July 2, 2021
I did my first sun salutation of the whole trip this morning. It’s a yoga stretch I usually do whenever I wake up. The only excuse I have for not doing it is that I’ve been in a lot of dirty parking lots and the sun salutation involves getting on your belly. Exercise is about routine and my routine has been pretty unsettled.
I arrived at my Aunt Linda’s late afternoon yesterday. She has a beautiful condo out in the middle of some fields in Corryton, TN. They are for seniors 55 and older. I guess I qualify. I’ll have the place mostly to myself for the month or so I plan on staying here. Linda fell in love with a local Lily magnate and moved in with him.
Stewart has a Day Lily farm and ships the plants all over the world. I met him for the first time last night. They are good together.
Jillian and I aren’t married and I call her my partner. For some reason that came up last night while we were eating and Linda said, “That’s what Stewart and I are, partners. There really isn’t a good word for unmarried couples.”
I said they could be wild and introduce each other as lovers.
“This is my lover Stewart,” I said, trying it out for her. That got a good laugh out of them. Stewart mentioned that they are both going on 80-years-old.
I managed to hit the road to leave Tallahassee a little after midnight yesterday. I only got about 45 minutes before tiredness overwhelmed me. I made it to a place called Bainbridge and I pulled into the far, back corner space in the parking lot of an Anytime Fitness. Across from me was a big rig parked in front of the neighboring Holiday Inn Express. This morning I realized I had parked next to a dumpster again; I was tired.
As a reader you only see the seamless beauty of these posts (ha!). Sometimes they come easy and sometimes I struggle for hours as I did late last night. Even when they come easy, I make dumb mistakes like calling barbed wire bob wire. (Thank you for keeping me on track my favorite unnamed proofreader!)
Bob-wire is a regression back to childhood. There really was a time when I thought it was bob wire. It made sense. As a child in Texas I saw a lot of bobwhites. They make themselves known in the fields there calling out “bobwhite, bobwhite”. And the fields were always surrounded by bob-wire. Then, of course, our northern friends have the bobolink. But I really can’t claim that has anything to do with this inaccuracy since, as a child, I never lived in the North.
However, it is also the case that it takes a special kind of southerner to actually go to the effort to contort their mouth in the manner necessary for saying the word barbed. Southerners only want to open and close their mouth once per word and barbed goes from an open a to a closed(ish) r to the b with its delicate little but-I-was-going-to-say then into the tongue doing a little top-plate mash for the d. This is more gymnastics than most southerners want to do with their kisser unless the kisser is kissing. Bob, however, is an open and shut case as far as words go. Only a little idiot child would ever think it was somehow related to bobwhites and bobolinks or, that it might have been, that the person who invented bob-wire was named Bob.
But I am going far afield here into these bobwhite pastures and I’m not done with Texas and I’m not done with Tallahassee, Florida. Mississippi is good for the moment, but I’m sure I’ll be coming back to her.
Most importantly I have a picture here of the last house we lived in in Tallahassee (which I’ll post tomorrow) and a picture of my old friend Tracy who, by the way, I would not have recognized on the street. Some strange things happen to humans between the ages of 7 and 58. But you know, while I was with Tracy I kept looking for clues of that 7-year-old and they were there. The most telling was the way he held his body when we stood for the first picture at the brew pub.
As a child, Tracy always seemed ready for the next thing, ready for the next movement. When he stopped he was completely relaxed but there was always something in his eyes looking for what was next and in his body that was ready to move toward it. That’s what I see in this picture. Maybe it’s a characteristic that is unique to athletes. Tracy played basketball in high school and college. Athleticism ran in the family along with academic smarts.
On Wednesday, I went to visit him in the home he built on some land near Wakulla Springs. Turning off the highway onto the country lane where they live I came to a fork in the road. As I approached I saw a woman with a baby in her lap take off in a golf cart, leading me without acknowledging me, down the final drive to their home. She disappeared behind some trees before I turned.
Wait, isn’t this the way country folks lure people further and further into the backwoods until they become lost and eventually stop in a clearing where they exit their car, turn in circles looking at the window of blue sky above, and then, one by one, people appear from behind trees holding clubs and pick axes? Before the person is bludgeoned and chopped to death the soundtrack of cicadas rises to a deafening level.
Phew. I’m glad I never have thoughts like that.
When I got to Tracy’s house, his wife Renee was standing at the garage opening holding their grandson, Tristen, who they are part-time caregivers for. Tristen is their first grandchild, child of their middle son. (They have three children— another younger son and the oldest, a daughter.) Renee and I introduced ourselves and then I followed her into the house.
