book Festival treated us to seventy writers from all over the country. Yet if I could have traveled only a few blocks from my front door, the last three months have brought a surprising parade of interesting minds to town.

Billy Bob Thornton came to our area partly because he remembered traveling to Muscle Shoals when he was seventeen to record with his band (all black except for him) at the famous sound studios there. I was in the 'standing room only' section for Billy Bob's kickoff presentation for UNA's annual film festival, but I didn't mind standing one bit as we watched clips of movies he had written or in which he had acted. Billy Bob says he weighs 140 but I swear he looks like a trim 125, and he claims he's too old now to gain weight to play roles, as he did earlier in his career for Slingblade. He said when he first went to LA, he worked as a stand-up comic who was regularly heckled for his hick Southern accent, so he began going out on stage and instantly telling his audience that he was Southern and they'd best get used to it because the South had given the country a good percentage of its literature and virtually all of its original music. Billy Bob has attitude. Gotta love a man who has hung out with Robert Duvall as much as Billy Bob has.

Having Eve Ensler visit was nothing less than a lucky fluke-----and a lot of hard work by a handful of women students who had seen her in Atlanta last year and begged her to visit our small campus where Violence Against Women and Girls has been such a focus issue for many years. The fact that this woman has raised more than $50 million to combat worldwide violence against women and girls with the help of celebrities and ordinary people such as UNA students is testament to the fact that one person can make a huge difference in the world. Yes, our campus has participated in V-Day for quite some time, but Eve was here partly because of V 10, V to the 10th power that was held in the Super Dome in New Orleans to benefit women who were pushed from their homes by Katrina and who either experienced or witnessed unspeakable violence toward women and girls during the ordeal.

Three days after Eve's visit, the Pulitzer prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey read to a full auditorium twice, from her first and second collections but also from NATIVE GUARD, her latest collection. Our students were well prepared for her visit since we had shared her work in classes. The essays I received about her reading represented some of the very best, most original writing I read from students all semester.

Then just last Thursday night Rheta Grimsley Johnson, the syndicated columnist, read at the downtown library from her recent book, POOR MAN'S PROVENCE, a collection of tales written from her experiences living on a one-room houseboat in bayou country in Louisiana which served as her 'vacation home'. Rheta is as humble and unassuming a writer as you would ever want to come across. She is a kind person who was genuinely pleased her book was selling well as people stood in line with copies, waiting to get them signed. "I'm glad y'all are buying these," she said from the podium. "I need a new roof."

I thought of all of these writers yesterday as I stood out amongst the plants at the Lowe's Home Improvement Center and picked out a couple of knock-out roses (what a name!) to plant by my front door and loaded up on bale after bale of pine straw, all that my old dilapidated station wagon would hold. The semester has ground to a halt and all I want to do is clean up my house and tend to my yard in a way that will convince my neighbors that perhaps we do still live there. Thoughts of these writers play back in my mind as I tend my roses and water the ferns and pull weeds and trim back the ivy. Maybe Voltaire had it right in "Candide." There is definitely a time in the season to tend one's own garden and ponder one's experiences.

County Road 2 Tour Arrives at Last!

2008-04-09T10:54:00.000-07:00

OK, OK. I've been promising it for months and just today got around to it. If you liked the County Road 14 Tour that has been at the end of the blog posts for quite a while, you may like the County Road 2 Tour, also. (Another request I've had is for a scrolling list of blog titles, but I'm afraid that is too advanced for my skills.) But if you want more pictures and less copy, by all means skip ahead to the end. And be sure to give me some feedback.

Urge to Kill a Mockingbird

2008-04-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered about Harper Lee's title (To Kill a Mockingbird)? The mockingbird in Lee's novel has been said to represent the main victim of the novel, Tom Robinson. But what about real mockingbirds, in real life. Let me enlighten you. People DO have the urge to kill mockingbirds. Even today.

Yes, they are handsome little birds. Yes, they sing varied, beautiful little recitals. Yes, they are industrious and curious harbingers of spring, full of personality as they flit around, alight on the ground, and cock their perky little bird heads from side to side, as if perusing a situation. And yes, they can drive you totally crazy.

When we moved back to Alabama years ago, we moved into my husband's grandparents' house. The back yard had been neglected with nothing much back there, just three giant Hackberry trees, an old rose bush, a rusted clothesline, and a few weeds that passed for grass when mowed. Muscadine vines had entertwined themselves in the tall canopy of the trees, blocking most all sunlight from reaching the yard below. My children were small and the back yard was relatively cool in the summer. We hung a rope swing from a Hackberry branch and planned to give the children freedom. The mockingbirds were not pleased.

I had encountered the mockingbirds once or twice already but tried to ignore them. They hung out on the clothesline, owning it like wary guerilla rebels, and when I walked out the back door with a bag of garbage headed for the trash cans in the alley, they became vocal. One of two of them would fly low toward me each time as if on a reconnaisance mission. When my husband mowed the weeds, they flew all around in angry little passes. By the time we hung the rope swing, they had had enough. We were invading their territory where they were raising their own babies. The mockingbirds began swooping closer and closer to my head each time I went out the back door. Finally, two of them actually attacked me. It felt as if they had hit the top of my head with a glancing blow from their beaks, like the Hitchcock movie The Birds. And something else: there was a wet glob in my hair. I had actually been attacked and pooped on by low flying birds.

I loosed the big weapon at this point. We had moved to Alabama with a giant Persian cat. Sylvester was an inside cat, but that day I let him roam the back yard, which created quite a stir from the mockingbirds. I wasn't about to let him find their fat fledgling offspring on the ground as they learned to fly. But they didn't know that. They squawked and screamed and dive-bombed Sylvester like crazy. He was a very big, mild-mannered cat and didn't seem to pay them much attention. By the time I let the kids out to play on the rope swing, the birds seemed relieved the only menace in the yard was small and human.

Twenty years later, the mockingbirds (their offspring, I presume) are still with us. They no longer dive bomb us in the back yard, however. Nowadays fifty of them perch on a tree limb next to my bedroom window every morning well before dawn and sing every song they know and make up a few especially loud and cacophonous ones.

No, I will not kill even one of these mockingbirds. Killing just one wouldn't do any good anyway. But I understand perfectly WHY someone might be tempted to kill a mockingbird.

Bad News/ Good News

2008-03-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning when I went outside to go to work, I discovered my car had been broken into. This happens at least once a year like a Halloween prank. I still drive the same clunky station wagon I used to carpool the kids. This poor old car has spent its life idling in front of elementary schools, junior highs, high schools, and parked a few blocks away in a university parking lot. Then maybe once a year some kids break into it, scramble for the pocket change I keep on the dash, and play with the cigarette lighter. Big deal.

