On Christmas Day, mom said "I wrote for you."
The story continues, Starting
here, Part nine
here.
To say that I craved sleeping with
someone sounds so calm. Maybe I need all
caps in this case. I CRAVED SLEEPING
WITH SOMEONE. As a reminder, my
grandfather was gone most nights, as he worked out in the Gulf
of Mexico on an oil rig. So
for most of my childhood, I lived in a
house of females. My grandmother, my
aunt, my mother, and me. When my mother
wasn’t available, I would sleep with someone else. No one turned me down – except for
Pa-Paw. When he would come home, he
wanted to sleep with his wife without a child between them. Took me years to understand that!
The people in my life were not dreamers, or artists, or poets. They were workers.
Nope.. I didn’t wake up my mother for
my school preparations. That was
Me-Maw’s job. I am quite sure that many
princesses didn’t have it as good as I did growing up. By the time my eyes saw the sunlight of the
morning, everything that could be ready, was ready. My dress was laid out, my breakfast on the
table, my satchel by the front door.
Bookbags weren’t invented yet. I
had a little childlike briefcase with cheap plastic straps secured by cheap
metal buckles. I went through several
each school year because I tended to be rather rough on them. Breakfast was the breakfast most kids are
unaware of today, unless they go out to I-Hop for breakfast on special
occasions. There was meat (bacon or ham,
but most definitely pork), eggs, toast, jelly.
Sometimes it would be grits. But
none of that instant stuff – grits cooked on the stove where I would stand
transfixed watching them. I had a great
imagination and I saw them as lava, pulling up into big bubbles until they
would pop, sending little pieces of corn meal up inches into the air. I wouldn’t really see lava in real life until
I was in my late thirties on a trip to Hawaii. And my thought was how much its thickness
resembled the grits of my childhood. I
didn’t share that with anyone, however.
I didn’t want to be seen as different.
The people in my life were not dreamers, or artists, or poets. They were workers. This is not to say that everyday workers are
not artists, it simply means that the mediums they work in are the consumables
of our lives. A farmer grows what he
considers to be a perfect squash, but he doesn’t indulge himself with idolizing
it or attributing praise to it. He
simply looks at it, thinks to himself how grand it is, then drops it into the
bushel with other squash to one day be fried up with butter and onions by
another artist whose work is admired by those who eat that perfect squash. Each artist in that cycle is anonymous to the
next, but it doesn’t make it any less beautiful
a process.
My grandmother came from a long
line of farmers. She was the first
daughter in a family of four boys and two girls. For the majority of her life, she was the
only daughter. My great grandparents
were Ben and Lizzie Watters. In talking
about my life, I always think of it as a clock that is consistently one hour –
in my case, one generation – off. My
grandmother was my mother, my great grandmother was my grandmother, and that
leaves my mother as….. well, I really don’t have a good answer for that
one. The closest thing would be to say
that my mother was like a sister to me.
I said that to her once and she didn’t speak to me for a year. But that drama came many years later than the
point we are in this story.
Neither of us imbued any deep philosophical meaning into those conversations. We were just friends.
Ben and Lizzie were definitely
farmers. One step above indentured
servants to be exact. They were share
croppers. While they did own some land
in “the bottom” as it was known, and made memories there, they generally made
money farming land belonging to someone else – someone richer. I never heard the words poor, or poverty,
or needy, or any other synonym we call it now.
They were just “plain folks” who got up each morning, gathered eggs,
tended fields, and raised children. By
the time I was old enough to start building my memories, their working farm
days were over. They had moved to “the
city.” And to call Springhill, Louisiana
the city was to acknowledge how small was the universe of Ben and Lizzie. It would be difficult to find two people more
diverse than this couple. While he was a
small man, standing only about 5’6’’, she was a tall woman, probably 5”
9”. My grandmother claimed an English
ancestry for her father, but he always looked to me like those described as
“black Irish” in that he had dark hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion. He was an oddity, that his hair never fully
turned gray, but kept its dark appearance even at his death in his mid
80s. Lizzie on the other hand, turned
gray very early in life, then when most others are turning gray her hair became
white. WHITE. Not grayish white, or silver, but white. It was beautiful, and she was known as a
beautiful woman. As expected, few
pictures remain of her, but those that do show a strikingly beautiful young
woman, and it is easy for me to romanticize her relationship with Ben. When they married, he was 32 and she was a
mere 16. At that early age, she was an
orphan. Her mother, my great great
grandmother was often called a “black widow”.
She died in her early 30s and left her fourth husband with a young
child. Lizzie’s father was a Newberry
and she had many cousins in the southern Arkansas/north Louisiana area. Ben was known as an honest man and his
daughter, my grandmother described him in almost angelic terms, saying that he
was the kindest person she had ever known.
I can only say that he was kind and loving to me. He was the rare adult who treated me almost
as an equal. I spent much of my summers
as a young child with my great grandparents in Springhill where I was allowed
to do the things that short stories are made of. Paw-Paw Watters and I planted a field of
summer squash. We would walk every
afternoon to feed and walk Buck, his horse around. We fished.
And we talked. Long long walks
and long long talks. I wish I could say
that I remember those talks, but I think the beauty of them is that I
don’t. They were simply mundane
conversations that two friends may share.
Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was the crops. Neither of us imbued any deep philosophical meaning into those conversations. We were just friends. When I was eight-ish, he had a stroke. It was a terrifying time for me. I didn’t understand what a stroke meant. Didn’t know what it was. When I tried to ask, I was shushed and when I
wasn’t shushed, my Me-Maw would cry. I
learned not to ask, but went back to my tried and true routine of simply
listening for those snippets of information which I could piece together into
some fabric of understanding. What I
didn’t know at the time was that my life with my Paw Paw was forever
changed.
No more walks. No more Buck.
No more talks. Just PawPaw in a
hospital bed in the middle bedroom. As
the days went into weeks, the weeks turned into months, then years. He laid in that bed for close to four years
until he died the summer of my twelfth year.
So now my memories are mostly of rubbing his feet with lotion, and
combing his hair, and singing to him at the request of Me-Maw. On one of our visits, she got him up and put
a robe over his pajamas. She walked him
out to the porch where he enjoyed his last visit outside. A dear neighbor, Lee Martin, came over to
visit with the family on the porch.
Pictures were taken. Many in the
family probably still have an enlargement of that picture in their home. I used
to look at it and wonder if he knew it was the last time he would smell fresh
air, see the sky, or visit with friends while sitting face to face with them. The rest of his days everything he saw, felt,
or sensed was from a prone position.
That makes me sad.
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