southern

A Cup of Kindness

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For auld lang syne, my jo

For auld lang syne

We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet

For days of auld lang syne

I’ve just spent the past hour trying to find the same kind of coffee cup my Papa used, which I have now learned is a 70s Corelle Old Town Blue pattern with a D handle. I found a set of two and sent a screenshot of them to my Mama before I bought them. I told her I was pretty sure they were the same but something seemed different. I wanted to make sure I was getting the right kind, because I am convinced my coffee will taste better in them. Every morning will taste like a Saturday at Granny and Papa’s house when I am ten years old. She said they were the same—the only difference was that the ones from Ebay didn’t have coffee stains. I’ll take care of that.

Coffee is a near religious experience for me. I guess it’s not much different than the Navajo and their peyote. It awakens me for prayer and meditation. And as soon as I get my Corelle cups, in a way, it will connect me with my ancestors. For auld lang syne—for the sake of old times.

I wonder what my grandchildren and old students will associate with me. Books maybe? Tap shoes? This reading lamp? A song I choreographed to or something I said? I have two of my Papa’s hats. He was a hat wearing gentleman. I loved that about him. Those hats were a part of his character. He had one that he would wear outside in the garden, that had a solar operated fan built into it. He looked ridiculous with that contraption on his head, but I don’t guess he cared.

Papa grew up poor as dirt, one of nine children who had to pick up and move every so often when the money ran out. He enlisted in the Army and ended up serving as a mess sergeant during World War II. When he came home on leave one time, he wanted to go see his Daddy, and he ended up leading the authorities straight to their moonshine operation. He was arrested along with his Daddy and brother and ended up having to go on another tour with the Army as a part of his agreement with the law.

But my Papa was a gentleman. He held down a steady job, retiring from the Thiele Kaolin company in Sandersville, Georgia. Good credit was important to him too:  “No one can take your good credit from you,” he used to say. Holding down a steady job and having good credit doesn’t make someone a gentleman, but I’m not sure how to explain it to you aside from this. It was in the way he treated people.

I hope I’ve taken on some of these better traits. I like to think I treat people with kindness no matter their station in life. But I am not my Papa inasmuch as I am not all anyone else. I share traits and appreciations with other kin, but I am not them. I am me. Still, they are a part of me, just as I will be a part of my descendants.

There is a song by Nichole Nordeman that is seldom played on the radio anymore called Legacy—”I want to leave a legacy/how will they remember me/did I choose to love?/did I point to You enough?” A few years later, Casting Crowns released a song called Only Jesus that throws shade on Nordeman’s song, claiming “I don’t want to leave a legacy/I don’t care if they remember me/Only Jesus”. I cringe when I hear the latter song on the radio. I think they’re being incredibly rude in their rebuttal, and when you compare lyrics, the message is actually very similar. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to leave a legacy of kindness, compassion, and pointing to Jesus. So there. Put it on the record.

Drink from a warm cup of kindness and then share it with the world. May we bestow such a legacy on this cold and bitter earth.

Patience, Piss, and Corruption

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Patience Easley walked almost sideways, her hip and knee and back holding on to a grinding ache. It helped when she could push the yellow janitor’s cart down the hallway to take some of the pressure off the lower joints. She had no medical leave, no retirement fund stashed away. She’d never had enough left over to save, borrowing money to keep her lights on from the local payday lender and title pawn. She had dropped out of high school at 16 to help her family, and had kept two part-time jobs ever since. With no children of her own, Patience was the one everybody in her circle came running to when they needed something. She paid bail for her nephew every time he got locked up for drugs and probation violations, and she had a boyfriend who mostly stayed away but would cozy up to her when he needed something. Piss and corruption. I’ll have to work until the day I die was the mantra that replayed in her mind all day.

The temperature was such that she wasn’t sweating, but she could feel a viscous oil coating her face and scalp. Her bra dug into the fat under her arms and she had to stop every few minutes to fix the shoulder straps that were stretched out and slipping down. It was Monday, and she longed for the day to be done. As soon as she got home to her single-wide trailer, she would shower the day away and watch it swirl down the drain.

Bump bump bump went the wheels of her cart over the tiles of the high school floor. A fetid odor came from the dirty mop water that needed to be refreshed, but that would mean another lap around the building to the spigot, and she didn’t have it in her today. Tomorrow she would do better. The boss man, Darius, was all over her ass anyway. Why not give him something to gripe about? It was sort of a fun past time at this point. It’s not like they’d fire her. They wouldn’t be able to get anyone else to come to work every day at these wages. Used to be, you could get benefits working for the school system and that would make it almost worth your while to bust your butt. But now that the school had outsourced all the custodial services to this private company, they worked the meager crew like mules. They didn’t even get invited to the employee Christmas dinner anymore now that they weren’t technically school personnel. Piss and corruption.

She passed by the young, first-year teacher’s classroom, the tall long-haired blonde still busy at work. It was nearly 7:00. Better her than me. Patience had seen her share of first-year teachers in her 43 years at the high school. They cared so much about their work. They were on a mission to save the world every day, and when they hadn’t, they’d stay through the late night hours trying to figure out where they went wrong. Patience wanted badly to shake the girl, to tell her she couldn’t save them all, to go home and get a life while she still had the chance. Instead, she simply asked, “Mind if I get your trash, Miss Vanloo?”

“No problem at all, Miz Patience! I keep it right back here behind my desk.” She carried the can over to the door.

A little voice in Patience’s head told her to stick around. “Thank ya, Miss Vanloo. Say, your floors are looking pretty dirty. I’ll sweep up for ye real quick.”

“Alright. Thank you, Miz Patience.” It mildly irritated Patience for uppity southern white people to call her like that. She found it condescending, but she knew they were just trying to be polite. Think they’re making up for Jim Crow calling me ‘Miz’. Piss and corruption.

The young teacher kept her nose down, flipping through papers and every so often turning to click-clack on her computer. It occurred to Patience that Miss Vanloo probably felt just as trapped as she did sometimes.

“Ya oughtta call it quits here soon and head ta the house. That work’ll be waitin on ye tomorrow. It ain’t goin nowhere.”

“You’re rrrrriii!” Elizabeth Vanloo started to say as a powerful thunderclap shook the schoolhouse. A couple seconds later, the power went out. “Did you know it was supposed to storm tonight, Miz Patience?”

“No’um, I hadn’t watched the weather report in a good long while.”

The emergency lights in the hallway flicked on. Piss and corruption.

“Let me check my phone… oh rats! My phone’s dead, and I left my charger at my apartment.”

“We had better hang tight til all this passes over. I’d rather be in here than on the side a the road,” Patience said.

The young teacher sighed a slow, deep breath. Patience finished up her sweeping and rolled her cart back to the janitor’s closet. The emergency lights cast eerie shadows on the walls and floor. She felt like she was walking through a passageway into the Twilight Zone.

She picked up a flashlight and an old hand crank weather radio off the back of one of the closet shelves and headed back to Miss Vanloo’s room. On the way, she stopped at a window and watched a torrent of rain and hail coming down. The sky was a witchy green color.

“We don’t need to go nowhere, girl. Best get com’terble and stay put. There’s hail comin down the size a quarters, and the sky looks like a tornada could touch down any minute.” Elizabeth grimaced at the thought of her new car out there in the elements. She had worked so hard to get to the point where she could afford monthly payments, and now it was out there getting battered.