But when I got to work, my grade book was missing. Teachers have nightmares about losing their gradebooks, especially after midterm. This was gritty. I ransacked my office. No luck. What if my grade book had fallen out of my backpack? What if it were LOST?

I left work early at 2 and went home to search for the grade book only to find that my house had been burglarized. I didn't catch on right away. When I walked through the dining room, I noticed some papers out of place on the floor. I sat down in the den to contemplate my grade book search strategy and pet the dog. As I absently gazed through the French doors at the Easter basket green grass in the back yard, I noticed a small basket from my son's room -- a basket that held Mardi Gras beads, a whistle, pocket change -- overturned on a corner of the deck. When the dog and I went outside to investigate, we found the basket's contents (minus the pocket change) spilled down the brick walk that led back to the street.

Hal, the policeman who came to fill out the report, is a former student, so he, my husband, and I had a fairly good time for the hour Hal was there. When you live in Mayberry, there's always a lot to catch up on. The whole town knows the usual suspects, the guys who make it a habit to steal from the elderly, run home-repair cons, or cook meth., and Hal caught us up to date on prosecutions and sentencings, matters of public record. Walking from room to room to see what was missing was like Santa Claus in reverse. Someone unseen had been in our house, and it was our job to discover what prizes had been taken, not left.

Well, if the truth be known, we don't own many prizes. There was very little missing. Some pocket change. A gold watch my husband received for his 16th birthday. The thieves had been very neat. Just a few drawers tossed about, their contents strewn. No windows broken.

Most people have asked "Don't you feel violated?" I spent several hours alone in the house last night and it felt about the same as usual. The dog barked several times, but he didn't seem particularly spooked. He probably wagged his tail and begged to be petted and made a nuisance of himself while the uninvited guests were there.

This morning I had to get up very early. My son was coming by before 6, headed for a conference in Birmingham. I walked around the house, sipping a cup of coffee and looking at my souvenirs, trying to decide what I would miss, what I would have a hard time replacing. Not much.

I would miss the framed letter Harper Lee wrote my seventeen-year-old daughter when my daughter won the first Harper Lee essay contest. "'Ignorant people can always find someone to hate'" Harper Lee quoted from the essay "are words I wish I had written myself," she wrote.

Red, our talented cousin whose work is in the Smithsonian, painted a mixed media portrait of Scout from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, looking like my daughter. Or maybe it's my daughter looking like Scout. The portrait has a page ripped from the novel glued to it, and there is a rusty iron mockingbird with the word SIN stamped into it affixed to the top. The entire piece was done on a cigar box like the one in which Jem and Scout kept the treasures Boo Radley left for them in the tree. I would miss that, too.

This is the first time in my life anyone has ever actually come inside my home with the purpose of stealing anything. I've always felt most people could take one look and realize there are greener pastures than this.

I found my grade book in my dimly lit dining room where it had fallen out of my backpack and hidden itself behind a chair.

This was not the worst day of my life.

The South I've Always Known

2008-02-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday night, I had been really sick for several days with the flu, the kind of sick where I'd just recorded my fourth day with a fever of 102, I'd been through the totally unexpected and demoralizing vomiting and diarrhea stage, and my nose and lungs were raw meat. My vision was too blurred to read or work on the computer, so what else was there to do? Suddenly there was time to think.

I am rarely this sick, but whenever I am, I remember being a little kid with a fever of 105 and a bad case of the measles... and being really scared. My mother was frightened, too. This was the same woman I had seen kill with a garden hoe a rattlesnake that had invaded my sandpile where I played out under the cedar tree. My daddy was frightened, too.

They were scared because we had no doctor.

At that time in our nation, the fact of poverty was that 1 in 7 people lived in it. Our county, the southernmost raggedy tip of Appalachia, scored higher than 1 in 7. We were officially the poorest, least populated county in the poorest state in the nation. (There for a few years Alabama somehow 'out-povertied' Mississippi.) Not only did our county have its typical Appalachian poverty in the northern part, it had its fair share of minority poverty in the Southern part. Two out of every five households in our county did not own an automobile, and this was in a county covering 635 square miles with fewer than 10,000 residents. It wasn't like you could just walk next door and borrow a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. There were no chain grocery stores, no movie theatres, no four-lane highways, and only one doctor, Dr. Goff. He was the doctor who had delivered me, assisted by a mid-wife. He had done this at my parents' home because it was February and the unpaved roads were too bad to risk traveling to a hospital in a neighboring county. By the time I had the measles, Dr. Goff had died. I doubt the roads were much better.

I remember the night when my fever spiked so high my mother finally stopped coming into my room to push the glass thermometer under my tongue and moved me into her own bed. She alternated between carrying me to the bathtub and immersing me in what felt like ice water, then when I was shivering uncontrollably, taking me back to bed to cover my body up with quilts as she continued to wipe my face with a cool damp washcloth. I remember the look on her face when I asked her why she had put black sheets on the bed (no one had ever heard of black sheets back then) and whose face was the mean man I kept seeing, the face whirling larger and larger when I closed my eyes? I know now I was hallucinating. At the time, I was miserable and scared.

I remember hearing both of my parents on the telephone, a party-line system shared with other households, calling doctors day and night in neighboring counties, hoping someone would accept me as a patient. I don't recall all of the details. But I know that not long before my mother died she bitterly recalled the name of one of those doctors and reminded me that right after Dr. Goff died, she had paid a 'well-visit' to this doctor's office, paying a fee and filling out paperwork to establish our family with his practice just in case one of us fell ill or was injured. During the time when I was sick, this doctor would not return my parents' phone calls. Surprised by her rancor after more than 40 years, I asked my mother why this doctor would do that, and she replied, "It was because of where we were from. There was a long distance fee to make a telephone call here." And then she said, with no bitterness, just matter-of-factly, "No one cared what happened to you if you were from Coosa County. We had to learn how to take care of ourselves because nobody else cared whether we lived or died."

Shortly after I lived through the measles, my pretty mother stopped putting on her high heels and red lipstick in the mornings and stopped working for Judge Thomas and took a position in public health instead. In 1960, she worked taking the census in areas of the county no man would volunteer to go. During census season, on Saturday mornings when I was not in school, she took me and a stack of LIFE and SATURDAY EVENING POST magazines with her in the family Chevrolet. She said it was against the law for her to take me and that I would have to sit in the car and not go inside the houses and, most importantly, never tell anyone she took me, but she felt it was important for me to go.

