When I was a kid, summers and family meant one thing–swimming.  Aunts and uncles and cousins left town and drove the forty miles to my grandmother’s, the last leg, five miles of gravel and dust road.  When everyone was there, we’d shoehorn into two or three cars and drive back down the five miles of gravel to the cleanest, coldest creek in Tennessee.  We would splash with the minnows until we began to turn blue around the edges, then crawl out onto the limestone shelf bank and bake in the sun until we were ready to start over again.
When we were exhausted, cranky, and starving, we’d pile back into the cars and head back up the hill.  And on those days when God was smiling on us, when we got back to my grandmother’s, there would be banana pudding.  An enormous bowl of warm, wonderful banana pudding made from scratch and vanilla wafers.

I turned 61 a few days ago.  Something of a non-event.  I almost let it pass without comment.  Odd, for me, to not celebrate the season if not myself. But times change and people change, and perhaps it is not so odd after all, but right and natural for the person I am becoming.

We voted early last Saturday.  For a black man from Hawaii.  When I was born, Hawaii was not a state, and the concept of a Colored Man as president of anything would have been the set-up for some sort of joke.  In 1947, in 1957.  In 1960 it was enough of a shock that the candidate of change was Catholic.  We debated the merits of Kennedy and Nixon in school, and did not ignore the elephant of his religion.  Obama’s race is in the pot, but the haters pretend that it is not the ingredient that makes him poison for their country.  They lie to themselves.  But then, anything we fear partakes of all the things we fear, so perhaps he is a socialistic Iranian Muslem terrorist, at least within pockets of the  ubermind.

Hell, the idea of early voting alone is damn near radical.  There were no computers in 1947.  No cell phones.  Most of us were on party lines, which were like extension phones in multiple households, each with its own pattern of rings, all with an expectation of evestropping.  And even local calls were through an operator.  Within scant blocks of the state capitol and the downtown shopping area were neighborhoods with no indoor plumbing in the second half of the twentieth century.

And so it goes.

I am by nature acquisitive, an indiscriminate lover of things.  Imagine an avio-reptilian totem:  a dragon, a magpie, and topping it all, Scrooge MacDuck in his coin-filled bathtub.  It isn’t the money itself–it’s the having that counts.  If the Duck put his money away in honest, hard-working FICA approved accounts, he would sit around all day, playing with his myriad passbooks.  Or jewelled bank card holders.  It’s all about the loot.  The stuff.  The junk.  The trash.

(I’ll see your thirty and raise you, dyl)  The finest birthday poem, period.

POEM IN OCTOBER

  It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Guess there was a false alarm back there somewhere. Or a miscarriage never mentioned later. I have a definite memory of my mother asking me if I would like to have a little brother or sister. And my excitement. That, I remember clearly. Of course, what I really wanted was an older brother, but even at four or five there are some things that you cannot help but understand. That, no matter how much I wished it, I could not be an Indian when I grew up. That there was not really a fairy on the toilet paper roll (often). Still, if Mama asked me if I wanted something…

I kept waiting. Nothing happened. For years. Got my brother eventually, to such rejoicing you would not believe.

Yea Glenn!

Starlings and Minnows

It is starling season again. Not my favorite birds as individuals or, come to think of it, when roosting, but I love them in flight. They whirl and swirl and it is like the wind made visible. Feathers, leaves, wind in the oat grass like wavelets on streams. Like minnows flashing black and silver as they weave and turn and turn back on themselves.
I learned to swim in a creek not far from my grandmother’s house in Dickson County. Yellow Creek at the time was crystal clear and icy cold, and the place we swam was just deep enough for diving on one side. The other side was a limestone shelf. That’s where we would drag ourselves out, blue and wrinkled, to thaw and bake until we were ready to go back in and start over again. There was a bridge there. When no one was swimming, you could sit up there, high above the water and watch the minnows.

The end supposes the beginning. The dog wags the tail or the tail wags the dog. There was a trail down the hollow when I was a little girl, but the trail went under the barbed wire fence that was rusted so badly it was about to fall apart and sagging so low that even a little girl could wind up with snagged pants if she tried to slip underneath it. I know, because I did try, and lost it in the end. It is hard to extricate oneself from barbed wire when all alone in a ditch. I wondered what would have happened. Could I wind up stuck there forever? Would snakes come and tickle my ankles. Would spiders build webs in my hair? Would the birds laugh at my problem? Would the squirrels swear at my being in their back yard? Would the foxes come at night and bark at me.

