For someone such as I -- raised and living within the transient environment of the military and
the modern world -- this would seem an understatement. Moving 10 times in 12 years, never
sleeping in the same bedroom for two birthdays in a row, never staying more than 18 months in
any one school, never halloweening with the same rowdy group of friends, decried the feel that I
had a home.
And as an adult, hundreds - sometimes thousands - of miles removed from family, even my
parent's home is theirs, not mine; a place to go for holidays or vacation time or sporadic reunions
with far-flung siblings.
But there is a home held in memory - one which, when asked from where I come, is quick upon
my lips. More the home of my heart, I think, than any mortared bastion of lineage and
descent...the only place I can call home, and the one to which I always return.
Nana's Place.
MEMORIED LAY-OUT
Nana's house was located at the long eng of the dog-leg in Arcadia
Road, in a small town called Cuevas (after the old man who owned the
general store at the crossroads, which also served as the post office,
since he was the postmaster) right outside of Pass Christian.....I
remember as a child knowing we were close to her house when the dirt
road tunneled under the overhanging oaks...knowing that we would be
there in exactly 7 minutes; that is, if the Dideaux' old coon dog wasn't
sleeping in the dusted middle of the road 'causing us to stop and have
to beep the horn on Dad's gray Rambler for old Oncle Dideaux to drag
Lottie out of the road by the rope collar.....
When I was small there, at Nana's house, in the early 60s, the nearest
neighbor was a mile down the road, and even they only came out and
stayed on the weekends...by the time I was in college, homes had been
built all up and down Arcadia...but back then it felt isolated,
special...and even though a "modern" ranch style with brickred-washed
wooden siding, feeling very old. I think it was the oaks that did that,
made it feel even older than it was....and the wisteria which twined and
vined around the trees and fences...spanish moss draped over every
branch and limb, like an old man's beard or an old granny's gray and
wiry hair...
There was one tree there, which stands there still unravaged by
hurricanes Betsy and Camille...(although the Corps of Engineers and the
Red Cross wanted to take it out when they brought in the house trailer
for Nanna and Poppa after Camille so damaged their house. Nana
wouldn't let them. ) The "horse tree" we all called it (still call it,
actually)... a live oak whose trunk had grown somehow bent ....standing
straight up for about 4 feet, then bent at a right angle (actually, the
rear part of the angle somewhat lower) and growing thusly backwards for
about another 2 1/2 or 3 feet, before straightening once again to grow
full-upright...a magical tree I thought when I was little....and nailed
a set of ropey reins to the front angled end and tossed an old quilt
piece over the rough and scaley bark to serve as my "horse blanket"
...and, after jumping mightily to gain a purchase and scrambling
over the scratchy wood, would sit there, astride the tree riding for
hours atop my daydreamed horse......
THE JOYS
I used to love staying at Nana's place.....the rhythms and the pace of
life seemed different there...driven by Poppa's autocratic need for
schedule and control, and by Nana's desire to keep the peace....and
when it all got too much she'd grab her wide-brimmed straw hat and take
me by the hand, and out we'd go into the sunshine to bait the poor
unsuspecting perch or bluegills instead of baiting Poppa.
The house sat on the front third of what seemed to me an ungodly piece
of property, which really was probably only 2 acres or so....the bayou
curving round the back of the lot, spoonlike, cradling the wide expanse
of St Augustine and Nana's vegetables.....(the yard so large and open
that I remember trying for days on end to run in slow motion...somehow
convinced that if I bounded just right I could do it....and knowing it
was simply a matter of slowing my breathing, slowing my motion, and
throwing wide my arms and stride, g-l-i-d-ing in slow barefoot measured
moments across the soft and cushioned grass. It was a great sadness in
my life that I never learned to run in slow motion.)