Sometimes the car's tires slipped on rocks as we forded small streams. Sometimes the feral smell of wild game and human sweat was unforgettable as it lingered on my mother's clothing after she had visited in these homes and gained the trust of the people enough for them to share their private, sensitive data for the census. How many children? Ages and names? What is your income? These are not popular questions in households where there are secrets such as incest and bootlegging, households with a stack of loaded shotguns by the front door. Later, working in public health, similar questions might include birth control needs, sanitation issues such as the total lack of a septic system, symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases, physical abuse, basic nutritional information and needs for pregnant women and mothers of infants.

Why this long trek down the memory lane of Southern poverty?

The sting of poverty had more than one barb during those blessed/cursed 'interesting times'. I had a little humming make-believe play dream, an alter-ego fantasy of what it would be like to be a girl growing up with a closet full of new wool school clothes in a state where there was beautiful snow in the winter and no one hated you because of your accent. I thought it would be cool to have a mother who stayed at home and cooked dinners of frozen Birdseye vegetables. This dream was inspired by the family road trip out West in 1963. As it turned out, driving around the United States in a brand-new Chevy with Alabama license plates was an invitation for open hostility and ridicule, having Dixie cups of soft-drinks thrown at our car, a man walking up to our family out of the blue in a restaurant in Landers, Wyoming, as we sat having dinner, demanding to know who we thought we were to be lording it over minorities and breaking laws in order to do so. If I opened my mouth to order a hamburger, everyone, it seemed, turned to glare in my direction. The day Bull Connor ordered the fire hoses and dogs loosed on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, my mother and brother were half a block away at the federal building. My brother was too young to drive but had prepared to take the Amateur Radio Operator's test ('HAM' radio). He had ordered the parts and built a HAM radio station in his upstairs bedroom. Sometimes he would enlist me to crawl up on the roof, in storms (my mother did not know this),and sit astride the highest roof ridge and adjust whatever homemade antenae he had recently built. I suppose when the end came--and to our young eyes, the news Walter Cronkite told us each evening clearly pointed to the fact that the end was near-- my brother would be the last outpost, the sole electric signal emanating from the chaos, letting Australia and Argentina know how we were faring now that the bomb had been dropped on us and the assassinations and riots had succeeded in breaking down what was left of society.

So, finally, here's the payoff in this long fever dream. How can these stories possibly link to the present? No medical care for the poor. My mother's chosen path. The rest of the nation feeling sure we were too stupid to extricate ourselves from our problems. My brother prepared to serve as witness to the chaos. These are indeed the threads that have been woven together to create the fabric of my life.

At the end of the fourth day of the flu, my temperature was still 102. Alone in the house I settled in with a quilt on the sofa to watch 60 Minutes. This was going to be a particularly interesting segment because it would touch on Alabama politics, more specifically how one political party in Alabama allegedly illegally manipulated the justice department and succeeded in imprisoning Alabama's latest former governor on trumped up charges. In the election environment, this story was emotionally charged, and nowhere more emotionally charged than in this state. This should be interesting, I thought.

And then suddenly I am in The South I've Always Known. For the past thirty years I had somehow convinced myself that I had outlived and overcome the sixties, but now the past came rushing back. When the local TV station I was watching mysteriously went blank for the Alabama politics segment of 60 Minutes, regaining the signal just as the segment concluded, suddenly I was the kid with no medical coverage again, the self-conscious kid sure that the world was laughing and shaking its head, the kid who followed her big-brother's lead and described as a clear-headed observer just the facts of what had happened. I got on the internet and contacted CBS. I emailed every site I could find. I described the facts: no other cable channels were affected, the screen just went black, Comcast said it was a network problem, not a cable problem. Apparently other affected viewers did the same thing. Soon we learned over the internet, through chats and blogs and official and non-official sites, that the 60 Minutes segment covering the imprisonment of a former Alabama governor was not, for some reason, broadcast in most of the Northern one-third of the state.

When a television station in Alabama fails to carry the 60 Minutes segment blowing the whistle on alleged illegal political cronyism in the state, there is no good way to spin it.

Even if the reason the 60 Minute blackout occurred is the least offensive possibility of all--that the cause of the blackout was entirely accidental-- suddenly the rest of the nation sees us as being too stupid in this state to operate normal equipment the rest of the world can easily manage.

Well, there are some areas of Afghanistan where technicians experience such lapses in technical know-how. But when it happens there, we call it by other names.

"May we live in interesting times", indeed.

A Greener Way to Die

2008-02-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

If you don't want to read about death, maybe the title of this entry has already served as a clue that this is an entry best left unread. On the other hand, if all the funerals you've ever attended left you feeling.....well, not merely sad but somehow offended, maybe you'll want to read on.

If your list of life's turn-offs includes funeral flowers, white hearses, canned Muzac hymns, and astroturf over raw red clay beneath a canvas tent in 100 degree heat, you've probably experienced at some point in your life the Southern funeral. Don't get me wrong. Some of my best childhood memories revolve around food brought to my grandparents' home after one of the family died. And of course there are those unforgettable moments in family mythology such as the time at my grandfather's funeral when my aunt and my mother both ran in hysterical laughter, not tears as most people thought, into the funeral home restroom as the circus known as the receiving line offered up its endless array of outright drunks, closet alcoholics, and (the coup de grace) the little old church lady so blind she could not see the dried corpse of a mouse in the black straw mourning hat she wore. Most of us in the South have been to this type of funeral, so many in fact that we're running out of good cemetery plots.

Pair this waste of choice land with a chilling fear that upon our own deaths our loved ones may have to ENDURE this kind of funeral. Just how dignified can death be when it is eviscerated, plasticized, perfumed, embalmed, and coiffed? In the tradition of the women in my family, I had a hard time keeping a straight face when I saw my mother in the casket and noticed the irony of the perfect coral nail polish. My mother died planting a bush by her back door. She was a gardener who daily wanted her hands in dirt and still had when she died in 2002 a gift manicure set, untouched, from 1957, complete with its full bottle of Revlon's 'Love That Red'.

So what would be a better way to handle death?

I think I've seen it, just this past weekend.

A colleague lost her husband after a long and dignified decline at home. As his health deteriorated, he was surrounded by friends, neighbors, caring health care workers, and a devoted wife. She was by his side as he died. He was in his own bed, with his own pillow, in familiar surroundings. He was not in pain.

The hospice workers were kind but totally professional going about the business of death as they whisked away the debris of illness and coordinated the removal of what had been necessary equipment just a few hours earlier. Supplies that could benefit others were recycled. Precious little was thrown away.

