Home Poem

We're home and the laundry is running and dishes are washed and bags are unpacked and things are put away and Mr. Moon has built a little ramp for Flopsy and her chicks who are in the big coop, bathing in dirt like they have discovered the keys to heaven and the teenagers are hiding behind the shelter which we let them out of because Flopsy keeps chasing them back there- not that they seem to have the slightest interest in harming her babies, those little diamond-backed puffballs of chicken-ness.

Oh, it is hot and it is steamy. It is so dry here that the dirt is fine dust and just a little while ago the wind blew, lifting that dust up and sending leaves and the tassels of the pecan trees scuttling downward and the sky grew dark and it rained barely enough to damp it all down and not even that under the trees but the air now is thick with moisture and yes, it is summer here in Lloyd. Not a taste of spring is left. Lick the air and your tongue comes back hot. Sweat pours off you if you move from house to garden and then to the chicken coop.The poison ivy that I got last week keeps popping up in different places and I feel as if I have become infected with what we sometimes called jungle rot when I was a child.

I feel unsettled and mean down in my bones, I hear the frogs croaking their plea for the rain to come, to come, to please just come on and I understand and I slap mosquitoes that land and torture my already itching arms.

Ah. Summer in Florida.

Home.

I went out to the garden and picked three squash that with last night's leftovers, kept cold in an ice chest, will be our supper. It is hard to remember last night, that dinner we ate in a room of cool, trendy cement walls and floor, with the lights down low and the white table linen, crisp and cool to the touch. Did we really sip ice water from big stemware glasses with slices of lemon floating in them? Did that ice tinkle as we lifted those glasses in that cool room and ate scallops with orzo and artichoke hearts and mushrooms and greek olives? Did we eat fried green tomatoes with a dill sauce and chunks of crab?
I think so.

Well. We are home and that is where you go and you go there because you love it. And we will turn on the air conditioner tonight and we will rest fine, I think.

This is the south, after all. The south has its ways and its charms and its devilments and dirt and its elegance and its mean, hard side. And yes, we do eat barbecue off styrofoam because that is the way it is. There are meals to be eaten off of china and there are meals to be eaten off of less substantial ware. The best barbecue you ever eat will doubtless not be served on fine dishes.
Not in the south I live in, anyway. You may see what looks like good barbecue being eaten off of fine china on tables decorated with hydrangea blooms in crystal vases in fancypants, thick-papered magazines but that's bullshit.

We are home and I've watered the porch plants, the hanging ferns drip their water down to the spider plants below them. The white fly is threatening to take over and I washed the chicken shit off the porch.

Owen is coming tomorrow and I'll get him to help me wash the dogs. I can't wait to see him and his brother. My heart and hands are hungry for them.

The little bit of rain that we got drips from the magnolia leaves in the growing darkness and I can hear Mr. Moon out in his garage-workshop, and I can see Curly Sue from here, running from one end of the coop to the other. I need to go figure out what I'm going to do with that squash.

We went away and we had a wonderful time and we are back. The meanness in  my bones dissipates and even as I write this, the air has cooled. I am like this place, in a way. I am a mixture of everything. Of heavy silver and thin crystal, of styrofoam and plastic forks, of heat and chill and drought and storm. Of wind and of complete stillness. Of blues and bluegrass, of silk and of cotton, of dirt and pure, clear water, of sin and of atonement. I can scream out truth, and honey, I can whisper lies. The snake crawls through the deep grass and the hawk screams overhead while the frogs plead and pray and the sky opens and closes, an eye that does not care but releases what it has down the face of this place I call home.

South of What?

The beloved blogger Juancho's post yesterday on Motor Touring got me to thinking about some things. Mainly, what it means in these days and times to identify as being a Southerner here in the United States of America.

I know what our reputation is in the rest of the country and perhaps in the rest of the world. We're all a bunch of redneck hicks who are malevolent racists who drive trucks with well-stocked gun racks in the back and a Confederate flag on our license plates.

Okay. That last part could actually happen if The Sons of Confederate Veterans can push through the legislation they're proposing to offer a vanity plate with the stars and bars on it although it's not looking like it'll pass.

"It's about heritage, not hate," they say, which is what they always say but that's such a crock of shit that I won't even give it the dignity of a response except to say that so are white sheets with slitty eye holes cut out of them if you look at it in a certain way.