Her place was actually bordered on three sides by water....two by bayou
proper...the third by a drainage ditch cut to drain the property from
the other side of the road.....the "ditch" became our official "pool",
trucked-in sand stacked and coating the muddy bottom, and a "swimming
hole" carved out by the ditchwitch and fed by water pouring out from the
corrugated culvert (I remember playing hide and seek with my brother
there....dashing across the road and lowering myself into the cool, dark
culvert's opening and then screwing my courage to crawl all the way, the
20 dark and claustrophic feet to just inside the opening on the "ditch"
side, where - by leaning in just the right position, I could see him
search the yard for me.... he never did find me there....didn't
think to cross the road and unable to look up inside to see me from his
vantage point on safe, dry land)
Marshmallows grew along the drainage ditch, and the road which curved
above it (yes, we did have a car wind up in there one dark, late
night.....a local boy who'd been up the road buying moonshine, and
speeding back missing the curve.....boy, talk about excitement....a
souped up Chevy sitting nose-down in our swimming hole, just the
taillights peeking out, and Poppa talking to the tow truck driver about
the best way to get the car out of the water.....Poppa always did seem
to have the answer - or at least think he did - to everything)......
I recall the summer I learned that mallow roots were edible.....*lol*
and spent those months trying desperately to dry and grind them into
flour (like I tried to do with cattails, also, having learned the
Choctaw Indians had used them to make their bread), mixing that into a
paste and - tasting it - spitting it out in disgust and fury that I'd
been duped!!!! But having better luck with THAT than my brother had
with Poppa's frog fur.....
Poppa was a kidder.....from marsh monsters to tall tales, he loved to
grab ahold of legs and pull them just as hard as he could
manage...sometimes with very little gentleness...(a kidder, yes, but
totally unversed in when to stop or when tender feelings were being
bruised). He convinced my brother that the milkweed fluff which coated
the Mississippi bayou landscape was in reality very rare and priceless
frog fur.....gave my brother a burlap croaker sack and told him if he
could collect the sack full of fur he would be rich. My brother tried
for days ..... but as he'd free the fluff from where it had snagged on
bush or bramble it would catch the wind and float away.... no clean
tree limbs here, but dewberry, blackberry and wild rose brambles, razor
sharp marsh grass and sticking 'Jesus thorns'.... a type of particularly
vicious thorny bushes whose barbs grew 2-3 inches long and were almost
surgical in their sharpness. It took my brother 2 summers to either
grow wiser or grow tired, we never did determine which.
BIG ENOUGH FOR ME
Washing my hair, always reminds me of Nana's bathroom...her house small,
originally just 2 bedrooms, a full
bath, a living room that had an open dining area at the back, the kitchen,
and what was, until I visited, a utility room.....washer, dryer, toilet and
sink...later a freezer added, and a roll-away bed that I slept upon when
staying there (as long as I can remember Nan and Pop had separate
bedrooms)...
Space such a premium that the bathtub was the oddest thing.....glass
enclosed, little more than what would be a shower stall for Poppa at his
6'4" size....the tub a half-tub if you can imagine....half the size of a
regular tub, but just as deep, and set on the diagonal, so the bathing
space was triangular...as a child not bad but growing into adolescence and
adulthood a royal pain to squeeze a larger body into....
And water that was so soft, it felt like liquid silk coming from the
spigot......oily to the feel almost, with all the minerals....felt like you
never got quite dry after bathing in it, your skin so soft and almost
coated with a powdery, slippery feel....
A gas heater set into the wall that mesmerized me as a child...the flame
not accessible, but hidden behind a ceramic grate which glowed red hot when
fired up...and oh so warm to a bath-chilled body...I remember trying to
drape a towel 'just so' so it would be toasty warm when I got out of the
tub...and sitting on the floor in front of it, face heating up and flushing
as I dried my hair by its heat....and once, accidentally backing into it,
leaving waffle burn marks upon my thigh..........
And Nana's things entrancing me...powders and lotions and old-fashioned
bobby pins to bind up her waist-length hair, and a myriad assortment of
pills for both their aging aches and pains and ailments...tooth powder, for
the longest time, instead of paste....