Then instead of a big funeral with flowers and a casket and a processional to the gravesite, on Saturday I held my friend's hand as she saw her husband one last time. He wore his favorite T shirt as his head rested upon his favorite pillow, his own clean white cotton sheet draped across the simple box. She could have pushed the button to begin the cremation had she chosen to do so, but by the time the process was under way, she was several hundred yards away, walking the quiet cemetery lane, looking back occasionally at the nondescript brick building no bigger than a garage. She walked for most of those two hours until a light drizzle began.

What more can any of us ask for: a quiet death and time for your loved ones to contemplate it. A simple memorial service can come later when she's had time to think about what she wants.

No pomp and circumstance. Little rhetoric. A time of contemplation and memory for the family.

OK, so maybe it's nice to have some good food brought by the house. Some barbecue, perhaps ham, and definitely a homemade pound cake: regional comfort foods.

Some Southern habits are impossible to break.

Thirty Years of Experience

2008-01-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

One great thing about teaching on a college campus is that I don't sit at my computer all day long. In order to get to classes, I have to put on my overcoat and walk through whatever weather the day presents. During the bad ice storm of February1994, tree-sized limbs crashed onto sidewalks all over campus. Most of the time, however, the ten minute dash across campus is uneventful and gives me time to think and observe.

This week's grey, cold weather with drizzle threatening to turn to ice turns my mind to Groundhog Day--and more specifically to the film Groundhog Daystarring Bill Murray. In my household, watching Groundhog Dayat the end of January has become a tradition. Living the worst day of your life over and over again seems to pretty much sum up many people's views of their lives. Few people seem to have found the perfect marriage of vocation and avocation. Their daily pattern of driving to work, spending eight hours like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up the same hill over and over, then driving back home to make dinner, do laundry, help with homework, and vacuum until it is time to fall into bed and arise the next morning to the same schedule--well, let's just say the cold grey days of winter create a mood that does little to break such a bleak spell. Fairly existential stuff. One might ask: Is this life I lead really who I am? At what point does life become worth living?

I think the writing life is my personal antidote for existential malaise. For one thing, if you are seriously writing, there are no idle moments to ponder your misery BECAUSE WHATEVER PROJECT YOU'RE WORKING ON, YOU'RE BEHIND AND YOU NEED TO GRAB EVERY SPARE MOMENT TO WORK ON IT. Sure, the effort is futile. No one will ever read what you're writing because the chances of it being published are slim. But as Phil Connors (Bill Murray) learns in the film, there is something to be found in the simple act of repetition. The way to become a better writer is to pay attention and write regularly, daily if you can manage. I have seen few writers who do this whose writing remains stagnant. And if publishing is your only goal, if being sure you are good and having the world acknowledge it is your only objective, Merwin quoted Berryman once in a poem: if you have to be sure, don't write.

The difference for Phil Connors as he repeats the same one day of his life over and over and over again is that although the world around him wakes up each morning like a goose in a new world, carrying over no knowledge of what has previously transpired, Phil himself IS aware of what he has learned in his yesterdays. That's what we do when we write. We don't have one year of experience thirty times: we have thirty years of experience. We build cumulative knowledge. We grow as writers just as we grow as people.

Which brings me to my own past thirty years. January 25, 1978 -- January 25, 2008.
Thirty years ago today, I was working late in The Writing Center at the University of Alabama when a colleague I had just met touched me on the shoulder and said,
"Let's close this place down and lock the door. Truman Capote is reading right down the hall. We should be there, not here."

As badly as I wanted to hear Capote read, it never occurred to me that I could leave my post early, even though there were no students. This guy tempted me with a delicious, enticing thought: I could use my own judgment.

And with his help for the past thirty years, I have continued to make choices that don't always follow the chain of command and certainly don't follow popular opinion.

A Christmas Ho

2007-12-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

A Scrooge. A Grinch. "Bah humbug". These are the typical labels for the joyless ones among us at Christmas. My new terminology for people who, like me, approach the holidays with a jaundiced eye and an arsenal of wisecracks is "Christmas Ho". We're trying to smile, but it comes out looking like Christina Ricci in "The Addams Family Values": lukewarm, half-hearted, lop-sided. If Santa says "HO HO HO", all we can manage is one weak "ho".

Talking in the Accent of Ocracoke

2007-12-10T16:25:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving break took me to Ocracoke Island, just off the coast of North Carolina, on the tip of the Outer Banks. The day before Thanksgiving found our group in shorts on that wide expanse of beach, thirteen miles of nothing but two lane blacktop with the beach on one side and the sound on the other. Whereas the steep beaches at Rodanthe and Avon, Waves and Salvo are beautiful but plagued by rip currents and those cold, foamy Atlantic waves that knock your knees right out from under you, the beaches of Ocracoke are gradual, their waves kissed by the Gulf Stream. The forty five minute ferry ride from Hatteras to Ocracoke is like watching decades march backwards. Although Ocracoke is more developed that it once was, its simple frame cottages with screened porches and crushed shell back lanes are prettier to me than the seven bedroom, four storied "beach houses" that line the shores of the rest of the Outer Banks, well, everywhere, that is, except for the strips of National Seashore. Yet Ocracoke itself has changed greatly from the island it once was. No longer is the Pony Island Inn the only place to stay in town, and although sadly the wonderful old Community Market next to the dock downtown has closed, there is still a place in the village where you can buy a bar of soap or a quart of milk to make oyster stew if you need it. Nevertheless, the native "O'Cockers" have, over the last 250 years, developed a unique brogue. There are far fewer of those who speak this brogue than there once was, but an outsider can quickly become familiar with it by visiting the Ocracoke Brogue Room in the Ocracoke Museum. A stay on Ocracoke is never complete until you roam the little local museum and pull up a metal folding chair to listen to the pre-corded lesson about how O'Cockers speak.

WHERE do you write?

2007-11-26T06:36:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have attended 5 million literary readings, workshops, craft talks, and the like. There are some questions you can predict the audience will ask.
Always. Such as: "Ms. Author, do you write with a pen, pencil, or computer?" Or: "Mr. Author, WHERE do you write?"

I have never heard any earth-altering answers to these questions, nothing that gave us deep insight into the creative genius of 'authorship'. In fact, until recently, I thought these were fairly dumb, time-wasting questions conceived by naive numb skull wanna-be hopefuls. Until recently.

