Transitions

I returned home last week from a trip to Kentucky and Mississippi for the American Forest FoundationIt was hot when I left the mountains the week before, and stayed hot in Kentucky, and hotter still in Mississippi. It was muggy in a way that seems unique to Mississippi. Mosquitoes were still fierce and cotton remained high in the fields – a lush, brown and deep green blanket dotted with white throughout. Rolls of baled cotton gathered at pick-up points on the edges of fields, ready for their trip to the gin. 

I drove home through a major storm front; rain across the entire 435 miles of Tennessee on Interstate 40 with hard downpours in the three major cities that only began to clear as I came into Madison County. At home, I went for a walk in the transitioning landscape. Cooler and dryer air. Longer shadows. Leaves showing signs of color change and beginning to edge the road and fill the ditchline. The last of the medicinals – Joe Pye weed and Jewel weed - insistent in their attention-getting array. I love the clarity of signs such as these. Reminding me, in this case, of the impermanence and ever-changing quality of life, both mine and nature’s.   

Seldom Scenes

             Untitled, Mars Hill, North Carolina, 1978.

My Father

My father, had he lived, would have been ninety-four years old on September 15. He died of a mix of what I think of as modern ailments – diabetes, high blood pressure, and a persistent melanoma that began on his leg and eventually traveled to his brain. He passed in February, 2002, a few months shy of his 84^th birthday, and shortly before publication of my first book, Sodom Laurel Album. That he didn’t live to see the book, or hear my lecture on the book at the Library of Congress, is one of the great regrets of my life.

Dad, and my mother too, was a product of the Great Depression and that experience was communicated to me, his oldest child, in the form of suggestions regarding what I should major in in college. I wanted to study history and anthropology and English although at the time I certainly had no idea how one made a living with such esoteric interests. Dad, thinking practically, and with his long memory of difficult times as a teenager, suggested business because I would always be able to get a job.

I got my degree in Personnel Management, but business didn’t stick with me. I spent more than a few years searching for the right fit, eventually coming back to my first love of writing and, a later learned-love, photography. My decision to pursue my art was difficult for both of my parents to understand or accept. Why would I not use my degree? Why would I choose a profession with such insecurity attached to it? Why would I pick something I knew so little about? My father, while mystified, also told me he would be proud of anything I did as long as I was productive. 

Some years later, after some success, when it seemed my decision had been the right one, my father revisited the decision that sent me to business school. We were at an exhibit of my work in Charlotte and he was talking with a friend who was filming the conversation for posterity. He explained his insistence that I take business, my pleas to study the humanities, and my ultimate stubbornness about following my own path. At that point in the conversation, he looked around the gallery and said, “But this is really nice work.”

That sentence was perhaps my father’s most important gift to me. In those few short words, he gave me acceptance and understanding while  showing me his own ability to change and be flexible. But most importantly, he gave me an important message about parenting, about accepting our children for who they are, not who we want them to be. 

And the announcer said. . .

Heard at the Harris Family Reunion

I live in the past a lot of times. I go to sleep at night and dream of what happened years ago.

When we was coming up, the old people would be sitting and talking and they wouldn't want the children to sit and listen. They'd say, 'go off and play.' So, we didn't know nothing, unless we asked them, and it was very little that we could ask them about.

I did hear one time that Grandma and Grandpa run off and got married. He went into the Army at 17. He was a Confederate soldier. I've got his certificate. I remember him saying that when he was in the Army, he was going down the road and he found a piece of cornbread in the wagon tracks. He said he didn't shave much dirt off that cornbread because he was so hungry. He said it tasted like candy.

I remember the first linoleum that daddy ever got. Me and Howard thought that was something special. We got down and just sat on it and slid all over the floor.

‘You make a quilt every year and you'll never go without cover,’ Grandma said.

Like my sister, my older sister, when she lived in Washington, she had a neighbor whose husband was sick with cancer. And Laura was out hanging up clothes and she hollered out over to the neighbor, ‘Mrs. Cheney, how is your husband doing?' Mrs. Cheney answered back, 'I guess he's doing all right, I buried him six months ago.' And Laura didn't even know he was dead. That's just about the way it's got. We live right beside one another, but we don't mix with the people. We don't take the time.

I thought about it as we were coming up the road. I would like to have a paper and write down everybody's names, like yours, and your children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Somebody, some day, is gonna want that record.