Ghosts, Images and Voices
Friday, May 21, 2010 at 12:32PM | by Otter 
Brick steps leading to the house my mother grew up in.A couple of years ago I took Spring Break off from family and friends and drove up into the Georgia pine-woods town where my mother grew up.
It's still a small town, in spite of a resort and retirement community that's grown up nearby. There are a lot of antique shops around the main street that keep the well-off outsiders furnished in local style.
There's almost no public internet. You can stop at the café across the street from the courthouse where my grandfather used to hold the gavel, next door to the law offices he later occupied with his brother, and you can leech the spotty, flickering wi-fi from that building that has woeful ideas about network security.
I hadn't been back there in twenty years or more, but now and then someone caught a family resemblance and asked me if I'm Kay's son. Yes, there are places on this earth where that sort of thing still happens, where memory seems a little mystical and goes beyond what a digital image will recall. It's more like catching a scent of something than checking down the traits of cheekbone and eye-color and hair, a subtle delicate thing that just tickles the rational mind enough to say, "Now would you be Kay L_'s son?" Yes. Yes, I would. And you would be...?
All around the café are pictures from the town's history. In one of them, my grandfather is a small boy, a little after the turn of the century, with his father standing next to him looking tall and impassive. They are in the main street, watching as a huge ox pulls a cart filled with wares for sale.
It's always been what some people unthinkingly call "a sleepy town." Really, of course, it's just deliberate, slow, preferring to move at the pace of growing things instead of the pace of machines. It makes concessions to change, it rarely embraces them. This town wasn't waiting anxiously for the iPhone to makes its life meaningful, or rapid communication or transportation to make it worth getting up in the morning.
The people here already had reasons.
When I was small, we came there once or twice a year. As an adult, I walked around the streets, thinking how small everything had become. The red brick retaining wall my sister and I used to play on, and from which we fell often, used to seem like such a long way to the ground. The magnolia tree in my grandparents' front yard (they are long since dead, and the house is no longer like it was) still stands there: its low branches were a fort, its cones were grenades, and the scent of crushed magolia leaves is always to me the freshest scent there is.
The Old Rock Gaol: 1807
I suppose I was prepared for the disappointment that comes on us when we see the places of our personal myths and legends.
But even at forty, I was struck by how much the ghostliness lingered, how much the feel of the place had changed, how beneath that there was something I can't quite put a name to unless it's that memory makes places sacred in a way that time can't disappoint and change can rob but can never beggar.
Mom wants to be buried there in the quiet, green town cemetery, next to her parents.
She will be, when the time comes. We talk about these things pretty easily, really. It's not that we don't think it will never happen. But it's the business of the end of life, and we do it with a lot of love, and a lot of understanding. She wants to be there: maybe I understand that. Maybe for me she'll always be there, and in a score of other places that memory consecrates and holds for her.
When that service is done, if my siblings and my dad and my kids don't especially need me, maybe I'll beg off and go for a long walk. Maybe the ghosts will be singing.
Maybe there will be one more.
The Presbyterian Church where my mother learned to love hymns, and gentle music, and the Bible.
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Reader Comments (5)
As a child, I spent a lot of time in a small town in northern MN from whence my family sprung. There were parish picnics (my great aunt was RCC) and street dances, family picnics and parades, berry picking trips and trips to "Paul Bunyan" in Brainard...I can, in some ways, connect to your feelings for a place where there is a sense of connectedness that relates solely (sp? that looks wrong) to the soul. I cannot explain it, but I have felt it.
I grew up in a small town an hour from everywhere, so I really enjoyed reading that. Of all the writing you do, this is my favorite, alongside things like the New Orleans piece you did earlier this year.
If you ever try your hand at Lake Wobegon-esque things, I'll be front and center to read 'em.
Jennifer: I expect that imagination (and memory is a part of your imagination) makes you more who you are than anything else.
Natalie: thank you, you're very kind.
What would you call a Cajun version of Lake Wobegon?
That was beautifully written. Don't ask me why I think so, I can't really explain. When I got to the end it gave me the feeling much like I get when I read the last sentence of the Lord of the Rings, not exactly a sigh of contentment but somewhere nearby.