I have been in the same office since 1988. Nineteen years. And now the entire building is being emptied so that long overdue renovations can be done. I teach at a public university in a Deep South state, so when I say 'overdue', well, let's just say that the fire-hazard air conditioner perched in my window will now be replaced by central air-conditioning, and when renovations are completed we hope that when someone plugs in the microwave in the main office that breakers won't smoke and spark and the lights all over the building flicker. It will be nice, we think, to have warm water for hand-washing in the bathroom sinks, and holding mandatory office hours in offices warmer than 55 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter will be a treat, not to mention no longer having to type wearing warm gloves. We are excited that the three feet of perpetual water in the basement will no longer be a problem and that most all of the asbestos has already been removed.

So why am I not smiling?

Because for the last nineteen years, my room with a view and 500 pounds Sterling has been this dark, rustic, moldy 12 x 15 space, complete with moths, spiders, and, at times, large roaches. I could move my entire household more easily than moving this office.

So for the next nine or ten months--until the paint is dry and the boxes are moved back in and unpacked--there will be at least one big question in my life:

WHERE do I write?

Like many writers, both male and female, my domestic life expands to fill every moment I'm not at work. When I am at work, I have 'permission' to write because publishing is part of my job. It may be only one of many hats I'm required to wear as a college professor, but in the rest of my life, there is no room for such a hat to exist.

When Natasha Trethewey visits our campus next spring, I hope some student raises a hand, walks to the microphone, and asks for all to hear: "Ms. Trethewey, would you mind describing to us WHERE you write?" May she smile and be detailed in her reply.

My Guitar Hero

2007-11-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

Jimi Hendrix? #1 for originality. Duane and Gregg? Southern hometown favorites. Eric Clapton? Yes, yes, yes: Acoustic or all plugged in, Eric C is righteous. But who is my Ultimate #1 All Time Fave Guitar Hero?

Luke Breland.

Never heard of him? Too bad.

He can play it all. 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and beyond. He can set the stage on fire (on the TV screen)with his cherry red Gibson SG or his ice white futuristic Gibson X-Plorer---although he was having a bit of trouble this past weekend with the game bundle that accompanied the X-Plorer.

Maybe Luke's my fave because I had an almost private audience with him and his genius this past Saturday night. Just me, my husband, and Luke's wife (my daughter)during the half-time break of the televised Alabama/LSU game. Luke had just bought Guitar Hero III, the popular video game in which the player holds an actual 'guitar' and mimics the motions of playing,and was dying to try out some new sets, a welcome change I thought from the usual ESPN half-time blather. He plugged everything in and soon we were munching snacks to the sounds of songs by Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, and Cream. After the abysmal finish to the ballgame, we drowned our sorrow in Van Halen, Guns N Roses, Deep Purple, Wolfmaster, and of course "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Luke was up very early the next morning, serenading us again, probably because he is in a pattern of arising very early so that he can make it to school in time. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa last spring, with a 4.0 in Anthropology and Chinese, Luke is postponing graduate work in order to teach public school ninth graders how to read and write. It is not an easy job. He cannot wear his vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle t-shirt to class, for instance. And even if he could, his students could not relate.

So for doing this very important, thankless job, Luke ranks high on my list of people I admire. And if he needs to play a little rock and roll air guitar in his spare time to help ease the pain, well, I can think of worse things he could be doing.

For instance, karaoke.

The Trouble with Blogs

2007-11-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

I'll skip the details and get right to it: riding down the Natchez Trace on a glorious fall afternoon with the sun spotlighting leaves colored like Kix cereal is no fun when your spouse has read the blog you wrote about hating musical films and decides to serenade you with all the songs he knows from 50's and 60's musicals. And he knows ALL of them and ALL the lyrics of the many verses. I'd rather be held down against my will and have someone rub dirty socks in my face. Still we make it to the Delta just as the sunset gives us a big sky light show as we cross the rickety old two lane bridge across the Mississippi at Greenville, MS to Lake Village, AR (looks like the same bridge I remember crossing as a kid on the return from the obligatory family car trip out West). We are spending the weekend in the Delta.

Though others may see flat fields, catfish plantations, and poverty with no genteel patina, when I get to the Delta, I am thrilled to see place names such as Itta Bena and Leland, names I have grown to love through Buddy Nordan and Ellen Gilchrist. And besides, when you've grown up in the poorest county in the poorest state in the nation, the Delta in many ways looks like home, just flatter. The Sunday lunch we eat is the same I grew up with for the most part: fried chicken, chicken and dressing, and fifteen overcooked but somehow delicious vegetables infused with the essence of cured pork. The iced tea is sweet. But the whiskey sauce on the bread pudding has way more kick to it than the bread pudding sauces of my Alabama childhood.

The real treat is the thirty minutes I spend alone on a bench just inside the entrance doors to the Greenville, Mississippi, Walmart on a Saturday afternoon. What a rich cast of characters. What incredible conversations. What variety. What a show. Delta writers have it easy. All they have to do is look around and tell what they see. The world will think they have excellent imaginations when all they really need is a keen eye for description.

But there is a price to pay for being a literary voyeur.

A young woman in her early twenties comes in, holding a color circular WalMart ad, the kind that comes in the mail. She walks up to the 'greeter', the woman checking the receipts as customers leave, and waits until the greeter has a free moment. The young woman points to the circular and says something in a whisper to the older woman who then reads the ad aloud, pointing to each individual word. There is a lot going on. Two elderly farm couples are having old home week over in a corner. Two young guys who haven't seen each other in a year catch up on one guy's recent return from California. I'm sitting there soaking it all in when the young woman with the ad turns to leave and shoots me a furtive glance, looking at me to see if I had seen, the flash of embarrassment on her face impossible to hide.

I'm pretty dense sometimes. It takes that look from her for me to figure out that she can't read and that it is a painful part of her life. She's coping, but me sitting there glancing her way is a definite intrusion.

I'd thought I was being nonchalant and cool, but I guess I stood out like a tourist in New York City, gawking up at the buildings, hardly believing just how high they really are.

"Johnny Cash Beset by Darkness" and "Lifelike Baby Girls"

2007-11-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

Reading fiction for a regional literary magazine is more than just a little fun, especially when you stumble across a new writer whose work is exciting. Check out the latest issue of storySouthmagazine at www.storysouth.com and be sure to read the featured story: "Johnny Cash Beset by Darkness". Great story. Exciting new author who is Southern but currently lives in France. John Marshall Daniel. Has a great blog, too. www.thefrogmarch.blogspot.com

Seriously, read this story and tell me what you think. I read it last summer and have not been able to stop thinking about it.

Along with a story my former student from VCU wrote. Jeff Landon's story "Lifelike Baby Girls" appeared in both the summer MISSISSIPPI REVIEW as well as the online version. Stunning.

