arboreal

Music: Twilight Singers: Dynamite Steps (2011)

Jeanette was eighteen at the time of this photograph. She was the fifth of six children; she was born in 1920 to pick cotton but figured out her own path, away from the sun---but never far from cotton; when she didn’t sow and pick it, she sewed it. The photograph is from 1938, a year before she would marry my grandfather and, I think, not long after she moved from Centerville to Atlanta, Georgia. The image bespeaks hope, perhaps rebellion.

Centerville was, and in some sense remains, a rural place. Barbed wire still lines the fields, even though the farms have shrunk and given way to a Waffle House and a McDonalds and a post office. Just three miles down Zoar Church Road, where my grandmother lived a life, Rockbridge Baptist Church still stands on highway 124, still with both sanctuaries. The old sanctuary had pinewood paneled walls and has this painting hanging over the altar. The new building was erected when granny took me there, in my preteens. I don’t know what it looks like now, twenty years since I sat in its pews. I do know that no one I know still goes there. The church went charismatic; pews were apparently removed for floor mats, for the laying on of hands. That’s when granny left, when the values laid deep resisted the hypnotic pulpit. Still, I remember the raised palms and nascent tongues---it was, as it always has been, only a matter of time.

My grandmother was a teenage punk. It’s the hat, and the lipstick.

The plummeting neckline on the summer dress is not Centerville. The vectors slant back, to the left, a Western conceit that connotes “looking back.” She’s looking back to the small, unincorporated town where she was born and raised, with the best smile she can muster for the camera (granny smiled a lot, often laughed, but getting her to do this “natural” gesture for the camera was always a challenge). She moved to Atlanta to start a new life as a seamstress in a factory. My family doesn’t know much about the two years she was there; she married Bob in 1939, we reckon they met in high school, but the details are fuzzy. By 1940 she was back in Centerville and starting a family, had my aunt Hilda, and then Bob was conscripted and off to war (pilot, crane operator, fought in Germany). When Bob came back he wasn’t the same. Over the next thirty years he would drink himself to death, at the year of my birth.

I never knew my grandfather. Over the years I’ve had snippets of stories, but mostly, he is (deliberately) not discussed. Last year for Christmas my mother gifted me a scrapbook she made about my grandfather, filling in some of the history I do not have. Mostly it consists of photographs. And there are some letters, handwritten notes he penned my grandmother from overseas, and they are lovely and dear and hard to square with contemporary life; these are letters written with the subtext of possible, unpredictable death over the second World War. My mother also gave me some postcards---not included in the scrapbook, as they depict naked women. And a few notes with dirty limericks he penned.

It’s easy to romanticize this old photograph of my 18-year-old grandmother, looking back on a farming life, now living in the “big city,” the lipstick proclaiming a certain independence, that neckline gesturing a certain confidence, that smile a resolute strength. It’s easy because my granny was the unknowing mother, a woman who raised me but who did not have the obligation of molding me (even though, we know, she did; I spent more time with her than I did with my mother in some important and formative years). As most of our grandparents do not do, she never passed judgment---she didn’t complain about the length of my hair, or tell me I was straying from the righteous path. She took me to church, every Sunday. She fed me buttermilk biscuits. And she taught me how to catch possums in a trap (and then let them go).

So much of my young life was spent on Zoar Church road, on granny’s porch; across the street I talked to the cows and, sometimes, even petted them through the barbed wire fence. Sometimes I walked through the small cemetery on the other side of the road; the church kept the gravel fresh. Small, pea-sized gravel, not the big chunks that made for driveways (I think that was on purpose).

I phoned and talked to my mother today, as we do every Sunday. It goes without saying---although I need to say it---that this was a harder Mother’s Day than I remember. Granny died last week. She was dying for a long time, stroke after stroke, eyes cloudy and ever cloudy, and I had mourned her death many years ago, when I first beheld her vacant eyes, in the home, where old people are sent to die. God, I hated that place.

Nursing homes are hospices; they smell of death and rotting flesh and callused caring; they sound of moans and cursing mouths routed from brains whose censors have rotted away.

But, in her death, I don’t hate---her place or mine or my mother’s or anyone’s. I’m in a sad place, a mournful one to be sure. Granny was a parent, and losing a parent is always hard, for everyone. I know. But, she was my granny, my confidant and for so many years my constant, my Waffle House dining companion and my gardening coach. And so now she’s gone, and today is an echo of so many years, of memories flitting in my head of a time of waiting, of waiting to grow up. Being a grown-up is a reckoning with death. It’s easy to understand, in the wake, why we are prone to romanticize the small stuff, or revise history, or justify the casserole (I’m sorry, one-dish meals still suck).

I miss you granny---I miss you Jeanette. I miss your laughter. I miss your “You be good now.” I miss our bi-annual trips to the Waffle House when I came home. I even miss your stubborn refusal to die.