Tristen is beautiful. The 14-month old stood a long time at the door of the room where we were sitting before he decided I was okay enough to come in. Grandpa has 14 basketballs for him of various sizes. It’s clear there is just a smidgen of aspiration for him.
Tracy applied to be his own contractor for the house he built 22 years ago. It was a big learning curve. He grilled lunch for the workers everyday with the awareness that having builders show up consistently is the hardest thing to do. Keep ‘em happy with food!
White sand is what qualifies as soil here—it’s that close to the Gulf of Mexico. They have a nice lawn but Tracy said it’s hard to keep it going. The large, lovely brick home has vaulted ceilings, a two car garage, and a swimming pool off the porch in back. On the recommendation of his main builder he extended the roof over the porch and switched out the joists from 2x4s to 2x6s to support the extra weight. 14 acres of Tropical Florida jungle surrounds the area not landscaped for the house.
When I was a child I didn’t have much of a concept about the human-made construct of race when I met the Warners. It did not strike me as unusual that they lived on a street with black homeowners who lived in beautiful, modern, affluent homes. It struck me as magical.
The modern brick and block homes on their street had interesting architectural features like multi-pitched, cross-gabled roofs, double front doors with wide sidelights, and long, multi-paned windows with muntins and mullions.
The homes were set back with large front lawns landscaped with saw palmetto, palm trees and broad-leafed jungle plants. Each home was unique, but a common, sleek-lined, low-roofed modernity tied them all together.
Tasteful color combinations were used on the homes: brown with tan panels and white with turquoise trim. The Warner’s home had cream-colored blocks (similar to cinder blocks but smaller and with a finer grain). The multi-layered roof sections had brown facia. The front, double doors and transom-like panels on a half gable above the lower roof were painted sunset orange. The color gave the effect of an orange glow emanating from the center of the home at all times. As a child I don’t think I ever paid attention that those were not windows on the half gable but panels. I was happy to believe that a portion of the sun rose and set in their home; it held such a place of love in my heart.
Outside at night, lights cast beautiful, palmetto patterns across the front. Pulling back a tropical leaf I could always find green tree frogs of various sizes. Some were as small as my pinky nail but could stretch and articulate each finger as if waking from a nap and holding up a digit to tell me to wait while their voice returned.
The Warner’s pristine street ended after about 200 yards where another street connected at a right angle. This street was either dirt or very poorly maintained concrete. On one side, small houses sat close to the road on lumps of carved up land backed up to a hill. The road did not have a gutter and no driveways came off it that I remember. These houses did not have grass and the color of the dirt yards, homes and street seemed to be a single, whitish monotone that was a little glaring to the eyes. Turning the corner from Tracy’s street onto this one seemed like walking from a Technicolor movie onto an old black and white film.
These houses were more like the first two homes in Tallahassee that I lived in, yet in even worse condition. These folks were poorer than my own family. I was only down that street once. There was not much room between a pedestrian and someone on their porch—if there was a porch and not just steps. The street was short and, in my memory, dead-ended after about 75 yards.
Yes, we were poor but had potential. Dad was working on his Ph.D. while simultaneously teaching a few survey courses in the speech department at Florida A and M. Mom, working full-time as the department of social work secretary, was probably making as much money, or more, than dad. I used to visit her at work and spin in her heavy swivel chair, then go over to a room next to her office that housed a huge insect collection for the Entomology department.
The door leading to the room was one of those heavy wooden doors with the opaque windows—the kind of doors old buildings used to have and behind which private things went on. When I closed that door the world was silent.
Expensive, tall-legged, dark-stained-oak cases with sloped and hinged glass tops lined the walls and formed an island in the middle of the room. Inside the cases, at eye-level for me, were hundreds upon hundreds of carefully pinned and labeled insects. There were whole collections of butterflies and moths, grasshoppers and crickets, flies, dragonflies and ants. The beetles contained every color imaginable, some iridescent with tricks of light that could swallow me. There were stick bugs, bees and wasps, praying mantis and other creatures with six legs that only a divine being, several million years old, with engineering skills, a 120-color crayon box, and the mind of a six-year-old could have imagined.
I think my mom must have loved having that room as my babysitter when I arrived and she needed more focused time before leaving work.
Before I left Tracy’s house I told him I was going to go back and have one more look at the colors on his family home before I left Tallahassee.
“We talked about changing it at one point,” he said, “but mom said that’s the color your father wanted and that’s the way we are going to keep it.”
I think most everyone else on that street must have felt the same way. The house colors are just as I remember fifty years ago.
Spotty West Goes East 