The weather radio confirmed Patience’s suspicions:  a tornado watch was in effect for their county until 3:00 a.m. There’s one—and probably only one—advantage to being a janitor though; janitors get master keys to every room in the building. “Let’s go fix us somethin ta eat,” she said.

The cafeteria, known to be filled with the overwhelming noise of lunching teenagers, was chillingly quiet. Elizabeth held the door to the walk-in pantry while Patience searched with her flashlight and started grabbing this and that. They were coming to the end of the month and the nutrition lady hadn’t yet stocked the shelves for the coming weeks. But if Patience knew nothing else, she had learned how to put together a stick-to-your-ribs meal off foraged ingredients.

They tried one of the gas stoves. Yes! It worked. Patience set out to prepare their supper, mixing a bunch of mayonnaise packets with instant potato flakes and water in the smallest pot she could find, which was still way too big for just the two of them. She had Elizabeth open a can of stewed tomatoes while she chopped up some little breakfast sausage links into bite-sized pieces. After the fats from the sausage coated the pan, Patience took a little bit of flour to make a roux and poured the tomatoes in, making a sausage and tomato gravy that smelled so rich you could taste it through your nose. Patience felt the touch of ancient memory blessing her hands, as she did anytime she cooked, of ancestral kitchen maids and fieldhands and hunter gatherers, all unlikely survivors. They ate the comforting meal off the kids’ plastic trays using sporks to scoop up the luscious potatoes and gravy. “How’d you learn to cook like that, Miz Patience?”

“I got hongry,” Patience said with a straight face. Nothing had hit Elizabeth Vanloo so funny in a long time. They both shared a genuine belly laugh like old friends.

Patience took a large scoop of food into her mouth when she remembered something funny her baby brother had said years ago. As the wind rushed in through her nose and mouth to produce laughter, it caught the blob of potatoes and sausage and hurled it deep into her trachea. She couldn’t cough it up. The viscid comfort food stuck like glue.

Elizabeth’s mind was on an old flame from college. The handsome fellow was strong but a little soft around the middle because he loved to eat. He had cooked for her at his duplex many times before his wandering eyes had drifted from her long blonde hair to some black-haired beauty that reminded him of his mother. Patience was slumped over and nearly unconscious before Elizabeth realized she was choking.

In a panic, Elizabeth patted Patience’s back like she was trying to console a hysterical child. Finally coming to her senses, she went to perform the Heimlich Maneuver but couldn’t get her arms around the old woman’s thick waist. Patience fell to the floor and Elizabeth began beating on her back as hard as she could. She did this for six full minutes before giving up. In one last act of desperation, Elizabeth rolled the poor woman onto her side and kicked her square in the back like she was punting a football. Patience was already dead, her eyes rolled back into her heavy head and every aching muscle limp as wet noodles. A puddle of feculent urine began forming on the floor underneath her and Elizabeth jumped out of the way in disgust.

The young woman’s heart raced but her legs wouldn’t take her anywhere. Her eyes fixed on the old woman, but her pretty head was empty. She felt a tingle in her manicured fingertips and toes that graduated up her arms and legs toward her center and made the fuzzy little hairs stand up. The foul smell of the dead woman’s shit woke her from her trance, and she backed away. She went to her desk phone and dialed 9-1-1.

“9-1-1, what is your emergency?” the dispatcher answered.

“We are stuck, me and this janitor lady, we’ve been stuck at school in this storm, and we got something to eat, she cooked us this food, the janitor, and she choked and I tried to help her, I tried but she’s not breathing and I really think she’s dead. I need some help. I think she’s dead. Please send help.”

“Ma’am, my GPS tells me you’re at the high school, is that correct?”

“Yes ma’am, the high school.”

“And you’ve been stuck there in this storm and the woman with you has choked, is that correct?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Do she have a pulse?”

“Ugh, I don’t know. I didn’t think to check for a pulse.”

“Okay, I want you to go back to her and feel for a pulse.”

“Okay, but she’s all the way in the cafeteria.”

“I’ll wait for you here on the phone. Don’t hang up. Go check for a pulse.”

“Okay.” Elizabeth ran back, knowing she wouldn’t find a pulse, and sure enough, the blood in the old woman’s veins was stagnant as pondwater. She walked back, tears trickling down her cheeks.

“There’s no pulse. There’s no pulse at all. She’s dead.”

“Okay, ma’am? I understand you’re upset, but I need you to listen carefully and stay calm. We are under a severe weather advisory and we cannot send anyone out right now unless it is an active emergency. Since the lady you are with has already passed, we will not send anyone there immediately and risk the well-being of our first responders. We will send them out as soon as this weather clears and we can safely send someone to you. Do not go anywhere. Do not leave the school until someone arrives to help you, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.” Elizabeth gulped air in between sobs.

“Would you like me to stay on the phone with you for awhile?” said the dispatcher.

“No ma’am, that’s okay. I’ll be alright. Thank you.”

“Okay, you stay safe. Take care now. Bye-bye.”

“Bye.”

A chill ran up Elizabeth’s spine. She stood up and walked to the double doors at the end of the hallway, where she watched rain come in sideways and pound on the glass. A puddle of rainwater was seeping in under the doors and she remembered the putrid puddle beneath the corpse. She gagged and fell to her knees. She wanted to go home.

She sat with her back against the cinder block wall and pondered her existence. Maybe it was this brush with death or the wind whispering to her through the double doors. Maybe it was the walls closing in on her or the memory of wasted opportunities, but at that moment, Elizabeth had to get out of that building. She needed to feel the rain on her skin. She needed to feel anything other than everything on her mind.

She wanted to forget everything and for a moment, live. She forgot many things walking out those doors, including her keys to get back inside. She remembered them when the door slammed shut.

She had always done what she was told. She was always trying to live up to someone else’s expectations. No more, she vowed to herself, walking off the walkway and into the soggy grass, wind whipping her wet hair around like a cat o’ nine tails. She walked back in the direction of her apartment, willing the storm to lift her from the ground and carry her. To hell with this place. Live or die, I’m going home and I’m never coming back.

The moment of madness was temporary, and Elizabeth soon found herself inferior to the elements. She stopped at an old abandoned gas station, the only building remotely close to the rural school. She beat on the front door to no avail, so she went around to the back to find an unlocked door banging open and shut with the whipping winds. She went inside for some shelter. How am I going to explain myself? she thought in a sudden panic.

Patience watched the girl from the other side. “Piss and corruption. She gone and left me laying there like some dog. Shoulda left her there, crazy heifer.”

The wind slammed the door shut behind Elizabeth.

A Dead End

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When I was in college, sometimes the only private place I had to go was in my car. I drove all over Oklahoma City that first year, getting lost and finding my way back again. Sometimes, I even ventured out into neighboring towns, depending on the breadth of contemplation I was undergoing at the time. I came upon many crossroads, forks in the road, and endless highways. At dead ends, I had to turn around and go in a different direction altogether.

People don’t talk about miscarriages. Much. Maybe its something they want to keep private, or maybe there’s some external pressure to keep it under wraps. For me, I’ve been quiet about it—for the most part—because I didn’t want to make anyone else sad and I fell in line with the notion that ladies don’t talk about such things. But I’m ready to talk about it. In a way, I need to talk about it. There’s a pull inside me to find out and connect with other women who have shared a similar experience, and how can I do that unless I put it out there?

