I am Appalachian. Today I stopped by the house where I grew up. I dont know who lives there now. No one was home. I walked around the property as memories like projectile dust of a tornado swirled around me, and some, like the shrapnel of bombs that didnt kill us, began to grow warm like a ring getting too close to Mordor, or the lightning bolt scar on a young wizards head. The house didnt have a slanted roof when I was there. It had started as a garage, and Pa had turned it into a tiny house. The flat roof was tarpapered until we got sheet metal from a trash dump somewhere to cover it. Children seldom know how poor they are. They go along and celebrate each improvement, and I did. I loved helping Pa paint tar on the seams in the metal to repair the leaks. It felt so grown up to be allowed on the roof. The woods beyond the house are mostly gone, thinned beyond recognition. When I looked back into the back yard I saw only one recognized object. One metal cross bar from the old clothesline was still there, tilted and rusted like faded sacred monument: to its right, the space where the chicken coop had stood beside the woods, to its left, the space where our vegetable garden had been. My hand remembered the metal bucket, its weight whitening and reddening my fingers as I carried water, one bucket at a time, to water the garden large enough to try to feed four. We didnt have a hose or an outside spigot. The same bucket carried peat from the woods to nutrify the soil that had been so poor that the first year the tomatoes grew no larger than seedlings all summer. On one of those trips into the woods I used the bucket to catch a Groundhog, with my border collie Skippy, and bring it home to Ma. She took out her ball peen hammer and told me to go back outside. We ate the groundhog the next day. I was proud to have become a provider, and sad to have caused the death of a free, wild creature. But I already knew that groundhog tasted good. I ended my visit standing above the area of Skippys grave. He came to me in a dream two nights ago and rescued me from my apartment building being on fire. I looked up across the property, so much gone. The goat shed, the little orchard, the grape vines, the shovel dug duck pond. All those acts of labor and quiet persistent steps of hungry people, all gone now, except when I teach. Then the steady rhythm of hoe and bucket, the knowledge that the long labor ahead is done one step at a time, and is made pleasant by a song, that a garden carved from shale takes years, but there is beauty and joy in every new leaf, these things stand inside me and I am an Appalachian. I miss Skippy most of all. I told Ma my dream yesterday, and she cried missing him too.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 02:31:15 +0000
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