That bathroom was the scene of the worst of my childhood pranks....setting
long strips of toilet paper on fire as I hung them over the commode,
watching the sparks creep and spread and flame up 'til scared I dropped it
into the water....or lighting one match, and then the others in a chain off
of it and each other, counting to see how many I could chain-light 'til I
messed it up...tossing the burnt charcoaled wood into the flushing
waters.........maybe 8 or 9 years old, playing with fire, in what I thought
was the secret privacy of the white tiled room....until one day the burning
paper floated down to drape over the upraised plastic toilet seat, and mar
the creamy white underside with ugly scorch marks...and my stammered
excuses for staying in there for an hour as I tried all of Nana's lotions
and potions to remove the marks......tooth powder and alcohol and Ajax
cleanser....spraying hair spray around the room to try to camoflage the
stench of scorched plastic and burning paper.....until finally in tears,
without much success, I cleaned up the mess from cleaning and lowered the
seat, hoping not to be found out....which lasted until a few hours later
when Poppa went in and, of course, raised the seat.....and then tanned
mine!
To my mortification they made me leave the bathroom door open for the
longest time after that......
JUICY
Summers at Nana's are remembered as "juicy".....fat, deep and lighter
green striated watermelons bigger than my sister when she was a baby,
full of lush red sweetness and dripping with sugary, tasty, hot liquid -
no clean way to eat the watermelon, but best eaten while sitting at the
concrete picnic table, arms bare to the shoulder, elbows held akimbo
stretched out to either side...huge wedge of melon held between both
hands and faces buried in the fleshy wetness, juice dripping over chins
to fall between the carefully spread legs to the ground below (a
position perfected by generations of southern children, bent forward at
the waist, face upturned and chin outthrust to catch as much of the
gushing melon nectar as possible and spilling, dripping as little as
needed).....could never decide if the melon fresh from the garden was
best, or that eaten the next day cold and icy from the refrigerator.
Nanna's fridge was always stocked, and so keeping a whole melon was
never possible...I recall always picking a melon and eating half
straight and hot from the garden, then carefully wrapping the other half
in a slightly damp kitchen towel to keep it moist and juicy then
swaddled in aluminum foil and stored there overnight...to be eaten in
the heat of the next afternoon, teeth shocked at the sudden iciness and
breaths quickly caught at the rush of cold liquid down parched throats
and over heated skin....
Late June was my favorite time of year. The wet winters and springs
always brought forth a new burgeoning and almost nuclear growth of wild
dew- and blackberries, and the heat of May and June brought them to a
juicy hugeness which still astounds me....berries as big as your thumb,
nubbined by tiny wet-filled chambers which, if eaten with extreme care
you could make burst separate and individual....a random 'pop, pop, pop'
of exploding moisture....dark and sweet and succulent in a way no other
fruit has yet to match...
To get them, though, meant determination and energy.....never able to
withstand the boiling heat enough in long sleeves and pants, I tackled
the wild berry patches with shorts and bare arms, coming home
triumphantly bearing overflowing buckets of the prized berries but also
long angry scratches and puncture wounds dotting legs and arms...thighs
marred from almost-hip to calf by gouges from the thorny vines and
barbed tips left impaled within the skin.....to be doctored by my Nana
with Octagon soap and -gasp- Absorbine Jr. (the "stingy stuff" we grew
up calling it....her favored medication for briar scrapes and insect
bites..... I remember her threats when she would see us scratching
and picking at the countless mosquito bites "If you don't stop, I 'll
get the stingy stuff" - and it usually worked, at least for a little
while, until the itching would rise in a crescendo of agony relieved by
nothing else but a vigorous scratching).
The briars were not the only things to be feared....cottonmouths and
copperheads loved to nest inside the safey of their brambled bowers so I
went out armed with a homemade gaff....a long broom handle that had, at
one end, the biggest nail I could find hammered through and exposed
spike-like, and at the other end, a just-as-large nail driven through
but bent at a right angle with which to catch the whippy trailers and
pull them towards me to keep me out of the worst of the thorns as I
plucked and teased the berries from their purchase there. With that
gaff, and my loudest stompings and shufflings and shouting as I
approached I never did have a problem with the snakes....saw plenty (and
cowered, frozen, damp-palmed each time) but thankful when they chose to
go their way and I went mine.