In November, I joined a club I never wanted to be in—the pregnancy loss club. My loss is minor compared to what some women have gone through. I was only seven weeks along when I had a D&C to take care of it. It’s easy for me to compare my loss to others and feel the need to get over it. I’ve been sucking it up all this time, but, as trauma tends to do, my not working through it has compromised my emotional well-being.

We all have our own unique ways of dealing with things, and I don’t mean to suggest that women should or shouldn’t go public when they have a miscarriage. But through therapy (yes, I see a therapist—loud and proud therapy participant right here), I’ve discovered that I need community. And it helps me to tell my story.

In my case, I was pregnant with a “blighted ovum”. You can look it up, but my doctor told me that there was probably going to be something wrong with the baby, so nature took its course. The problem was that my body still thought it was pregnant, so I was going into the doctor sick as a dog and happy to be so, thinking that the raging hormones making me sick was a good sign. “This is a loss. You’re going to grieve,” my doctor told me. It’s true, but this has been a strange grief. It hasn’t been anything like the losses I’ve experienced before. In all of my other confrontations with death, I grieved for what was. Now, I grieve for what could have been.

From the moment I learned I was pregnant, I knew it was a little girl. We even picked out a name, which I will keep to myself since I might like to save it for a living child one day. When I called my Mama to tell her I was expecting, she said, “Well my, my, my!” and was so excited that her words started getting ahead of her on the phone. We started calling the freshly fertilized egg “Lizard” as a code word, because when we asked our four-year-old if he would like to have a little brother or sister, he said without hesitation, “I want a lizard.”

I called my doctor and we formulated a plan to titrate off my meds. I stocked up on prenatal vitamins and cut out all of the things you’re supposed to cut out when expecting:  wine, soft cheese, raw sushi, cold lunchmeat. We made an appointment with the obstetrician, and Joey made plans to go with me. Even though I was sick as a dog, I gained fifteen pounds from eating bland carbohydrates. I could see the weight gain in the mirror at the gym, but all would be well once I was able to announce my pregnancy to the world. Then everyone would understand the extra pooch over the waistband of my pants.

In the waiting room at that first OB visit, Joey and I began to formulate what we would say in that first Facebook post. A second child wouldn’t warrant the same type of announcement as our first child—where we shared the news via a family event and a special email out to all my co-workers. A Facebook post would be sufficient, but we wanted it to be worded just right. The child might look back on it years down the road, and we would want that child to feel loved right from the start. They told us it was probably too early to see everything in that first ultrasound, so they had me come back in for bloodwork a couple of times and scheduled a follow-up ultrasound. The bloodwork came back with good levels of heightened pregnancy hormones, and that made everyone in our small circle confident that everything was just fine. I was so confident that I told Joey he didn’t need to come to the second ultrasound.

In the waiting room that second time, I watched a teenage girl with a nervous smile—a girl that I had taught a couple years before—go back with her boyfriend to be seen on the OB side of the office. I had been pregnant the first time alongside some of my students, and I found it strange. Here I was, once again, sharing in the maternal journey with someone half my age.

The rest of it went by so fast it is almost already a blur in my memory. I remember being told by the ultrasound technician that she did not see the fetus, and I took a deep and accepting breath. My doctor said, “It’s not working out”, and I cried. Afterwards, I went to the bathroom and overheard an excited mother breathing a sigh of relief about something and talking to the same doctor about next steps in the pregnancy. It occurred to me then how strange it must be to work in a profession delivering devastating news to one person, then turning around to deliver happy news to the next in line. I felt sorry for everyone who had to care for me through this process. How awkward it must be for them, I thought.

There was certainly a great deal of pain initially, but a prolonged suffering has been in the aftermath. I can’t bear to open Pinterest right now because the social media gods have decided to fill my feed with baby stuff. It’s not so bad when a friend posts that she’s expecting; for the most part, I’m genuinely happy for an expectant mother. It’s hard to see the medical bills from the procedure I had to undergo, so I’ll be triumphantly glad when I can pay those off. Medical jargon is what it is, but the fact that the type of miscarriage I had is referred to as a “missed abortion” gets under my skin.

The most surreal part of the whole ordeal was signing a document that designated where the fetal remains were to be sent. In my case, the embryo was absorbed back into my body; of course that didn’t stop anyone from taking the other tissues to a lab and charging me for it.

I’m here at this dead end and it is time to turn around. I’ve been sitting here for months trying to figure out a way to forge a path through, to pave over uneven, rocky ground and get over it. But sometimes getting over rough ground just tears up your car.

Desires of the Heart

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Aunt Ruth wasn’t really an aunt at all, we just called her kin because she was more than kith to MawMaw. Her hair was fire engine red, and she always wore cat eye spectacles with a beaded chain that would hold them around her neck. She loved Jesus as any good country woman would and she knew how to behave herself in mixed company, but she liked to dip snuff and she cussed a little.

Aunt Ruth had grown up poor like everyone else in Sparta, Georgia, at that time, but she had managed to get by picking cotton and eventually got a job as a secretary for a businessman in town. She never took a sick day and held her boss man in the highest regard, as women were wont to do in those days. He had given her a job that didn’t require breaking her back in the fields; he had been the reason she didn’t have to worry about food on the table or paying a bill. She retired at 65, but continued to talk about what a nice man he was for the rest of her life.

Never married, she lived in a small A-frame house, always neat and tidy since there were no children. Her front porch was cute as could be—daisies in pots next to the porch swing with daffodils and hyacinth in a perfectly placed flower bed. She mostly came to visit with MawMaw at her house, but on the occasions that we visited her, we could always expect a treat out of her cookie jar. Ginger cookies were her favorite. And a cold Coca-Cola to wash it down with.

She liked to play gin rummy with MawMaw, and when they weren’t playing cards, they were looking at the Simplicity catalog and gushing about the outfits they’d like to make if they could just find the right material. Aunt Ruth was very stylish in my eyes, a very put-together lady, and she loved fashion.

“Ruth, you ought to make that dress. Might getchew a man in that ‘un!” MawMaw would say.

“I reckon it’s too late for me to get a man now, Louise.”

“Hogwash. Any woman your age still wearing heels and not a lick of gray hair? You’ve just got to wait for the right one to show up.”

“Louise, it’s called Clairol. You should getchew some. And I been waiting 83 years. If he shows up today, he sure don’t care about punctuality.”

“All in the Lord’s perfect timing.”

At 83 years old, Ruth didn’t really care anymore about finding a husband. She did, however, want a child of her own. I think she doted on us to make up for it, spending time with us playing dolls and having tea parties. She loved tea sets and had a large collection of them in her china cabinet at home. Since she didn’t have wedding china, she filled it with other things.

In those days, there was a filling station as you came into Milledgeville, just over the river bridge. A dashing young man named John worked there as an attendant, and it seemed that the station was always busiest during his shift. All the ladies’ cars ran low on gas at the same time, when he happened to be available to fill them up.

John had a head full of dark hair and stood tall at 6’1”. He kept his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal his defined biceps, and the material across his chest pulled a bit at the buttons. His brawny physique came from early mornings on his father’s dairy farm, pulling calves, hauling hay, and anything else his parents needed him to do in lieu of paying for room and board. His Mama fed him a good meat-and-potatoes diet, and she prayed he would find a good Christian woman to do the same for him one day.

John wanted to go to college, so he saved every dime he made at the filling station. He had hoped that he would get a football scholarship somewhere, but senior year came and went and well… here he was.

