The Power of Place

Grandma Connie died this summer at 102. Truth is I had stayed away from that side of the family, my dad’s side, for a long time. The whole thing was a colossal mess, the classic saga of a shattered American family. Started by teenage passion and destroyed by alcohol fueled immaturity and selfishness. My parents married in their teens and divorced in their twenties. My dad showed up occasionally, made promises with breath heavy with beer, and then left again. A gross, ridiculous, misunderstanding played out with my older brother living with my dad and being raised by my Grandma Connie and Granddaddy Bilbo.  

When we got older, my brother would come pick my younger brother and me up and take us to Grandma Connie’s. All too often my dad showed up drunk, wanted to fight somebody, or worse yet wanted to pull a gun and kill somebody. As the years went by I just had to distance myself from them all.  The trajectory of my life just couldn’t include drunken brawls, unhinged anger, and the violation of every game and fish law on the books. So I just stayed away.

Part of me wishes I hadn’t, primarily because of Grandma. I could sit and listen to her for hours, just sip on that instant coffee she always drank and listen. But during those years I had battles to fight of my own, and my emotional capital just wasn’t sufficient to spend any on gun fights and drunken rants from my father.

Then came the drive down for her funeral. I found myself on back roads passing just barely familiar land marks and grappling with memories welling up from deep down inside, stirring a longing for this place. I am not even sure they could rightly be called memories. They were more like emotionally charged impressions, nothing visually vivid, a series of blurred black and white slides projected on a wobbley screen. More visceral, internal, deeper than memory, more like my very marrow. My genes had their origin in the soil of this Mississippi county, and they longed to be here, to return to their native element. I felt free in my place.

 I am convinced the Bible is right; we are of the soil and the soil of our places matter. They speak to our bones. Two weeks after Grandma Connie’s funeral I was back with my son Caleb, to introduce him to my native soil. We went out to her house at the end of County Road 125, the very end. There was no going beyond Grandma’s house. It was the inevitable destination of County Road 125. 

She had always been a gardener, always growing things. Only now the growing things were left behind all round her house, but as if in some last, wildly fertile good-bye the pear trees heavy with fruit bowed their branches to the ground taking on the curve of a weeping willow more than a pear tree. The apples followed the pears' example. My son and I walked around the house amazed at the bounty, pears, apples, grapes and figs. Tomatoes in the vegetable patch flushed varying hues of red like mottled cheeked mourners, spent and aggravated by too many tears. The place seemed to salute her years of stewardship and mourn her passing at the same time.

I mourned too. I lamented the time I could have spent sitting with her taking in her wisdom. I mourned the relationship my children had missed. I missed my history. I missed the place. But now at least my bones could hear again.