A hateful, crock-of-shit way but yes, there is heritage there too.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yeah. I'm a Southern woman and wondering what that means. It's hard to define. Virginia Southern is completely different from Georgia Southern which is completely different from North Florida Southern which is light worlds away from being South Florida Southern which is not really Southern at all.

The media certainly loves to stereotype the South, but I doubt I'd fit into those stereotypes and neither would most of my family or friends.

We don't (sadly) wear cut-offs that say Dixielicious on the ass (had to do that, Juancho) and we don't hate people because of their race and we use fairly good grammar and we don't marry our siblings or even our cousins and we don't eat grits at every meal. Mostly only breakfast.
We go to the dentist, we are sometimes insanely left-leaning when it comes to politics and we enjoy culture as much as the next person. Of course that culture may include smoked mullet, raw oysters, Bud-Lite and bluegrass.

Or it may include sushi, a crisp Cabernet and the symphony.

The point is, we can't be pigeon-holed any more than any other group of people.
The village I live in, my community, is a very mixed place, racially, economically, politically, and just about every other way I can imagine. We have college professors, musicians, preachers, (there must be two dozen churches within a ten-mile radius of my house), store-keepers, business owners, construction workers, artists, state workers, mechanics, school teachers, food service workers, farmers, possible drug dealers, AME'ers, Catholics, Pentecostals, atheists, hippies, professional business people, and of course me- the one remaining housewife in the world, at least for this moment. We are the descendants of slaves and plantation owners. We are the sons and daughters of Yankee carpet baggers and poor white sharecroppers. We are Mexicans, here to work and learning the language. We have nothing in common if viewed from certain angles, but when we meet at the post office we smile and hold the door open and say, "How you doin' today?" When I moved here four years ago and began to walk for exercise and to explore, it was a common occurrence for people in cars or trucks to stop and inquire in a concerned manner if I needed a ride.

I believe I am probably known as that crazy white white who walks around these parts and I sort of like that.

And maybe that's what I like about the south in general. We may not actively celebrate diversity but we certainly do find it interesting and generally tolerate it. In my experience, the unusual and the eccentric and the border-line crazy person are not looked upon with disdain in the south, but with curiosity. We may talk about these people (or be talked about if we are one of them) but that's fine. Talk is what we do. Talk is what we enjoy. And when we talk about someone who has, um, shall we say- differences? we very frequently add a "bless her heart" to the end of the conversation as a sort of smoothing over of the karmetic waters which we may have roiled or perhaps just as a sop to the idea implanted into us by our foremothers that we should always "be sweet," which is another thing about the South that I love. We try to be sweet, most of us, most of the time.

Being born a Southerner is no more of an accomplishment than being born a citizen of the United States but I take comfort in the fact that I was. My grandparents on my mother's side of the family were all Yankees although they moved to the South before they began raising their family but I still feel the uncomfortable tug of those Yankee roots sometimes. When visiting the family farm up in Pennsylvania I feel like the veritable fish out of water. I look around the rural area and all I see is extremely neat and tidy white houses with extremely neat and tidy white people and I am so grateful that Granddaddy moved to Chattanooga in time for me never to have to live up there. It's just not where I feel comfortable.

Where I feel comfortable is right here in my old house in North Florida with its three porches to sit on and talk with friends who have come over for beer and supper.

I feel comfortable living in a community with people of all colors who live in houses of all colors. I love the fact that on some Saturdays churches have fish fries in the little park by the post office and I can buy a fish sandwich which is a piece of fried mullet between two slices of white bread and there is always hot sauce to put on it. I feel a great sense of comfort studying the gravestones in the little cemetery I discovered in the woods nearby where the oldest person buried there was born in 1821. I love the fact that there's a house down the road where there are three flags flown daily and proudly and they are: the American flag, the State Flag of Florida and a gloriously colored rainbow flag. It is right next to the junk-dealer's house where there are goats and chickens and an alpaca in the yard and I often wonder how that works out, but it seems to.

I choose not to literally fly a flag but I suppose I do, in a way, when I put on my walking shoes and hit the road. We all fly our flags in one way or another.
Mine says that I'm the crazy white lady who walks and yours may say you're the gay person who lives next to the junk dealer's house with the alpaca in the yard.

Amen. Let's all get along and show a little Southern pride by not throwing our trash on the road.

And oh yes- bless our hearts.