In April of 1969, John had finally saved enough to pay for his first semester of school. He applied to the University of Georgia, saying a prayer over the envelope as he stamped it and placed it in the box at the post office. He had a plan. He would move in with his Uncle Horace and Aunt Christy in Watkinsville and work at his uncle’s auto repair shop until he could afford to move all the way into Athens on his own. Three weeks later, the mailman delivered a letter addressed to him from the Office of Admissions.

His mother laid it at the foot of his bed so he would see it when he came home. She had a bittersweet moment, thinking of him as a little boy, now grown up and moving off to start his own life. A life better than theirs, a life of more comfort and wealth. Her baby was going to be a college educated man.

With bated breath, John opened the envelope. “We regret to inform you…” it began. He laid down on his bed for a good long miserable hour, and then an indignant anger started to rise up within his chest. He sat up. The anger continued to rise like a fever into his head, and when it did, he stood up, took all the money he had—stored in a shoebox in the back of his closet—and stormed out the door. They didn’t want him at their school? Fine. He was going to buy him a motorcycle, dammit.

It was Aunt Ruth’s 84th birthday. She got up at 4:45 a.m., as usual, and spent quiet time with the Lord on her mustard yellow settee in the sitting room. She propped her slippered feet up on the coffee table, turned to the Psalms and settled on number 37.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the Lord,

and He will give you the desires of your heart.

She made herself a breakfast of two eggs, a piece of smoked sausage, and grapefruit. She normally wasn’t so hungry first thing in the morning, but today she wanted a fortifying stick-to-your-bones kind of meal. She would skip lunch, she thought, and hold out for the big birthday dinner at MawMaw’s that evening.

She piddled around the house for awhile, watering her flowers, working on her cross stich sampler, and watching Andy Griffith. She decided she would go into town—it being her birthday after all—and finally get that pretty dark pink silky material she had been eyeing for months. It was expensive, but she couldn’t remember the last time she treated herself. She figured it was a good a day as any to splurge a little.

She pulled her Buick into the A&P parking lot first, remembering that she needed to replenish her coffee canister. When she got out of the car, she met John in the parking lot. He was coming out of the store with a brown bag concealing a six-pack of Schlitz beer.

“Hello, young man.”

“Hey Mrs. Ruth, how are you doing today?”

“I’m doing just fine, thank you. It’s my 84th birthday. I’m happy to be seen and not viewed!”

John gave her a courteous chuckle. Then he got a notion. “Mrs. Ruth, how would you like to go for a ride on my new motorbike?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, sugar. I might fall off or something.”

“No ma’am, I wouldn’t dare let you fall off. Let me give you a ride. I just got it. 1969 Harley-Davidson.”

“Well…” She thought for a moment. She thought of her simple life and all the chances she hadn’t taken. She thought of her heart’s desires. “Why not!” she said to the handsome young twenty-one year old.

They rode for miles that afternoon. All over the county. Everyone they passed stared at them, puzzled. This old woman on the back of a motorcycle with her hands around the waist of the most eligible bachelor in town.

When he got to the river bridge, he accelerated, and she felt the bike lift in the front. “Yippee!” she cried in his ear. They felt a rush of wind, his dark hair waving freely and her perm and set gone to all hell. All at once, something radiated out of their chests and rose from their shoulders. John laughed. Ruth smiled and squeezed him tighter.

A Memoir of Kitchens

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Some people gather in living rooms or dining rooms. Some people sit on porches with kith and kin. At my Mama’s house, though, most times we congregate in the kitchen. Mama never has liked anyone in her kitchen while she’s cooking, but oftentimes we find ourselves standing around and leaning on the white Corian counters or even sitting on the dusty-pink tile floor with babies after the meals are made and the only thing is the biscuits in the oven.

See, if you’re family or you’ve been to my Mama and Daddy’s house before, you know to come in the side door—not the front door. The side door leads right into the kitchen, so part of the fun of being in the kitchen is seeing who walks in the door next. So many people have walked through that kitchen door, some of those people no longer with us on this side of Heaven. I once put a chicken bone over that kitchen door frame because my Granny told me that the first eligible bachelor to walk through the door with that over his head would marry me. Obviously, I must have done something wrong, because the old black magic failed me that time.

This kitchen has gone through changes. Once owned by my Daddy’s grandparents, Granny and Pa Johnson, the kitchen was less than half the size it is now. When my parents bought the house, they knocked off the little porch and made it into a long galley kitchen. Now, all of those cabinets are jam packed with dishes and cookware—some that go back generations. Not too long ago, Mama dropped and broke a white platter that belonged to my great-grandmother, Nan Nan. It hurt her feelings, but she realized that it was the price to be paid for actually using heirlooms. There is no sitting around in china cabinets gathering dust for our family’s passed-down possessions.

There’s a long list of meals my Mama is famous for, but it wasn’t always that way. Daddy said she couldn’t cook in the beginning, and in her defense, there are only so many ways you can transform a hot dog and a can of beans when its all you’ve got. Mama was only 17 when she married Daddy, so she had a little more studying to do in the cooking department. She learned mostly from Nan Nan, but also from her mother-in-law, a Central State Hospital cookbook published in the 80s, and magazine clippings. She makes an incredible eggplant parmigiana, cubed steak and tomato gravy, scalloped tomatoes, corn casserole, and the best Red Velvet cake I’ve ever tasted. Seriously, you think your grandma or Aunt So-and-So makes the best Red Velvet? Naw. This woman has made so many Red Velvet cakes on special request that she can whip them up with her eyes closed.

Mama will tell you that she has to measure when she’s baking, but she rarely pulls out a measuring cup or spoon for cooking. She hasn’t let me in her kitchen while she’s cooking long enough to learn what looks right, and therein lies the problem. How does she make Nan Nan’s fudge, you ask her? Til it looks right. Biscuits? Til it looks right. How do you know what looks right, Mama? I don’t know baby, it’s just what looks right to me.

Mama learned what looks right in Nan Nan’s kitchen. I had the privilege of knowing and loving Nan Nan until the day before my seventeenth birthday. She had a rocking chair in her kitchen, upon which she would sit and pick fleas off her dog, Poo Doodle. A spoiled little curly haired ivory-color dog, he feasted on boiled chicken. And that’s what her kitchen always smelled like to me:  chicken. On those black countertops with the metal edging, she made many a biscuit, cutting them out carefully with her biscuit cutter. I remember butter beans on the stove. And ice cream sandwiches in the deep freeze. Always ice cream sandwiches that she kept there for us kids.

Worry is an inherited gene in our family’s DNA. I remember her sitting at her kitchen table crying. She always worried over something, be it money or something wrong she had said to a friend. I have watched my own mother cry similarly in her own kitchen, and Lord knows I have cried in mine.

My Granny’s kitchen smelled a lot differently than Nan Nan’s kitchen. It was an earthy smell of collard greens and sausage. But I also think of her when I smell oranges, and I can still see her peeling one with her paring knife. There was usually a few pieces of link sausage sitting on a little plate by the stove—I reckon in case someone wanted a snack leftover from breakfast. She kept her cheese and butter out on the counter, never in the refrigerator, and if a piece of that sweaty cheese grew mold, she’d simply cut off that part and keep using it.

I call it Granny’s kitchen, but it was just as much Papa’s. He had been a mess sergeant in World War II, and he did much of the cooking at home too. He had come up with all sorts of dishes born out of the lean times, like egg gravy and cantaloupe. He didn’t talk about the war much, but he mentioned a time when a General rode in on his horse for a visit and walked back. Either you were an adventurous eater in Papa’s kitchen or you went hungry. Brains and eggs? Yes please. Tripe? I’ll try it. Pig ear? Delicious.

