caerula's Diaryland Diary

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The old home place

Wow, so I�m only just now getting around to more Alabama stories. Sorry. I�ve been, uh, busy. Anyway, I finally finished writing this one out last night.

My grandmother�s brother lives just outside of town there. She had four brothers, actually, and two left; one�s there, and one�s in Florida. She hasn�t seen the Florida one in over twenty years. That�s just so strange, to think of not seeing either of my sisters for that length of time. I can�t go a week without something coming up with one of them. I hope we don�t get old and decide we don�t need each other any more.

Anyway, the Alabama brother, whom everyone seems to call Unc, has never lived anywhere else. Except when he was in service during WWII. On our way out to his place, Mom and Auntie P were telling me stories about him. He and his wife never had kids, but they loved everyone else�s. When his wife died he just got run down, and hadn�t ever been the same. Hhe used to sit up late playing pinochle with the girls when they visited from Michigan, and taught my mom to shoot. This was news to me; apparently mom was around 11 and Unc and her dad took her out back and set up targets and gave her Unc�s army rifle. The kickback knocked her over and the men thought it was hilarious.

Unc lives in a 30 year-old single wide on a teeny patch of land, surrounded by other trailers on other teeny patches of land. Not a trailer park, just several trailers plunked down in haphazard fashion on a back road. The trailer is white, with this peeling red trim that looks like it might have been cheerful once. There�s an elaborate carport on the back with a little Chevy truck parked underneath it; my mom says in surprise, �Do you think Unc is still driving?� Grandma points out the garden patch on the other side of the carport: �Ain't he growin nothin besides turnips?�

We're shown in through the back door, of course, which looks right into the tiny cell of a bathroom. Unc, a large, lumpy man in a Carhart jumpsuit, shows us past a battered washer and dryer into the living room, where there�s a couch pushed up against a paneled wall and two armchairs. Mom gives Unc a hug, and everyone else sort of nods around; Grandma takes one chair, Unc the other, and the rest of us line up on the couch. It's one of those hideous 70s couches, dark brown and green velvety stuff in some sort of pattern of hunting scenes, stiff as a board. Unc�s chair, which matches, is in front of us on the right but turned away from us. In this position, we�re all facing the television on the opposite wall. I don't know if Unc doesn't get many visitors, or if it just doesn't occur to him that the arrangement is odd.

The conversation seems stiff to me, after the warm welcome we had the day before at Aunt Nell�s - of course, none of us can look at each other, so that doesn't help. Unc and Grandma ask after each other�s health and if either has heard from brother John down in Florida. (Nope.) Pictures are passed around; Unc squints at them mightily, but then his eyes seem frozen into a permanent squint anyway, so it�s hard to tell. Mom tells me later he�s looked like that as long as she can remember. There�s a picture on the wall from Unc�s basic training class, and he�s squinting there too. Then he pulls out a picture I wish to God I could steal and copy. 1929. Three rows of kids outside a one-room schoolhouse. The girls all have bobs cut right over their ears and wear feedsack dresses; the boys are almost all wearing overalls and straw hats. Some of the girls have them on, too. In this picture are three of my grandmother�s four brothers, and at least two of my grandfather�s siblings. Unc was eight or so, just starting school; Grandma would have been just four, still too young to go. Some of the boys are caught scratching, or poking each other; one is adjusting his hat. Mom finds Unc right away; he�s squinting at the photographer. Grandma picks out her two brothers, and the one�s she thinks are Grandpa�s older brothers, but isn�t sure. I�m reminded again how important it is to label your pictures. You don�t think you�ll forget, but oh, you do.

The conversation starts picking up, now. Unc had his knee replaced last year, and he just turned 84, but dern it he�s still driving. Goes out down to Tom�s truckstop couple mornin�s a week, he�s got this lady friend who sometimes meets him fer breakfast. Three, four months after his operation, this therapist lady�s coming out to see him, and he done forgot and went off to breakfast; she goes on down to Robert�s down the road and says, is Unc here? And Robert says, no, I reckon he�s gone on down to Tom�s fer breakfast, meets his lady friend down there couple mornings a week. And that lady says, you mean he�s still drivin? And Robert says, wayl, shur, how else would he a� got there? And she just couldn�t believe it! Can he still see that well? Wayl, yup, he can see clear as bell.