The foxes in the hills around my grandmother’s did bark. I heard them before, in the nights when I crawled out of my nest of four quilts, so heavy I could hardly breathe beneath them, much less move, having to pee, hating the little chamber pot under the bed because it was so easy to miss. I would pad barefoot out of the cold front bedroom through the living room where my grandmother slept in her rocker beside the banked stove. She could not sleep lying down; asthma, she said. Open the door, open the screen, creaking but quiet, onto the smooth concrete front porch.

Outside the smell of hickory woodsmoke filled the air. The air was still and frigid, cracking. There was no sound nearby, no birds, the dogs all in their house curled in a warm ball together, the chickens in their coop all puffed (no baby chicks yet beneath light bulbs, in a month or two the mail order peepers will come). No one about but me and the moon, making hard shadows, and off in the distance up the hill past the hollow with the tiny creek and the barbed wire, the foxes, not like dogs at all, calling out the cold night. Then I went to the moon, shaking scared of the foxes and chilled and pulled down my pants to pee steam off the edge of the porch.

(found)

Sunday, September 04, 2005
Labor Day Weekend–Dickson, Tennessee

There are some times more than others when I miss family. Labor Day weekend is one. Funny that it’s not the Forth. They were both big Yates family get-together days, probably still are, just I haven’t been to anything since Daddy died. I got asked to Uncle Tom and Aunt Dot’s anniversary a few years back but I was in one of my intend-well, do nothing modes and not only didn’t do the gift thing I had planned, I didn’t even RSVP when I realized there was no way I could manage it all. I know why I am all family fractured. Don’t know why Glenn doesn’t keep up with anybody but Aunt Harriet.

Still, I miss them all now, or maybe miss the people we used to be.

We would run around acting crazy and generally making nuisances of ourselves. We’d chase each other around and over the loose hay and baled in the barn loft and sit there with daring, dangling our feet out the wide loft window. There were tadpoles in the pond to catch and kittens to scratch the daylights out of us when we tried. Green persimmons were for shoving onto the end of sticks and flinging as far as we could.

After we ate, in the long afternoon’s heat, there was Yellow Creek to go to. Clear as pale green glass, sparkling with minnows, and fed by springs said to be 52 degrees the year round. I couldn’t swear to the temperature, only know that the first dip in would take your breath and there wasn’t anyone, man, woman or child who didn’t have to climb, blue-lipped and shivering, out onto the rock to thaw in the hot sun. And repeat until exhaustion made us cross and we were hauled back up to the house to shuck out of wet bathing suits in the hot, tin-roofed attic with its blue-black dirt daubers. We would collapse up there. I could still feel the movement of the water around me in my sleep.

My Grandparents. I’m not sure of the date, but believe the building behind them was the “old house”. When my father and his brothers came back from WWII, they built them a new one. James and Mary. To me they were Mamaw and Papaw Yates, and if he looks less than cheerful to you, that’s the only way I ever saw him. By the time I was old enough to notice, he rarely spoke, ate little more than cornbread soaked in buttermilk, and had violent spells. Truth to tell, no one seemed heartbroken when he passed, least of all my grandmother, who had been putting up with it for too long.
My grandmother was very short and round with thin hair she never cut because “hair is woman’s crown and glory”. She always said she was Dutch, but even excluding the wars with the Deutsch folk, there is a lot of variation among the people labeled Dutch. She worked. Hard. Liked to read when she could. There were always farm magazines around, and Reader’s Digests and the Digest joke books, but she stashed novels in her little bedroom off the back porch. Named her two daughters Carmen and Harriet Arlena Maria. She milked by hand, churned, cooked on a wood stove, drew all her water from a well in the front yard, gardened and canned, raised and killed and plucked her own chickens, and would make a special jam cake for me in a little heart-shaped pan–no icing. The cake in her lap is probably coconut.

Uncle Will, Wilburn, was a batchelor, which was a shame because he was better with kids than any of his brothers (and among them they had plenty). He took care of the farm for my grandparents. He had hound dogs: fox hounds and coon hounds, and he and his neighbors went out on clear fall nights and listened to the dogs run. They’d have a fire and tell lies and (I have reason to suspect) pass around a Mason jar. The only thing I knew him to bring back from one of those evenings was a fox kit in a burlap sack. He brought it into the living room and tipped it out onto the floor. It was small and scared and I wanted to make a pet of it. Uncle Will used his pen knife to cut a chew of tobacco off a plug and with the same knife whittled bits of twig to fit in spools for me to use as twirling tops or dolls. He died after he got caught in the rain riding my mare Gypsy to McEwen to be bred, and my grandmother blamed the horse, not being the sort to blame the child. During his wake the men sat out all night in folding chairs in the front yard and the women in the front room. It was all a quiet buzz. Upstairs, I couldn’t sleep. I’d look out the front window and watch the cigarettes flare and burn, go out, and start up again.