Granny would cook big meals on Sunday afternoons and then leave it sitting on the dining room table with a sheet thrown over it for whomever else passed through and wanted a bite. Granny and Papa had a passion for feeding everybody. It was a way to share their love. One particular Sunday, Granny had cooked chicken feet in gravy. I’m not talking about chicken legs, I mean the actual feet they scratch the dirt with. Papa told me to go behind the kitchen door and eat it—this act, he said, would make me pretty. I said, “Papa, there ain’t no meat on this thing,” to which he replied, “There’s a lot of meat on it when it’s all you’ve got.” I remember this with tears in my eyes. And I remember Granny sitting in Papa’s chair at the kitchen table (always with the back of the chair against the wall and not pulled up under the table) calling relative after friend after friend and explaining to them that “Booster passed yesterday”.

Now Granny and Papa lived next door to us growing up, but Grandmother and Buddy—Mama’s mother and step-father—haved always lived a good distance from us. They’re in the Virginia hills near Blacksburg now, but during my childhood, they lived in Pennsylvania, just outside Allentown. I loved going to visit them and remember one time in particular that I went to stay with them by myself. Grandmother made a salad for me with delicate daylily petals sprinkled on top, and I thought it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. Her gardens were just outside the sliding glass doors of the kitchen, and boy, did she have a green thumb. She curated her gardens like she curated the things she fixed in her kitchen—carefully and artfully. There was always a sweet perfume about the place, and sometimes when I open the cabinets she gave me when they moved to Virginia, I can still smell it.

When I moved off to college at first, there was no cooking because I was in the only kind of dorm room there should be:  a character building one. Nowadays, kids move into what is basically a souped up apartment building, but this doesn’t produce the kind of suffering that is essential to building a college-educated young person. You should have to share a bathroom with at least five people, and you should have to share a room with people you don’t know and get to learn all their quirks—there will be many. You should have to experience the power going out because someone on your floor plugged in their hair dryer at the same time as their curling iron. But I digress. The only cooking going on in Walker Hall was from our floor’s shared microwave, and half the time we were banned from popping popcorn in it because someone would inevitably burn it. Once the smell got to Mom Mary, all bets were off. I still remember Mom Mary’s opening speech to us freshman girls:  “You have certain inalienable rights as a human being in America, but you do not—I repeat do not—have a right to have sex in your dorm room.” I can only imagine what confrontation led to such detail imparted to us.

My next living arrangement was with three other girls in a tiny little apartment. We had a kitchen, and I used it enthusiastically. I started making cakes for no reason at all. I made supper for a mystery dinner date. I ate half my roommate’s roll of cookie dough out of the refrigerator because I was eating my feelings, and she got mad and probably told half the school about what I had done. Needless to say, I gained a good bit of weight that year. My roommate Mindy, my favorite, always on a mission to keep her weight down, would microwave fish for breakfast. It was awful.

One summer, I rented out a room from a family in Tucker, Georgia, just outside Atlanta proper. They grew to love me being in their kitchen. Many mornings, I made them pumpkin pancakes for breakfast and a cabbage soup that I continued to make for people throughout my college years. The last time I made that soup was the night that my boyfriend Tim dumped me. I burned it on the bottom of my stock pot and it tasted like cigarettes and heartache. For the life of me, I can’t remember what all I put in that soup.

When I married Joey, we lived in a little white house with the ugliest kitchen you’ve ever seen. Joey and his Uncle Herman took out two layers of old linoleum that was put down with tar. My Mama and Daddy came over and helped me paint the kitchen cabinets and they put in shelving to make me a little pantry. Once the refreshing was done, it became the cutest little kitchen. I was never happy with the lack of counterspace, but I loved the kitchen window and the view of a dogwood tree it provided. I cooked supper for anyone willing to come over. Joey and I experimented with making new dishes like paella and homemade sushi. We even played “Chopped” one time where we had to use what was in the freezer. I cooked a lot of beef dishes in that kitchen, because my father-in-law would give us half a cow every year.

When I got pregnant, we knew we had to find a bigger place. We fell in love with the house we’re in now but had to wait until the sale of our little white house went through before we could buy it. I was 8 months pregnant before we were able to move in, and I cried. Oh my goodness, I cried so much. But I was overjoyed to have this great big kitchen. Just like at Mama and Daddy’s house, when we have friends and family over, they usually congregate in the kitchen. I get great joy from putting out a spread for visitors, be it comprised of old, passed-down dishes or something new and creative.

My brother’s wife remarked that it “looked like a baby was here” when she saw bottles drying on a rack in there. My sister-in-law had pumpkin bread baking when we came home from the hospital, and I baked oatmeal cookies trying to get my breastmilk to come in. My baby crawled in this kitchen and took some of his first steps in it. He bounced like a little frog in his bouncer, which hung from the kitchen doorframe. Now, he runs laps through it no matter how many times I tell him to stop, and the smooth floor provides the perfect racing surface for Hot Wheels cars. My child spends more time refusing to eat what I cook than he does actually eating, but I am keeping faith that will change with some age.

I have laughed in this kitchen and cried in this kitchen. My husband and I have had some ugly arguments in here, but we have also held each other and smooched on this kitchen floor. I have agonized here. I have mourned here. I have delighted here. I have lived here.

Running on Empty

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The fog was so thick I had to creep along at 10 miles an hour. I passed a mile marker sign, then another, then finally a sign that listed a single gas station at the next exit. I rolled up the exit ramp, a right at the stop sign—praying no one was coming—and made it into the Citgo parking lot. I picked up my cell phone out of the cup holder. No service.

Fine. Might as well get out and get something warm to drink. I dug through the console for enough change to buy a coffee and went on inside.

“Do you have a bathroom?” I asked the attendant.

“Around the corner. Here’s the key,” he said, looking up from a newspaper. Great, no cell service and an outside bathroom.

I walked around outside and started to unlock the door, but it was already open. I flipped on the light switch, and there in the corner of that nasty little dark bathroom was a child. She was maybe five or six years old with long, tangled brown hair and a dirty face.

“What are you doing here, little one?” I asked in the softest voice I could manage having just been startled. I had a feeling that if I spoke the wrong way, I might scare her off like a stray animal.

“Mama told me to stay right here. She’ll be back in the morning.”

“Okay, where did your Mama go?”

“To work.”

“Well, where does she work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well I’m going to see if I can get you some help. Are you hungry?”

“A little bit.”

I ran back inside and told the man at the register about the unexpected bathroom guest. “Oh, that little rat! I’m sorry about that. I told her Mama not to leave her there!” he said, irritated.

“Well, no, it’s okay, but we need to call the police or DFACS or something, right? And she says she’s hungry.”

“Of course she is. Those two cost me too much. Take her a pack of peanuts off that rack and you best be getting on.”

“But…”

“I said you best be getting on. She’s not your problem. I’ll handle her.”

Shocked to my core, I walked backward a couple of steps and turned to walk back out to my car. I sat there in silence for a while, looking down at my hands on the cool steering wheel. I would have to keep driving and find cell service so that I could call for help, but I didn’t want to leave the girl alone. I looked up through the windshield and locked eyes with the man at the register. I knew I had to get her out of there.

