Evening In Nashville

Yesterday I was standing in the window loving the feel of the breeze almost brisk, almost chill. I do love this time of year. But it was the sky that caught me, just that moment when the horizon still has an orange blush. Above that is light blue, softly grading into cobalt.

It reminded me that when I was in elementary school, fifth grade, sixth, we took a field trip to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. If I was impressed, I do not remember. We weren't allowed inside the rooms, couldn't touch anything. The hallways were long and the wooden floors echoed. Outside , though, there was a beautiful double row of trees, cedars I think, maybe oaks (I should look that up, they were many of them lost in the tornado several springs ago) , along the lane leading up to the front door.

At the end of the tour, we went to the gift shop. I bought a necklace there. It was a silhouette of a cedar tree against an evening sky. Iridescent blues and almost amber, the tree in black. They told me it was made of butterfly wings.

Starlings and Minnows

It is starling season again. Not my favorite birds as individuals or, come to think of it, when roosting, but I love them in flight. They whirl and swirl and it is like the wind made visible. Feathers, leaves, wind in the oat grass like wavelets on streams. Like minnows flashing black and silver as they weave and turn and turn back on themselves.
I learned to swim in a creek not far from my grandmother's house in Dickson County. Yellow Creek at the time was crystal clear and icy cold, and the place we swam was just deep enough for diving on one side. The other side was a limestone shelf. That's where we would drag ourselves out, blue and wrinkled, to thaw and bake until we were ready to go back in and start over again. There was a bridge there. When no one was swimming, you could sit up there, high above the water and watch the minnows.

Yellow cat on the woodpile sunrise and frost 

The Woodpile

Fall. It won't be long until we begin to sight rusty pickup trucks loaded with ricks and cords of firewood for sale. Guaranteed seasoned, dry, split, hardwood. Delivered to your house, stacked free of charge. I love the smell. Hickory, oak, maple, you name it.

My country grandmother cooked with wood, in addition to using a wood stove in the living room for heat, both fueled by a big, loose woodpile back behind the house where a mule-drawn wagon could unload easily, not neatly stacked in ricks and cords, but tossed. Then one of the men, Uncle Jethro or Tom or Will or Herb, or Daddy would split enough to use for a while.

Climbing the woodpile was great sport for me and my cousins when we were small. It was a place of mystery and danger, since our mothers were constantly promising rattlesnakes and copperheads.

I found cats there. The almost-feral barn cats had their kittens in safety somewhere, sometimes even in the hayloft, then when they were about to open their eyes, moved them until they were satisfied with the location. One place they used was the woodpile. I would wait and watch the mother cat leave, then reach down into the depths, scraping my short arms on the rough bark, again and again, trying to find where they were hidden. Now and then my reward would be the back of my hand scratched by spitfire and I could barely get my arm out fast enough, but on rare occasions I could catch them sound asleep and I would slowly pull out a warm, soft handful of kitten.

Elective Surgery 1950s Style

I had my tonsils taken out when I was nine. Literally. They checked me into the hospital on the Sunday afternoon before my birthday. They gave me a beautiful doll from Phillips Toy Mart, a Madame Alexander, I believe it was. When her head came off...This was not a good omen.

Everything about the hospital was a horror. In the room with me was a moaning girl I never saw, always surrounded by a curtain. Mama said, in that way she used when she was lying, that the girl had an accident on her bicycle. Poor Mama. She was within a week of her due date, hugely pregnant, and had to stay the night watching over me.

Poor me. Clear liquids for supper and then the enema. No explanation, just torture. I certainly never connected it with the odd-smelling stuff they used the next day to put me to sleep. Ether may have been a miracle drug when it was introduced for surgery, but it was a far cry from today's relatively safe anesthesia cocktails. There's not much I remember. The mask over my face, a cone actually. The smell was sweet and cool. Someone asked me questions: my name, my school. I was embarrassed because I answered with the school I used to go to and not my new one. Count backwards.

Then it was all over but the hurting. Back to the room and I didn't care if it was clear liquids because swallowing hurt. There was a replacement doll, not so fine, but with blonde hair and pearls. Another night in the hospital before it was pronounced safe for me to go home where I received my promised ice cream.

Two nights later and I was awakened and dumped at my grandparents house. Forget the tonsils! It's a baby brother.

Altogether, I was out of school for three weeks, and by then it was almost Thanksgiving.

My country grandmother's house was golden. Unpainted drywall, the paper backing had turned amber over time, baked by woodsmoke. There were ochre canvas roll-up shades. Hanging bare from a brown-knit covered wire, a single weak light bulb gave a yellow glow to night.

Little Evil

Do politicians in the rest of the country use parenthetical names on their signs, like D. W. "Buster" Brown, or Randolph "Doc" McGovern, or is it a Southern thing? We once had a pol here in Nashville, Gene "Little Evil" Jacobs. Someone had spoken of him as the lesser of two evils. He decided to fly with it. That was before his jail term.

Boy/Man, Girl/Woman

Let me say here and for now that when I use a term it is in context of its time. My time. I was still a Girl and learning long after the absurdity of my first experience with sex.

I never did learn to socialize. The ways of men and women together have always been a foreign language to me. So much that even after all these years I watch the lives around me like subtitled film, never sure I really understand what is going on.

I had almost no practice at simple day to day communication with a man outside the group. Crushes. In high school once I fell for a boy who was kind enough to pick up a dropped pencil, and I can still relive that fractional moment. A tooth-dented yellow stick had linked me with another being and his smile.

In college one boy did ask me out, Richard. And because he asked, I went. We went to football games together and one disaster of a hayride. I ate some cafeteria suppers with him, wishing all the time to be back with my room-mate and her Arnie and his room-mate whom I had adored from near day one. Ray and Arnie punned and laughed; Richard and I went to church and discussed religion. One night he asked me to go steady who had never had a date with anyone else. I shrieked "No!" and ran out of the dorm parlor for the safety of my room. Relieved. There were no more college dates. Only Syl and Arnie, and Ray who never wanted me, and gay Harold whom I loved, not understanding.

Small wonder it took so long to learn which of my crushes were love and which were lust. More often than not it was sex at first sight and I wound up heels over head in love with the wrong men.