Wow. These guys can write. Really write. In fact, read both stories and let me know what you think.

Global Pig

2007-10-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Another entry to skip if you are vegetarian, vegan, or don't eat pork.
Last Saturday, Oct. 27, was the 18th Annual Jack Daniels World Championship International Barbeque Cookoff. Our friends Jeff and Deb Delmas were scheduled to rough it with us down at the river cabin, but a water problem (dead pump and no way to repair it in time) stood in the way of fun. Since Jeff and I "talk pig" every occasion we get and Deb and I cook up plenty of day trips, we decided on a foodie day trip to Falls Mill near Belvedere, TN, to procure organic, down-home Christmas gifts and then on to view the circus at the 18th Annual Jack Daniels World Championship BBQ cookoff 17 miles further up the backroads in Lynchburg.

Since the morning started out cold, grey, and foggy, we skipped the scenic, leaf-peeper route we'd planned and went straight to the mill. Never a disappointment, the restored brick structure with a ginormous water wheel is a fun stop, and we promptly filled our fall order for corn meal, flours, bulgar, sorghum syrup, and many many bags of grits. (These are THE grits for making that Southern specialty Shrimp and Grits. The nice folks at the Mill will also take your orders for Christmas gift shipments; all you have to do is provide the mailing addresses and your debit card.) We walked around the mill property and shot the usual photos, then headed on our way to Lynchburg, careful to ask for the detailed map the people at Falls Mill have on hand. The road was picturesque but tricky. Beautiful meadows with hay bales, wooded hills, restored Federalist era homes, all punctuated with what could pass for the burnt-out hulls of meth-lab mobile homes.

Arriving in Lynchburg by the back roads meant little traffic and a great parking spot overlooking the big field where most of the 80 participating BBQ teams sat under tents, manning their grills and smokers. Novices, we stumbled right into the center of the action and before long strolled down the international gallery. Jeff's degree in math and philosophy from Millsaps and his high tech advanced degree from Georgia Tech came in handy as he quickly surveyed the situation and offered the complex, sage, technical wisdom: "If you see a line, get in it." As each country's chefs completed their entry for competition, they carved up what was left and gave out samples. The first sample we stumbled upon was from the Swiss team: pork tenderloin with a wild mushroom rissoto. Mmmm. There were teams from Canada, Great Britain, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Turkey, and my favorite: Estonia, whose team had grilled the most incredible Frenched rack of lamb that I had the pleasure to smell as they carved it up and applied the finish sauce. In the true sense of the word, I was TANTALIZED and never got to taste one morsel from this vision. The Belgian team won the most snaps from me as the team with the best clothes (they all wore bright aqua chef's coats) and team spirit (they sent their entry off to the judging tent with a team chant and cheer).

Further away from the action, the amateur division had very little foot traffic and the entrants were mostly from southern Tennessee and northern Alabama and happy to chat it up about method, maintaining constant temperature, dry rubs, etc. They had all the free samples any glutton could want. Some very fine sauces, too. Even side dishes if you were in the mood.

One disappointment: no whole hogs. One British team told us this category had been discontinued due to sparse participation and the high cost of whole hogs, which prompted the four in our party to begin reminiscing about pig roasts of our pasts. Which is an entire post unto itself. In fact, watch this blog for a post issuing an invitation to an old style whole hog pickin', an all-night affair complete with dug pit and bedsprings.

Our advice: If you ever decide to go to this Lynchburg event, avoid downtown and the 'midway' row of long porta-potty lines and bad food cooked in burned, rancid grease. Do seek out the church groups if for no other reason than they have fried pies extraordinaire, the best I've had since my grandmother died. Don't even think about visiting the distillery on this day. Plan another day trip if you're interested in that.

Skip this entry if you're vegan: Venison Tenderloin

2007-10-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

This past Friday afternoon was one of those warm-hazy-golden-fall-light afternoons where time is suspended until there is a sunset as gaudy as a Vegas dancer. Edward had taken the boat to the island, hoping to find another incredible point like the one he'd stumbled upon earlier in the week. Trey, our neighbor's twelve year old nephew, had asked to go along and was so grateful for the lesson that a short time after they returned he came over to the cabin bearing a small Ziploc bag of fresh venison tenderloin. Trey has been practicing all fall to use a bow, and he had killed his first deer with a shot straight to the heart. My success rate cooking edible venison is only about 50/50, so I called my best cooking buddy Lowell. Here's the method he told me to use. It turned out to be the very best venison I've ever had the pleasure to prepare. Edward said the fact that the animal instantly died was the key.

VENISON MEDALLIONS
Slice the tenderloin into 4 small filets about 3/4 inch thick. Heat a large saute pan and add 1 T good olive oil. Then cut in half two slices of thick-cut pepper-coated country cured bacon and begin to brown them in the oil over high (not the very highest, one step down) heat. Meanwhile, lightly salt the venison medallions and heavily pepper them with good coarse-ground pepper, coating them with 2 tsp. dry mustard. When it's time to turn the bacon, move it away from the center of the pan to the outside edges and place the medallions into the middle of the pan, searing them well on both sides. Here's the trick on timing: When the bacon is crispy and done, the venison will be cooked to the perfect degree of doneness, not too rare and not overcooked and tough. Place the medallions on a warm plate and drain the bacon on a paper towel. Drain all the fat from the saute pan and pour into the pan a cup or so of red wine to deglaze. Leave the heat under the pan on high, reduce the liquid until it's a sauce, and drizzle over the medallions. Arrange the bacon on the sides as crispy lardons. You'll need an oven-warmed baguette to go with this so that you can capture every last drop of the glaze.

Jesus Crucified, The Musical OR Aristotle, Muscle Shoals, and Blue-eyed Soul

2007-10-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day that comes every fall in world literature class, the day we talk about Aristotle's POETICS and how its ideas are reflected in today's American culture. Look at the sum total of films that have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, back from the beginning until now, we say. See how tragedy has dominated comedy. Then tell me that what Aristotle wrote in POETICS about tragedy's inherent superiority to comedy is not relevant in today's world. No wonder so few people have a sense of humor.

Of course, that one person who actually read the assigned pages raises her hand.

"But what about this CHORUS stuff he talks about? One thing you don't see much of these days is twelve men dressed all alike talking in unison like a bunch of cheerleaders with handmotions."

She looks around the room for support as if to further say AND THERE IS NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING IN THIS CLASS THAT YOU CAN CONVINCE ME IS REMOTELY CONNECTED TO ANYTHING AT ALL IN MY LIFE.