I raced my car around the building, yanked the girl off the floor and told her she had to get in the car. I caught sight of the man running around the corner as I closed her passenger door. He caught me at my side of the car, and thick, calloused fingers grabbed at the edge of the door, prying it open. I turned around and donkey kicked him in the groin, slammed my door shut and put pedal to metal. “We’re going to find your Mama,” I said.

We lost sight of him in the fog pretty quickly. I nearly missed the ramp to get back on I-75N. I had to find cell service. The girl sat quietly without shedding a tear. She’s used to this chaos, I thought as we sped down the highway, me keeping my eyes on the dotted white lines in front of me as best I could. The visibility was only about fifteen feet. “We’ll get you something to eat soon. I know you’re hungry, but I had to get you safe. Away from that bad man. Do you know him?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Who is he?”

“Mama’s boss.”

It all became clear to me in the silence that followed. Her Mama must be a prostitute and he, her pimp. I lifted my phone out of the cup holder, taking my eyes off the road long enough to see that there was still no cell service. “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK!”

I jerked the steering wheel, luckily in the right direction. The Mack truck blazed past me in the mist. “You had better put on your seatbelt, child.” She did.

Just then, I heard a shot, then another, and a couple seconds later, felt the air going out of the back tire on the driver’s side. We rode even faster on the rim, trying to lose the bastard. We had just passed an exit and I could see nowhere to go but off the road. “Hang on tight.” I jerked the wheel to the right. The car went down an embankment and flipped twice. Please God, make a way.

We landed right side up, thank God, and I told the little girl to get out. “We have to run now.”

I held onto my phone and raced with the little girl through the trees back toward the last exit. The terrain was hilly and uneven and the underbrush tore at my pant legs. I held onto her tiny hand, grimy and cold. She couldn’t have even reached the sink back there in that abysmal place. It wasn’t long before we came to a clearing and a dirt road. Unbelievable. An unpaved road next to the Interstate.

I checked my phone again. One bar. I dialed 9-1-1. When the dispatcher picked up, I couldn’t hear her clearly and I was sure she couldn’t understand me, breaking up as bad as it was. I just prayed that they would be able to track us using GPS from my phone or something. Please, God.

We walked down the road, hoping to find a house with a friendly resident.

“You best leave that child with me and get on, ma’am,” the man said from behind us. All the blood ran out of my head as I realized he had caught up with us. I felt sick and turned around, trying to control my breathing. Please God, make a way.

“No sir. I’m going to get this child home safe.”

“Ain’t got no home, that ‘un. And I done told ye, she’s my problem. Not yers. Get on and we won’t have no more trouble.”

“I can’t do that.”

“We might have a problem then,” he said as he pulled his gun.

“Shit, Jim. Put that thang up!” came an elderly female voice behind us, then the sound of a shotgun being cocked.

“Aww, go own Edna! This bitch messin’ around what none ‘a her bidness. I ken take care my own!”

“Your bidness ain’t right, Jim, and both you and I know it. Now go own and I’ll take care a this,” said the old lady in curlers and house coat.

“Damn it, Edna,” he said just before he shot her in the arm. She returned fire quickly, hitting him right between the eyes. A fine shot for an old woman with one usable arm. He keeled right over backwards, his heavy head making a thud in the red dirt and sending up a cloud of dust.

“Y’all get own inside and we’ll call the law,” she said.

We sat down on her sagging floral print sofa while she phoned the sheriff’s department. The living room walls had 70s style wood paneling from floor to ceiling. The house smelled like cigarette smoke, baby powder, and Aquanet hairspray. There was a velvet painting of Elvis Presley beside her television with an ornately carved wooden frame and two shelves on the adjoining wall holding a dusty collection of curiosities. There was a bookshelf with no books, save a Bible and a Rand McNally Illustrated Atlas of the World. There were several photo frames with the store pictures still in them. In a tiny metal frame was a wallet size Olan Mills photo of a young boy with a bowl cut. He looked familiar.

I drew in a long sip of oxygen and blew it out, the first deep breath I had taken since stopping at the Citgo. I turned my head and saw that the girl was gently fingering the yarn in a crocheted afghan thrown over the armrest. Poor thing, she must not know what to make of all this. “Are you okay, darlin?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m glad my Granny found us.”

The Long Road Home

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About three miles off Exit 90 on I-20, you’ll run into Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. I know about this place from years of going back and forth to school in Oklahoma City. I stopped there the first time out of curiosity, but something kept drawing me back to it each time I journeyed past on the long road home and back again. Most recently in the fall of 2019, when going to a friend’s wedding out west, I stopped to pay homage to this origin story.

I’m fascinated by the origins of great people. Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor, sits in the county of my birth, as does the home of Margaret Mitchell and, a few miles down the road, the stomping grounds of Alice Walker and Joel Chandler Harris. These are all somewhat modest places, but Elvis’s family home evokes a more emotional response. I can see the struggle of a young family when I go to this place. I can hear the prayers of a mother wondering how her family will make it. I can smell the drunkenness of poverty and sense the aspirations of a young man who was built by this, who cherished this, but who wanted more than this.

The house that built Elvis is all-in-all the size of my living room. It is a little white two-room house with a front porch that must be about four foot deep. Vernon and Gladys Presley were evicted from this house after failing to pay rent when Elvis was just a few years old. They, like my Papa’s family, had to move around a lot. I don’t know where all the places are that housed my grandfather’s family, but I have an image in my mind—that my great Aunt Tina planted—of feeding chickens through the floorboards. When the job and money run out, you have to find a new place. Such was the life they led.

I’ve lived a much more privileged life, as there has never been a doubt in my mind where home is, both in the place sense and the people sense. My parents have stayed married since my mother was 17. I know it hasn’t always been unicorns and rainbows for Mama and Daddy, but the fact is that they remained together through the trials life threw at them and, in turn, have provided a safe and strong foundation for my brother and me.

In the place sense, home has always been on Black Springs Road. The only time Beth and Buck Eubanks picked up and moved was next door, out of a single-wide trailer and into Granny Johnson’s old place. This patch of land will always be home to me. Part of my emotional stability is settled on the notion that no matter how bad things get, I can always find my way back to Mama and Daddy’s house, and I do just about every weekend. It’s a beautiful gift they gave me by staying put.

I have wandered. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I went halfway across the country to school and spent summers in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, the city of dreams where I just knew I’d end up. I get to New York every once in a while, but I’ve settled here in Sandersville, Georgia, for the better part of a decade now. If you had told me eleven or twelve years ago that I would be here, I would have laughed in your face. But God has a vicious sense of humor sometimes, and He knew right where I needed to be—30 minutes from my Mama.

Elvis co-wrote and released a song called “We’re Gonna Move” in 1956. The song talks about all the things wrong at their place—there’s a leak, there’s a stove without a chimney, there’s holes in the walls the neighbors can see through, a window without a pane, a hole in the floor, a crack across the ceiling. He finishes each stanza with “We’re gonna move to a better home”. One of his earliest songs, these lyrics cut to the heart of his short life. Elvis went to his heavenly home at only 42, abusing prescription drugs and passing suddenly at his Graceland estate in Memphis.

Graceland is by far the most famous Elvis attraction, hosting over 500,000 visitors per year. The website for Graceland boasts that it is the most famous home besides the White House. But it is not Graceland that draws me back each time I drive out West. It’s that tiny two-room house in Tupelo.