We stayed and listened to Unc for about an hour � you just listen, you don�t really offer any information. Then Auntie P mentioned we wanted to drive out to where Grandma and them grew up, and see the house; Unc decided to go with us cause they got that bridge tore out and y�all�ll never find it now. As we go out to the car Unc tries to convince us to take some turnip greens with us; Grandma, who hates them, tactfully says she don't think they'd keep until Friday, when we're leaving, and then all the way home. Unc says we're welcome to come back Friday morning and pick some; Robert's boy helped him plant those up, and they are sooooo good this year.

The bridge they�re tearing out and replacing was a perfectly good bridge, you know. My great-grandpa, I found out, helped to build it in the 30s, after some kids blew up the old bridge. What?! They blew up the bridge? Yup. Your Uncle Dove and RJ and maybe couple of others � some of them Hayes boys, pro�ly, they was trouble makers � they decided they didn�t want the school bus to git down there. County�d just gotten the school bus and those boys thought they�d teach County sumpthin about tryin to make them go ter school. You could go down to the store and buy dynamite, then, y�know. We had to blast rocks outta the fields. So they blew up that bridge. It was out for a couple-three years, and then WPA decided to rebuild it, and Daddy got a job with them working on the bridge. Perfectly good bridge. Don� know why they think they need a two-lane bridge out here. You cain�t never git around now, all them trucks and detours, yup, now you�ll wanta turn here, this�ll take you down toward the old home place.

Unc starts pointing out where various fields were that used to belong to them; we pass cows grazing, horses, hay bales, and a couple of chicken farms. You see the barn first; it�s falling apart, almost grown over, with a door hanging off the hinges. Across the dirt road, though, just before the bend, there�s a neat, well-kept, modern looking house. It looks nothing the same, mom says, it�s been added onto, and sided. If you look, though, the bones are still there of the house my great-grandfather built and moved his young family into; the wide front porch, with what might be the same posts, the brick foundation � rare, in those days. My grandmother was nine days old when they moved into that house from a shack in town, the last baby, and the only girl, with brothers ranged from 4 to 14. Oh, she was a daddy�s girl; she remembers daddy sitting in his chair on that porch, bouncing her on his foot. He was a big man, tall, and no one else could sit in his chair because it was so off-balance; he only ever leaned back in it, back against the outside wall, with two legs on the ground and two in the air and his feet propped on the railing, and the chair legs warped because of it. The tree in the front yard is the same; mom remembers a swing her grandpa built off it. There was a storm cellar, too, for those storms that raged up from the Gulf. Scary, that was, and the girls didn�t play around in it though the boys thought it was fine � bugs long as your finger, snakes, cobwebs and dust and Grandma�s canning.

Unc knows the people who live there now � nice lady � and he and mom walk up to the front door to see if she�s home, if we can go in. No one�s home, though; Grandma and Unc stand on the porch for a minute, and then head back to the car. Not even long enough for me to get out my camera and take a picture. There doesn�t seem to be any sadness in them, none of the nostalgia I imagine I�d feel, but they�re from a time and place when such things just weren't practical, and the habit stays with them. When you don�t know if you�re going to be able to feed your family tomorrow, I guess yesterday isn�t quite as important. Before she gets back in the Windstar, though, Grandma picks up an acorn and hands it to me. I put it in my shirt pocket and look through the back window of the van as we drive off; if it weren�t for the lines from the defroster I�d take a picture that way, but there�s no time, and it wouldn�t come out, anyway. And this isn�t the place they remember, not a falling-down barn and a freshly vinyl-sided house. I can�t know what they saw.

11:14 a.m. - November 04, 2003

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