"What about musicals?" I offer. Action followed by orchestrated commentary. Comedies never win Best Picture and are lucky to even be nominated. Musicals fare better, somewhat. (Well, "Oliver" did actually win Best Picture.) But here is where I have to confess to the class and the rest of the world: for most of my life, I despised musicals.

For many of us growing up the 50's and 60's, musicals were shoved down our throats like cod liver oil mixed into orange juice. "Showboat," "Oklahoma", and "The Music Man" puzzled and frustrated me. Right in the middle of an already dull plot, the characters paused to sing about it. Badly. Wearing bad costumes. My frustration peaked with "Bye Bye Birdie" ( I may have been a pre-teen, but no matter how much I wanted to grow up to look like Ann Margaret, I knew the plot was stupid and silly with bad timing) before the volcano of my ire erupted with "The Sound of Music". I had just read "The Diary of Anne Frank" in school and cried my eyes out. Here the stupid Von Trapp family was, strolling across the Alps in a vague attempt to avoid the Axis power, stopping along the way to smell the eidelweiss and SING AND DANCE ABOUT IT. Gee whiz, people, I thought, get with the program. These Nazis have killed 6 million people and you think you've got time for four-part harmony?

My problem in my youth was that I did not understand that perfectly normal people can stop right in the middle of their daily lives and break out into song. I didn't understand that the plot of a musical does not require a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of most viewers.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. Yesterday, a student sent me a YouTube link to a video snippet that takes less than a minute to watch. The student and three friends (one friend's little daughter is standing there with them) had just gone to a music performance, and while standing around in the parking lot afterwards they just felt like singing. Like slaves in the fields felt like singing the blues. Or Janis Joplin in the shower felt like belting it out. Like even I on some beautiful fall day drive out Gunwaleford Road with the car windows down, singing loudly and off-key along with a CD.

That's what living in The Shoals has taught me.

Somedays, right in the middle of everything, you just feel like singing.

Check it out. See for yourself what it sounds like to live in the certified boondocks, right between Nashville and Memphis.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MfoBdjLgl8M

My student's name is Joey. He's the one in the white shirt, shaved head.

2007-10-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Jill McCorkle Workshop: Advice for Beginning Writers

2007-10-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Southern Women's Writers' Conference happens every other year in Rome, Georgia, on the campus of Berry College, the largest college campus in the United States, with over 26,000 acres of Eden-like hills, fields, forests, and North Georgia mountains. Herds of deer roam through the rolling lawns surrounding the castle-like buildings Henry Ford donated. If you are lucky enough to be there at the end of September during the full moon, you can see the deer wandering about in the moon mist as you watch a wavy orange moon wink at you in the reflecting pool.

After two days of readings by the likes of Maya Angelou, Kay Gibbons, and Minrose Gwin, I was fully primed for Jill McCorkle's fiction workshop on Saturday morning. We all arrived around 8 just as the coffee was ready and left around 12 to scurry over to the dining hall to eat a lunch prepared from the recipes of Vertamae Grosvenor, who entertained us with stories of how she came to be a food writer, wearing her signature long cotton dress, straw hat, and of course a working apron. In other words, we worked hard for almost four hours, but the time went by so quickly we all hated for it to be over, many of us chatting after Grosvenor's presentation and on the quad afterwards at the book signing.

Most of McCorkle's comments were specific advice for the stories that had been submitted and chosen to be in the workshop, but some of her general comments about writing are worth passing on to the beginning writer.

About writing short fiction, she said:

"Writing short fiction and novels are as different as writing poetry and novels."

She continued about short fiction: "A story is a juggling act, not
just standing in a room, throwing one ball up in the air over and over. There are many stories happening in a short story. The trick is to keep the side stories in proportion."

About panarama vs.scene in all lengths of fiction: "I know you are told to render information into scenes rather than 'telling', and generally you should, but a scene should be reserved for what's important. If everythingturns into scene, there's just one, long extended note."

About dialogue: "Don't let it drive the plot."

Order in novels: "The order is everything. The old way where people used to actually cut out with scissors pieces of their pages and fit them together is probably superior to making corrections on a word processor. The old hard copies--you made the corrections on the page and could go back and look at your earlier drafts more easily since they weren't so effortlessly, instantly replaced. Sometimes you need to go back and re-use an earlier version, and if you're using a computer, often you've lost the original way you'd written it."

About the use of outlines when writing a novel: "Start with a vague destination in mind, like leaving from the East Coast on a road trip to the West Coast. You know where you're headed, but you may not read the entire road map before you leave. You have to mentally travel the road to see what you'll learn. You don't really know what you're gonna find at the Day's Inn until you actually stop there for the night."

And, finally, about overall organization in a novel: "You need a 'clothesline'. Something to hang the chapters on, the smaller stories, some organizing structure that holds the chapters together, that moves the reader forward....."

Jill McCorkle and Kay Gibbons both have rich North Carolina accents and aren't a bit shy about using them.

Lunch with Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary

2007-09-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

My one regret about writing is that it takes time away from food. The planning, the purchasing at the farmer's market from the sweet lady who grows organically, the harvesting, the preparation, the serving, the leisurely eating. In the last couple of years, I've written more but cooked less. And although I have greatly enjoyed the hard but fulfilling work of writing, I've just recently realized how much I miss the kinds of cooking I used to do.

For me, writing and cooking come from the same place, just as Jung paired dreams and creating literature. "Creating literature, like dreams, is inventing from the imagination," he said. For me, both writing and cooking are inventing twice. The first invention is creating the story or dish in my mind. I must have a clear idea of the outcome, what I'm trying to achieve, what I want to be noticed in the finished product, what I wish for the partaker to experience. The second invention is when my hands actually create the physical products: the story or the food. How will the story 'taste'? How will the dish 'read'?

What clarified this in my mind today is a link my friend sent me, a link to a most wonderful article in today's New York Times. The story: "Lunch with Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary". Alice Waters,an important force in the green gourmet push in our society, is credited with founding California cuisine and has been a high ranking officer of Slow Food, a worldwide group who are reacting to fast food. Go read this article about experiencing food with Alice Waters http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/dining/19wate.html
And then think twice when you drive through for a burger and fries for lunch. If that's your only choice, your health and your taste buds might be better off if you skipped lunch altogether and settled for a piece of local fruit. You'd definitely be hungrier come dinner time when you'd arrive at your home stocked, hopefully, with healthier and better-tasting options.