Rooster

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None of this would’ve happened if Daddy hadn’t fallen asleep. Mama was working her shift at the hospital and since he wasn’t working that weekend, he was supposed to be watching my baby brother and me. It was a beautiful, sunshiny day with just the right amount of breeze to make it comfortable. Daddy had taken us back to the pond that morning, propping brother up on some old quilts in the back of his pickup truck and trying to teach me how to bait a hook. I didn’t want to touch the juicy red wrigglers, so he just kept doing it for me. I caught a couple of bream the size of fish sticks and decided I had had enough, so I whined until Daddy packed everything back up and took us home. And besides, I had wet my pants because I was too scared to squat behind the tree. I don’t care what Daddy said, it looked like prime boogeyman territory to me.

We got back home around 11:30 and had an early lunch of boiled hot dogs and boxed macaroni and cheese. Brother had his Gerber peas and applesauce and went down for a nap. I, on the other hand, had established that I was too old for naps. Daddy said “I don’t care what you do, just go to your room and be quiet. If you wake up your brother, I will tan your hide.” Let me explain. If you weren’t raised in the South, bless your heart, you might not understand that there are echelons to corporal punishment. There’s the “pop”, usually reserved for babies and toddlers, which is just a little tap on the hand or foot. This says, “You’re too little for a spanking, but in a couple years this is going to turn into one. Straighten up, little grasshopper.” There’s the spanking, a traditional hand to butt transaction. The next level of discipline would be the “whooping”, which usually entails a paddle, switch, or belt. You have really ticked off one of your elders at this point, but the worst punishment of all is “tan your hide”. It is typically administered by fathers or really mean Grannies and is reserved for special occasions.

So I pitter pattered back to my bedroom and closed the door.

You can’t fault a 6-year-old for being curious. It’s in the nature of an intelligent child to question the world around him or her, and I was brilliant, thank you very much. It occurred to me, sitting there in my quiet bedroom, that if a chicken could hatch an egg by sitting on it, then so could I.

With this notion, I considered that Daddy had not yet gotten the eggs that day and wouldn’t I be helpful if I just went ahead and took care of that chore for him? He would be appreciative that I had done him this favor, him being so tired and all. So with Daddy sawing logs in his living room chair, I set out on my mission.

The window was a little tricky to get open, but with a little finagling, I finally figured out how to unlock the window and push it up. The screen was easy—it just popped right out. As luck would have it, the monstrous air conditioner was right below my window, just like a stairstep. I hopped down onto the unit and right down to the soft green grass below.

I ran all the way to the chicken pen. (See, there’s part of the trail from our house all the way to Granny’s house that Papa’s shop casts a shadow over. One does not simply walk past the shop. You must run or the boogeyman will get you.) I jumped to unlatch the eye hook on the door, propped it open, and went on in the pen. Thinking I was about to feed them, the fowl followed me back to their nests, where I found six brown eggs and two beautiful blue ones. I held out my too-short t-shirt and put the eggs in the pouch as I had seen Granny do before to carry eggs. One rolled out the side and cracked on the ground, so I set the rest of the eggs down on the dirt while I tried to cover it up. Daddy wouldn’t like it if he saw that I had dropped one of his precious eggs. This turned out to be kind of fun, it looking like brownie batter and all, so I plopped down right there in the chicken shit and made a beautiful mud pie. The chickens were starting to peck at the eggs I had laid on the ground, so I scooped them back up and headed back for home. As it turns out, I forgot to shut the door to the pen.

By this time, Daddy was up and yelling my name desperately, “Alice! Aliiiiiiiiiice! Oh God, oh God, I’ve lost my child!” I knew I was in trouble, so I snuck in the back door and went to my room just as he started off toward the corn field. I could still hear him yelling my name, but I was right back where I was supposed to be, and besides, his only rule was that I not wake up brother. He didn’t say I couldn’t go get the eggs.

I proceeded with my science experiment. I decided that I should take off my pants to sit on the egg, because chickens don’t wear pants. I placed the first egg on the floor and sat on it. Smush. I took the second egg and made a nest for it with the blanket off my bed. I gently sat on it this time. Smush. It was when I picked up the third egg that I heard Daddy howling with tears outside and figured I better go check on him. I had never heard Daddy cry at all, much less like this. “Oh God, oh God! Please! Where is my baby girl? Please God!”

I creeped out of my room and toward the kitchen door as Daddy trudged up the stoop. I saw the shadow of a great winged demon fly up from the floor as Daddy opened the screen door. “Squawwwk!” The rooster! The rooster got out! The rooster was on Daddy’s head!

As Daddy flailed and fought with the rooster, I ran for my life toward the back door and all the way to Granny’s house. I was surely a goner unless I made it into the loving arms of our matriarch. Standing in my underwear with raw egg all over my butt, I banged on her back door with all my might. “Granny! Granny! You’ve got to let me in! Grannnnnnyyyyyy!”

Thinking the worst, Granny opened the door and shooed me inside, locking the door behind me… and she never locked the door. “What on earth, Alice? What on earth is it?” I explained to her in no uncertain terms that I was just trying to help get the eggs and the rooster got out and Daddy was going to kill me. Kill me dead.

When Daddy came up to Granny’s door, he had a dead rooster in one hand and his belt in the other. “You’ll not lay a hand on this child,” Granny proclaimed as she consoled me in her rocking chair, feeding me an oatmeal cookie and a Coca-Cola. Granny saved my life that day.

Mama was grateful that, after a long day on her feet, she didn’t have to cook supper. “Granny, it was so sweet of you to cook supper tonight. This is the best chicken and rice I think I’ve ever tasted.”

“Rooster and rice,” Daddy moaned, his eyes downcast.

The Ties that Bind

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In an old Methodist church, the kind that still employs a pastor on a circuit with other country churches, I sang of the ties that bind our hearts in Christian love. It was easy to sing then, next to my Nan Nan, the woman who raised my Mama and uncles. The ties strengthen when you struggle through something together, and those family bonds had been forged long before me. They’re still there on that side of the family, but I fear I’m losing friends and family as the days go by. We focus more on the things that divide us, paying no mind to blessed ties. What are the ties that could bind us, I wonder. And what is Christian love? I don’t know that we can even agree on that anymore.

The strongest ties that bind nowadays are based on mutual hatred. I wouldn’t say that this kind of bond is stronger than love, but it is certainly easier and more prevalent than the bonds of love. In a society where everything, and I do mean everything is politicized, how can we fashion the ties of love once again? Where can we start?

For one, I think we have to get away from social media, get off our phones, and start living again. Instead of documenting everything on Facebook, document it in your diary. You can even add your pictures to illustrate each day. Wouldn’t that be a more meaningful relic for your family than a trajectory of public posts?

I give this advice to myself because I am completely and utterly addicted to Facebook. It gives me hardly any pleasure anymore, mostly anxiety, and yet I had to tell my husband to keep my phone away from me today so I wouldn’t obsessively check a seemingly harmless post that got negative attention from some family and friends. My heart was racing and I had to pop a pill to quell an impending panic attack. Now, he and my son are fishing in my brother-in-law’s pond while I sit a short distance away and type this. The fresh air is doing me some good, as is getting these words out.

Mutual struggle is a powerful tie as well, while not as loud as mutual hatred. But its there if we can be vulnerable enough to find it amongst ourselves. This may be the most difficult bond to give oxygen to, because it requires uncovering our deepest places from underneath the rubble of pride. What we forget is that the bonds that mutual struggle can supply are more fortifying than pride ever thought about being.

