It's been a time of asking where I fit and where I'm going. (Yes, I understand I'm always asking that, but a little bit more these days). It's been a time of both wanting to get out of this town as fast as I can and of wanting to water deeper roots. Today, I think the deeper roots idea is winning. Maybe it's because Alabama is glowing in fabulous shades of green every where I look, but I feel a stirring of wanting to get back. Get back to knowing where my food came from, which isn't hard when it was grown on your own farm. Get back to nurturing the most basic building blocks of the world, like honey bees and family. I don't know what all this means, but something is stirring.
It's been a hard winter and I had let bitterness rent more property inside than I realized. Unforgiveness allows that when you don't tell it to leave every day. Last night, I decided to start giving that bitterness more of a fight. Today was bright and beautiful and full of colors and sunlight. It was a day when my often stressful job was the best job in the world. I spent most of it in a beautifully renovated community center in a town with one of the most corrupt histories. I learned people's stories while they sang dominoes. I had a young man tell a woman to sing me a song, and the song that came out of her was like something on one of those scratchy records in the Smithsonian collection. The ones recorded after the Great Depression and after the fields and during the grieving. I wish I knew the words, but they were about God overcoming the dark and bringing her to the joy and the other side. About helping her put one foot in front of the other. I hugged her and told her I needed that. Somehow, I didn't even get her name.
Then I jumped in a pick up and heard stories of houses built before the war. The ones with the columns and the long driveways with the giant oaks and magnolias. These led to a dirt road (Red, of course. Maybe it's cliche because it's true when that's the only kind of dirt ya got) and a house that reminded me of my grandparents' house, or what my grandparents' dreamed their house would be like if they hadn't been tenant farmers in a dogtrot house. The amazing thing about this place was that it was a place of healing and hope and restoration. Right there on a dirt road with 3 loose yard dogs is a home that really is the future of quality health care. I stood in that kitchen, with the sun streaming through the original glass window giving me a wavy image of a small fruit orchard and I felt like I was home. It must have been obvious because next I was asked to walk across a field in my work clothes and peep toe patent wedges. (Note - small sticks and bits of dandelion and such love to get in your shoes through your peep toes when walking through fields. Just act like you don't notice and make sure to dodge the ant beds). The student housing on the other side of that field had been built by the Auburn Rural Studios and really was like my grandparents' house, except I'm pretty sure these bathrooms had a light switch instead of a pull cord.
We had to get back to town because the First Baptist Church had prepared lunch for today. I didn't complain when I saw the lunch was official reunion food - casseroles, collard greens, deviled eggs, and fried corn bread. (Even if I don't really like deviled eggs and only eat them on occasion when feeling collective Southern peer pressure. Or when they contain a lot of mustard and pickles.) While in a conversation about the cornbread, an older lady basically said hers brought all of the boys to the yard (or at least the students, which she kept cornbread for on the stove). I admitted I could cook but so far my cornbread hadn't been too great. She proceeded to walk me through every step of making it, including sprinkling corn meal in the hot grease in the iron pan. I knew these steps from watching them my whole life, but I listened to every word she said because I had a genuine showed folk artist with a Coca Cola painting in the Coca Cola museum explaining to me how to make corn bread. Can you get more genuinely Southern than that?
I had to go back to the real world where my preexisting responsibilities were waiting for me. The kicker of it all is that while going down one of those dirt roads in that pick up, the person running the whole operation asked me out of the blue "So, where do you see yourself with all of this stuff in 10 years?" Really? I kinda wanted to punch him in the face for that or ask when he'd read my journal. But I left feeling part of my future will look like something good from my past.
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