And then if you're still pushed for time and must prepare food in a split second, become a Farm Girl or Boy a la MaryJane Butters. Ever since I first read about her in The New Yorker I have been intrigued with MaryJane Butters and her concept of MaryJane's Farm: organic fast food, actually quicker and more instantly available than driving through for the burger or McChicken sandwich. This week I've already made MaryJane's signature concept: the bakeover, a kind of glorified, organic Shepherd's Pie that takes roughly 30 minutes from walking into the kitchen until actually sitting down at the table to eat. I, like so many others, am the sole person in my home who shops for groceries and plans and prepares meals, so MaryJane has kept me from sinking into fast food doom on those days when I leave for work as the sun comes up and return home at dusk.

Don't think you have heard the last of the food topic, especially about buying local, organic foods. After all, I grew up a good half hour's drive from the closest 'chain' grocery store, and my grandfather's farm was both his hobby and my family's supermarket and emotional center.

Be warned. There will probably even be recipes.

Writing Novels vs. Writing Short Stories

2007-09-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

"With a novel, you can win by a decision, but with a short story you have to win by a knockout.” So says Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and who am I to disagree? In fact, in my limited writing experience, I have found that to be the case. A story requires the kind of intense, relentless, focused editing that borders on OCD, while a novel may have to be tidied up somewhat, but ultimately its tangents can be part of the charm. My reading experience is broader than my writing experience, and it is the rare piece of short fiction that rambles on loosely, finally winning by cult of personality. But many, many novels have won me over with their charm.

The summer reading junk feast is over. The 'beach books' that we pull out right after spring break and keep through Labor Day on the desk, bedside table, beside the reading chair and lamp on the sleeping porch, in the weekend travel bag.....well, it's time to put them away and update the stack. They're all mostly read now anyway.

But it's still fun to talk about the good juicy 'reads'. Kind of like indulging in a hot fudge sundae instead of lunch on the hottest day of the year. You know you shouldn't consume the empty calories, but somehow, just this once, it seems like the only right thing to do.

So. Come on, share. What did you read during those long, hot days that dragged into Dog Days and now beyond? What was your hot weather indulgence? When you should have been weeding the flower bed or washing the car, what book lured you to a comfy chair instead, a glass of iced tea by your side?

Quick, before your tan fades and you forget all the details, confess.

Waverly's Accent (see Waverly's photo in County Road 14 Photo Tour, following Posts)

2007-09-06T09:21:00.002-07:00

Waverly can play a reel fast and pure enough to make your heart spin. He is not shy, neither is he a braggart nor a show-off. He likes to play his fiddle while his daddy plays guitar, and he did not mind one bit playing his reels at my daughter's (his first cousin's)wedding, first on the beach and then later at the reception. His eyes are dark brown with depth, almost black, like shadows in the Blue Ridge, and when he looks at you, his face is open and unguarded. He asks questions from his heart.

Waverly likes to read. Alot. His daddy read all of Lee Smith's novels before I could get my hands on them, and if I didn't watch it, in his enthusiasm he would tell too many secrets from the plot before I could get him to stop. His mother's taste leans more toward Jane Austen.

When Waverly speaks, I hear the clear Midwestern of media announcers. But then I listen more deeply, to the o's and u's. Virginia. The Upper South. Unmistakable.

Waverly

2007-09-06T09:21:00.001-07:00

Red's Accent

2007-08-31T05:56:00.000-07:00

Red wears her auburn hair in pigtails as she arranges the sprays of white orchids for my daughter's wedding. She has been up all night, polishing silver, creating tablescapes, arranging for the zillionth time seashells and driftwood, sterling candelabra and curly willow, a turquoise remnant of her favorite linen casually thrown 'just so' over a sea of espresso-colored silk. I can peel shrimp and make stuffed brie. I can make sure a tiny orchid is ready to go into every chilled stemmed glass. Only Red can transform the room like Tinker Bell with a wand.

Although she comes to my house for every major holiday and we hug and fight back tears at every family tragedy or celebration, Red does not have the same accent I do. Hers is rich in Kentucky burgoo and genuflecting at an early age. Yet To Kill A Mockingbird affected her young life much in the same way it influenced mine. I write my art with my fingers. She molds hers with her hands.

Red is a ceramic artist whose favorite subjects are teapots and books. To Kill A Mockingbird and other childhood novels have been favorite subjects through the years in her whimsical sculptures as well as her three dimensional, multimedia paintings. The fact that she has work in the Smithsonian has not affected her spontaneous love of all art. She will stop work on her own pieces to spend an afternoon with a couple of children, creating a tea party complete with handmade teapots and cups, allowing the children to shape the concepts and designs. When asked why she choses books and teapots as recurring themes, she said:

They represent containment. A book contains stories, information, and lessons. A teapot, metaphorically, holds ideas that are filtered, brewed, steeped, and poured out for fulfillment and understanding. These two objects become symbols of the information, informed truths, childhood experiences, battles won and lost, and rules of etiquette we acquire as we grow from children to adults, through reading and living.

Look at her work at www.ferringallery.com/dynamic/artist_bio.asp?artistID=19

Or read more at http://www.criticalceramics.org/reviews/shows/sandlin.shtml

Return to Return

2007-08-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

What is it like to hear yourself speak and not recognize the sound of your own voice?

What is it like to have once been a writer and then, after a hiatus of twenty years, hear yourself think on paper once again?

In the Deep South, there are many, many accents. One of my relatives spent his entire academic career cataloging the speech patterns of the 67 counties in Alabama. In our family, we loved to listen to people speak, then guess where they called home, much in the same way we liked to look on the frosty green bottoms of Coca-cola bottles as they rolled out of the chute of my father's red metal Coke machine to see from which distant city the bottle had begun its journey. The bottle that had traveled the farthest won the bet and earned its holder a free Coke.

I watch the old VHS tape of my toddler children, a tape that I now transfer onto DVD. I hear the young mother softly speak as she holds the dinosaur camera, heavier than a sack of sugar.

"Look here," the voice urges. "Look at the camera."

The twin boy and girl stand beside a red canoe. The boys holds up a tiny sunfish by the monofilament line, the hook still set in its mouth. Both children look into the camera and smile. We are at my grandfather's bass pond, just out of view of County Road 14. I remember when the pond was built in 1960. I remember playing in the mud, catching hundreds of baby frogs the size of dimes. And when I was a little older, learning how to thread wriggling worms onto blue steel hooks as my grandfather taught me how to cast a Zebco reel.

I remember holding the camera and trying not to speak, my goal always to be silent and behind the camera, never in front of it.

The children I recognize, but the woman's voice I do not. We had just moved back from Virginia. I didn't yet sound like myself. Not like the girl who had reeled in enough bass for supper. Not like the woman I've become.