I believe some people look for something to be offended by, while others look to start arguments. These are the loudest voices that stress the rest of us the hell out. How can we get them to hush up? Or at least tune them out so that they become the undeniable minority that I—deep down—believe they are?

My soul is looking for these blessed ties. As much as I enjoy solitude, I’m craving genuine connection with other people. Shared experiences are difficult in the middle of a pandemic, so most of us are having to settle for virtual interactions. While not the same as sitting together in a coffee shop and reading our works aloud, I’m looking forward to participating in a Zoom session for the Macon Writer’s Group, a small group of people who value not only writing but the connection to other writers. While what I’ve read so far from the others hasn’t necessarily been “my style”, I’m looking forward to this meeting with them. It’ll be a bright spot at the end of a pretty ordinary week. I hope they like my work. I could use a little validation.

Nine Lives

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Melissa had severe cerebral palsy. The tendons in her wrists were stiff and curled her hands up into unusable appendages. Her neck was spastic, making her head bob uncontrollably. Not a single part of her body cooperated with what she wanted to do, including speaking clearly. How she wished she could say what was on her mind!

She had grown up in special education classrooms that were completely separated from the rest of the “normal” kids. While her mind was sharp, her body wouldn’t communicate her intelligence to the rest of the world. She was confined to a motorized wheelchair, which, in turn, confined her to only the places her wheelchair would fit.

Melissa loved her Mama and Daddy with all her heart. They were the ones who bathed her, fed her, lifted her in and out of her chair, and at the end of the day, still found the emotional strength to lie down beside her and talk for a while. They were starved for alone time, while Melissa sometimes felt like she was drowning in it. But you would never hear Dawn and Willis complain. Everything they did was for Melissa.

In her quiet time at home, Melissa liked to look at a family photo album that her Mama had put together. There were pictures of her grandparents and great aunts and uncles, cousins she had only met a couple of times, a young Dawn and Willis, and a baby Melissa. She was always careful not to stare at people in person –simply her presence made people uncomfortable enough—but photos allowed her to study the forms of healthy and happy people. She stared at the images for hours at a time, imagining the lives of others.

Willis drove log trucks until his diabetes got the best of him and put him on permanent disability. Dawn worked 52 years at the same insurance agency where she managed the office. Once Melissa aged out of public school, she started going to what they called the “Center”, a place for developmentally disabled adults to stay during the day. Melissa loved it. Much better than being isolated and feeling like one of the “others”, everyone at the Center WAS one of the “others”, and they became an extended family. At the Center, they got to participate in music and movement therapy led by local college students. They had reading time and movie time, and occasionally they got to travel to small concerts and school plays. But Melissa’s favorite activity was painting. Over time, she had learned to manipulate the brush with her mouth. She swirled and swooshed and swooped the color across the paper or –when the budget allowed—canvas. Painting allowed her pure self-expression in a way that her limited speech and motor skills could not, and it calmed her racing thoughts.

Out of the gazillion thoughts that stirred around in her head, Melissa had never considered outliving her parents. Even after her Daddy died, she couldn’t fathom a life without her Mama. Even when she found out her Mama had breast cancer, she took it as just another obstacle that they would overcome together. But one day, tucking her into bed as she had done a million times before, her Mama lie down beside her and explained in the calmest of terms that she was dying. The cancer had spread. She would not get better. They had about a month.

Dawn called a lawyer and set up a plan for Melissa’s care. The house and all their possessions, including her Daddy’s prized blue ’57 Chevy, would be sold and the money put into a trust. She would go to live in a group home, where her friend Cory from the Center lived. Even though they couldn’t talk to each other, at least they were familiar and could give each other a friendly nod of recognition from time to time. She would get to keep her bedroom furniture and the family photo album.

In three and a half weeks, hospice was called in, and after another couple days, Dawn was gone. Melissa was immediately taken to the group home. Orphaned. Disabled. It was the loneliest she had ever felt in her thirty-three years.

Dawn was cremated and a small service was held at their little brown country church. Melissa knew she had some family out there on her Mama’s side, but she didn’t know how to contact them. She recognized a few people from her Mama’s office at the service, but that was all.

After the funeral, Mrs. Sarah, the attorney, took Melissa back to the group home. She was late for lunch, but Mrs. Pat, the older widowed lady who worked there, had set aside a plate for her. Melissa parked herself at the round oak pedestal table. Mrs. Pat microwaved her plate and set it in front of her. The smell of warm cornbread dressing filled her nostrils and touched her soul. She cried her first tears at that table. It felt good to let it go. Mrs. Pat fed her small bites and let her cry, knowing the tears needed to come, not trying to stop them. When all the food was gone, she held onto Melissa’s curled up hands, not saying a word.

In the months that followed, Melissa found comfort in routine. Wake up, eat breakfast and get on the bus with Cory. After a day at the Center, get back on the bus home, eat dinner, sponge bath, TV time, and bed. Still, she missed the nightly talks with her Mama. She missed the song of the crickets outside the window at her old house in the country. She wished the lamp lights in town weren’t so bright, and the occasional midnight siren startled her. So much was the same, and nothing was the same.

Soon, the holidays came and, between the staff at the Center and the group home, they all made sure Melissa didn’t have time to feel lonely. There were parties for days, carolers that stopped by, church services to attend, dance recitals to watch. For weeks, it was all she could do to stay awake for her bath. She was grateful for the diversions while they lasted.

On New Years Day, Mrs. Pat cooked black eyed peas, collard greens, fried pork chops, cornbread, and sweet potatoes. The food was comforting, but Melissa felt a dark space in her heart. The holidays were coming to an end. Tomorrow, the Christmas decorations would start to come down and make room for more solitude. She wasn’t ready for the “new normal” to resume. She asked to be excused for a nap, and Mrs. Pat obliged.

Rolling into her room, she picked up the family photo album and sat it on the bed. Mrs. Pat strapped her into the motorized lift and gently laid her down on her side so that she could flip through the pictures. Once Mrs. Pat closed the door, Melissa’s tears began to fall. It’s not supposed to be this way. I was supposed to die first.

A high-pitched meow interrupted her downward emotional spiral. Melissa looked up to see an orange tabby saunter across the room and hop up onto the bed. The cat circled and nestled down in the crook of Melissa’s arm, right on top of the photo album. She looked down and noticed that the tip of the cat’s tail was broken and stuck out in the wrong direction. It can’t be. No, it can’t be, can it?

Dawn had often told stories about her childhood cat, Rusty, an orange tabby with a tail broken from her accidentally shutting it in the kitchen door. Dawn had adored the cat, and it had shown her great affection, allowing her to dress it in baby doll clothes and feed it ice cream from a spoon. She used to tell Melissa about the cat’s purr that sounded more like the trill of a bird than a feline and how the tabby would hop on all fours if you made a popping sound with your mouth. It was a clever cat with impeccable hearing that would find Dawn immediately when she called his name.

Rusty. Melissa nuzzled the cat with her nose, and he turned around and put the little pink pads of his paw on her cheek, making her giggle. To see what would happen, Melissa called the name, which came out “Ussy”. The cat purred a strange, high-pitched sound that she hadn’t heard from a cat before. A great calm fell over Melissa, and both she and Rusty fell into a deep sleep.

As her mother would say, she must’ve needed the rest, because Melissa slept soundly through the rest of the afternoon and all night, waking at 5:14 a.m. The album had fallen to the floor. Rusty was gone, but the peace of the surprise visitor remained.