primarily because it was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren’t subject to the prejudices of men.
My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I called home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering—and returning—home.
A rusting, dented black mailbox teetering atop a decaying post marked the spot: Route 1, Box 29, Republican Road. Driving west you bore left at the mailbox, onto the dusty dirt road where the county had abandoned regular maintenance to chance and persistent complaints. If you stayed straight on that road for about a quarter of a mile, you’d see a brick house, tinted somewhere between orange and red, the hue of sun-faded clay. The Ranch was a typical 1970s dwelling, nothing spectacular, but mostly modern. It was comfortable and a place Daddy and Mama had worked hard to build. It had been a much smaller house until my parents bought an old army barracks and attached it to the little four-room affair that had been the Lanham abode. They encased the new addition in these clay-colored bricks, added a touch of distinction with white columns on the front porch, and called it home.
The porch looked out over a yard Mama had tried to cover with a slow-growing patch of carpetlike Zoysia grass. But it never lived up to her expectations, and weeds and Bermuda grass had to suffice for lawn. Behind the Ranch a huge hay shed sheltered food for the cattle, Daddy’s farm equipment, and almost everything else he thought might be of some future use. There was a chicken coop in the corner of the shed, and on the far side and out of sight (but not smell) a pigpen.
All of it—the Ranch, the hay shed with its tacked-on animal pens—was surrounded by nature. Well-tended gardens, crop fields, and rolling pastures buffered the Home Place from the government timberland. There was even a wetland of sorts, which in later years I would learn was really an open cesspool—the Ranch’s own homemade sewage system.
The homestead was also buffered from the outside world. Mama and Daddy were progressive thirtysomethings who’d come through the 1960s civil rights movement. They were still overcoming discrimination but saw a way to provide better for all of us, improving and enlarging their condition. Inside the Ranch there were the decorative signs of 1970s progress: faux-wood paneling and sculpted carpeting in gaudy colors. My big brother, Jock; older sister, Julia (“Bug”); and little sister, Jennifer, all grew up there. For me, though, it was mostly a part-time home. A good portion of my life up until I was fifteen was spent at the other, less-than-modern house that sat across the pasture.
That house—the Ramshackle—was down another road in both space and time. My grandmother Mamatha’s place was everything the brick Ranch wasn’t. It had a rusting (and leaky) tin roof, six tiny rooms, and an exterior of brittle, white tiles that were loose or missing in places. The house had a snaggletoothed look where the black tar paper showed through the gapped tile teeth. The porch roof had a ragged hole where she’d shot blindly one night at a hooting owl she claimed was a bad omen.
The yard was Mamatha’s pride and joy. She would sit on the wood-planked front porch on warm spring days, admiring her green-thumbed handiwork. Over her five or six decades of occupancy she’d collected fieldstones of every shape and size and arranged them carefully around a huge arborvitae tree. In that dedicated space Mamatha planted all kinds of flowers, which flourished under her constant care. Much of her success depended on the tons of manure she constantly mined from our feedlot. My grandmother worked hard to control things in that little world of stone and cowshit—watering, hoeing, and weeding were never-ending work.
Outside the flower ring, however, an army of weeds crept in from the adjoining pasture. Most of what was in that tiny space was green, and from a distance looked lawn-like. There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of March. The last time I visited the Home Place many of those flowers, now probably a hundred years old, were still heralding spring.
In the complimentary light of a fading sunset, with your eyes squinted just so, Mamatha’s place looked quaint: the little house in the big woods. Coming closer and stepping through the ill-fitting door would reveal the truth, though. Probably built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, the Ramshackle was almost a functional museum of the Depression-era South. The house was a shoddily constructed thing, with an interior of hastily painted Sheetrock walls and creaky, uneven floors covered by sheets of cheap, fading vinyl. In one room, a remnant piece of threadbare beige carpet provided the “luxurious” touch to an otherwise basic decor. The indoor plumbing, with exposed metal pipes and white enamel basins, was a relatively recent addition. Insulation had been an afterthought. The modern improvements included a 1950s Frigidaire that Mamatha always called an “icebox.”
In a scary, dimly lit, and moldy-smelling lower room that had probably been someone’s quick-fix idea of an addition, a coffin-sized deep freezer sat entombed in piles of old clothes, magazines, and other junk my pack rat grandmother just couldn’t bear to throw away. The freezer kept other items in an icy state of suspended animation. Plastic containers and bags filled with the bounty from gardens past sat stacked and frozen against some future famine. Foil-wrapped mystery meats and leftovers from long-ago church suppers were wedged into every nook and cranny. There was food in there that had seen several decades pass. If Mamatha had pulled a coelacanth—the prehistorically creepy, bottom-dwelling fossil-fish-amphibian—from the depths of that freezer, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. I suppose my father came by his hoarding gene honestly.
In spite of her “collecting” my grandmother kept a clean—if not neat—home. Twine-bound brooms made of the tawny stems and tassels of dead broom sedge kept the floors cleaner than any vacuum ever could. Mamatha scrubbed her floors—sometimes on her knees—and seemed always in some mopping, sweeping, or dusting mode.
My grandmother’s humble Ramshackle sat next to a dilapidated smokehouse. A notched-log structure that may have been built decades before the house itself was, it always seemed ready to give up the ghost to time and gravity. Though salt-cured pork had hung there in the past, by the time I came along the smokehouse was a dark and dank junk shed filled with all kinds of unappetizing and inedible things. My grandfather’s World War I gas mask stared out of the dim like some alien. Cloudy mason jars with God knows what in them and disintegrating old textbooks and magazines littered the interior. In spite of the eerie aura that surrounded the shed, I ventured inside occasionally when I was a kid, just to see what was in there. I never stayed for long and always felt like there was something lurking in one of the dark corners that I didn’t really want to see.
Mamatha’s backyard, mostly compacted dirt with scattered islands of weeds, struggled even more than the front. There was a woodpile that waxed and waned with the seasons. A barn with warped split-board siding had seen its better days twenty or thirty years before I arrived on the scene. You could see through the siding. The tin roof barely hung onto the rafters. It was a quarrelsome structure that complained in the slightest wind, creaking and groaning as if afflicted by some sort of architectural arthritis. Daddy built an elevated corncrib on one side of the barn to store feed and hay. On the other side was a scrapyard museum of antiquated junk and artifacts: rusting plowshares, old singletrees, worn leather harnesses, a burlap sack full of mostly broken arrowheads and pottery made by the people who used to call the same land their home place. The arrowheads were a constant source of curiosity to me, and I used to wonder about the people ingenious enough to make such beautiful tools from stone and clay. There was enough other stuff to keep a kid—or plundering picker—searching for an eternity. The rickety building was full of the melding odors of an old farm; the metallic musk of rusting iron and fertilizer, slick scent of spilled oil, and pleasant aroma of dried corn husks and molasses-soaked sweet feed mingled with the heavy mustiness of everything else, from unknown chemicals to toxic pest-killing potions long ago soaked up by the dirt floor.
There was a barely standing chicken coop behind the barn, under a gnarled black walnut tree where the hawks would wait for a chance at chicken dinner. The Ramshackle, the smokehouse, and the potluck-landscape yard could have all been