And going home to Nana's with my twin buckets filled with berries and
wooden-staffed gaff under one arm...hot, sweaty, itching from the heat
and insects, sticky with both berry juice and perspiration, flushed and
touseled from my exertions, I knew - I knew it would all be worth it
when she made her dewberry cobbler.....sweet and juicy and steaming hot,
with a crumb topping; or her blackberry cobbler, just as sweet and just
as juicy, but with a pastry or dumpling covering..... and just as
wonderful eaten cold, forkfuls stolen while standing in front of the
open fridge, foil peeled back off cobbler pan and greedy surreptitious
foragings topped off with cold glasses of milk....twin moustached by the
milk and berry stains, but always seeming to get away with it!
NATURAL SOUTH
Spending so much time at Nana's place gave me a sense of
nature.....surrounded by the marshes and the flow of tides, the bright
heatstroked sunlight and the buttered moon, nights so very dark the
stars looked to be within hand's reach of grasping fingertips....
The smells......sniffing, deep-breathed, nostrils flared.....of rich,
dark chocolately mud, the struck flint smell of the crushed oyster
shells lining the driveway, the rich swooney-smell of mimosa and
gardenia and purple wisteria and Nana's prized Peace and JFK roses, the
tang of briney waters carrying the slightly fishy smell of crab and
shrimp, manure brought in to enrich the sandy soil so the tomatoes and
the cucumbers and the watermelons would grow large and ripe and juicy;
the colors ..... the drab dusty-looking olive green of live oaks,
carpeted with the mossy gray-green of spanish moss....the scarlet of the
cardinals and the red-winged blackbirds and the pilated woodpeckers
flashing amidst the marshy landscape of grays and browns and tans and
the emerald green of new rushes.....the flashing white of an egret or a
heron....the golden yellow haze of summery days, the dun coating of
dusty grit laid across the summered world and begging for any little bit
of moisture....but overshadowing everything else, overlaying all
sensibilities and awareness, was the rich brown of the bayous and the
verdant, fertile greens of growing things....
We, or rather Nana, had a pet alligator. He
first appeared when only 3 feet long...in the intervening 7 years, Allie
(as we named him - original, no????) grew to an impressive
13+feet.... would crawl up onto the bank at Nana's place and eat Wonder
bread from her hand....his favorite!! And if he arrived and she was not
out there, or there but without his Wonder bread, he would "boom" at
her....a deep, low-throated vibration that sounding like the biggest,
most hollow bass drum you could find...... of course, he would
condescend to eat fish we would throw at him, warned to stay at least 10
feet away (so lots of fish never made it close to his mouth, but lay
scattered around him in all directions).....
In addition to Allie, there was Ozzie, a fairly tame blue heron who
WOULD eat fish from our hands....and the nutria which populated the
marshes, the racoons, the possums, and hundreds upon thousands of birds
which flocked to the bayou'd marshes surrounding Nana's place....
SUNDAYS
The Episcopal church that we belonged to was in Pass
Christian....Trinity Episcopal Church...historically old, built in the
the mid 1800s and a cemetary of tombstones predating even
that.....stained glass windows imported from England and France by one
of the wealthier Civil-War planters from out towards Bay St.
Louis....and ancient-feeling, moss-draped oaks lining the driveways and
the walks and one -said to be the oldest confirmed living oak along
the coast - standing proudly in the middle of the church yard.
I remember sitting in Nana's overwarm kitchen early on those
non-communion Sunday mornings, eating buttermilk pancakes with
stove-warmed maple syrup and ice-cold glasses of milk....and then
dressing in my church clothes, matching both my mother and my sister, in
like hats and gloves; sitting stiff and formal across the back bench
seat of the old gray Rambler, afraid to move lest I should dust-smear
the pastel clothes.... drowsing fitfully in the enclosed heat ("ladies
do not go about with wind-blown hair from open (car) windows", my mother
would say by way of stifling explanation) until we pulled into the
oyster-shelled parking lot at Trinity....and the three of us - my
brother, sister and I - tumbled gratefully out into the warm but
still-cooler air of the open churchyard.
Ooooh, I paid the price for those pancakes every single
Sunday....sitting somnolent and heavy-stomached while Father Hardin
seemed to speak forever....chastized for squirming (trying to settle
those pancakes in a still-full tummy, pushing them down from the back of
my throat where they THOUGHT that they belonged), and miserable there
until released for Sunday School.....
Trinity was levelled by Hurricane Camille. The rectory and the church
demolished, the windows blown out and shattered. The 150+ year old oaks
stripped and blasted and uprooted by the dozens. Every grave
storm-ravaged and floating its grisly contents to the surface.....Mrs.
Hardin found 2 days later, with a broken leg and only half-alive
clutching the coffin of a long-dead parishioner, and never quite the
same thereafter. The Corps of Engineers could make no effort to sort it
out, with such destruction all around them, but simply brought in dozers
and pushed everything into one mass grave. And although Trinity still
lives, it does not have the same feel or life.
LIFE AND
STORM-SCAPED
The South, to me, has always had a separate feel...an inherent slowness,
a drowsy sensibility...not dullard-sensed but dulled or stunned by heat
and history and the passage of time.... a good frame of mind from which
to slowly contemplate life's turns and twists and the vagaries of
nature..... almost as if, by moving slowly through time's passage I was
somehow able to see a little more than others.....
Life in the south was also cruel....both taunted and tormented by nature
and by its own attitudinal way of life.... the storms which battered the
Gulf Coast were historically phenomenal....hurricanes Helen and Betsy
and Camille were monsters changing the landscape and the lifescape of
that place; each one thought to be the worst, not able to be surpassed,
until a decade later another would appear and carve its mark....
I remember as a child of 7???(8???), leaving Nana's place during Betsy,
the better pieces of furniture stacked high atop the workshop tables and
quickly rigged sawhorses, everything that could be raised a minimum of 2
feet off the floor....and windows boarded over and sandbags stacked
against the bottom of the outside doors to stop the water seepage... and
driving into Long Beach to stay with Aunt Mary Helen....all 7 of us plus
Mary Helen's family and her neighbors gathered against the coming storm
and stocked against what surprises could be imagined....
Sleeping on the floor, palleted with all the other children in the
middle room, I moved my sleeping bag over to the long windows lining the
exterior wall and remember peeking out through the duct-taped "x's" at
the fury of the storm outside....enthralled, enchanted by the power
there.... whole trees knocked down and blown down the street, power
lines snapping, crackling, hissing in the wind-blown gushing
torrents...and even going out into the back yard and feeling the storm
surge in me, before Nana chased me scolding back inside ... and when
the power went, as it almost always did, sitting there by the light of
kerosene lamps while Poppa told the tale of "Hoppin' Bill" (which
childhood ears and family tradition has bastardized into "Hoblin' Gill"
over the years) and he and Uncle JT tried to outdo each other in the
"scare the kids to death" competition. But I always sat there, one ear
on the storms outside, seeing, feeling it surge and batter and push and
change.... and so was immune to their attempts.
HURRICANES
Hurricane Camille damaged Nana's place as well...... within a 2 hour
period, the bayous swelled and overflowed and overran their banks, rose
17 feet and came 214 feet up Nanna's yard to flood the house.....and
when it subsided, left a full 2 1/2 feet of mud deposited on the floor
of Nanna's house, and watermarked the walls 4' 9" up from the
baseboards....
The clean-up was horrendous.....snake nests disturbed and deposited
under the house and within the walls....and the task of simply
shovelling out the mud numbing. The Corps of Engineers and the Red
Cross delivered a trailer for Nan and Pop, in which they lived for a
solid year while they worked at cleaning and rebuilding their house on
Arcadia Road...
I think that marked the beginning of the decline of Nana's place...and
of Poppa for that matter. He never seemed the same thereafter....he had
always had a "mean streak" and liked bullying people with his gruff
demeanor, but with the stress of Camille, his declining health and the
rebuilding of his home he worsened.....
RIDING DREAMS OF
CHILDHOOD
I went back to Nana's place before I left Mississippi, in 1982, almost 17 years
after
"tacking out" my horse tree....and 4 years after Nan and Pop's
passing.....the nails still stood there, hammered firmly in the still
strong oak with small frayed bits of rope still stuck....and straddling
the rough-barked seat again, for one last ride, rode my dreams of
childhood there at Nana's place.
