He rises in darkness and pads his way to the kitchen, backlit only by the soft glow of the stove light. It is there waiting as it has every other day of the last 45 years, offering a seemingly new chance to bestow the energy, the soulfulness of a life well-lived. There’s a scratch of dark earthy grounds as he scoops them into the carafe. The water slowly and deliberately turning to boil, the thick rising steam as he pours, filling the room with its glorious caffeinated aroma, stirring lifeblood back into a tired body desperate for rejuvenation. The steam fills his cup in layers like clouds, radiating from his mug and warming his palms. He steps outside, breathing the coffee-infused energy in through his nostrils, feeling its pulse hit the bloodstream as he envelops himself in the dark, misty, overcast stillness of his back porch. The cold air hits his nostrils in sharp contrast. It is a sensation worthy of its Pacific Northwest reputation. The faintest smell of salt in the air from the ever-present Sound, not seen from his vantage point but always the gentle reminder of home.
He strikes his flint, a momentary blaze in the darkness that he sets to burning on his requisite morning stogie. He inhales deeply, filling his lungs and revels in the smoky delivery of nicotine, a jolt to the brain, sparking it alive.
Grabbing onto the railing of his back porch, he steadies himself and stretches to loosen up the sleep-induced atrophy in his back, his hips, his legs. He feels their rush as the endorphins release, elated to be free of their prison.
He takes another sip from his mug, another drag of his smoke and his thoughts meander, working their way like a slow-moving river towards Arkansas.
Meandering. It describes the culture there. Life is slow, purposeful, intent in its destination. It will get there in due time without being rushed or distracted, drawing energy at each bend pulling from its ecosystem, each thing there purposely for its sustenance. A simple, more mindful way of life. And most certainly less expensive as he ponders his impending retirement and the creative stretch of retirement dollars, “Economical for sure.” “Who the hell wants to live in Arkansas?” “Certainly not near so much demand as his present West Coast abode,” he thinks to himself.
It is not so arbitrary, the thought of Arkansas. Home of his ancestors, his southern kin, he the Yankee cousin. His little sister always remarked the best thing their father ever did was join the military, ensuring travel would result in a locale anywhere in the world but Arkansas. Had he not, he and his sister would undoubtedly be married to any one of the multitudes of southern cousins (Isn’t that always the joke about Arkansas?). So deep the ancestral roots, harkening back to colonial times. His were among the first to hit these shores, migrating families, battles of Revolution, the Confederacy and Civil War, even World Wars. There was a trail of graves to lead him legitimately back to Arkansas.
But his was a more personal longing. It seemed the cells in his body could hear the call of long-ago ancestors. Or was it a call to fill a gap not provided by a constantly moving military family. One displaced from its home and landed permanently in unfamiliar geography; descendants cut off from its Southern arm and everything that comes with it: the personal history, that binding tie, that feeling of familial grounded-ness.
He lived, very briefly, amongst all that rooted family and knew the characters vaguely, all between bouts of a well-traveled life and the experiences of distant and exotic places; Germany, Okinawa, Kyoto, Hawaii. He had lived in more states; North, South, East, and lastly, the West, than most experience in a lifetime. Each enriching in its own right, a culture onto itself, placing its distinctive stamp on him, molding the character he had become in his advancing years. It was something he spoke about with pride to others, should the conversation ever lead there. While living that well-traveled life, his parents were always peppering it with stories about Arkansas, their family, and it’s history. Stories he’d heard innumerable times. Stories always told with self-deprecation and ensuing hilarity, never failing to delight, sending him and his little sister into fits of laughter. The stories later cemented by the occasional care package filled with local department store trinkets from retailers; it seemed both his grandmothers worked.
The sharing of family lore, was it told to help him stay connected or possibly to quell his parents’ own need to entangle their roots? He wasn’t sure. Whether purposeful or not, he had been charmed and mystified by the endearing cast of comical and generous characters. They were inextricably as much a part of his history as they were his parents.
It was always a momentous event for him and his little sister, the occasions they would visit Arkansas, his Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, and cousin counterparts. For him, it was the exotic, the mystical, the stuff of legends. It was foreign and familiar at the same time. Was it jealousy he felt that his counterpart cousins got to live it? He only visiting every three or four years, or later in life, when it was time to memorialize another departed family member, a stark reminder that time marches on, and the window to reconnect closing with each passing day.
Visits always felt like a page out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He remembers with giddy excitement the mile-long gravel road to the homestead where his mother and her siblings grew up. The expansive drive where a barking pack of hounds would meet them. Different every time but always an ever-present pack, evidence of the patriarch’s penchant for ‘coon hunting, the larger than life Tommy.
His mother had shared hilarious stories, camping as a kid on those infamous ‘coon hunts. Seems they were little more than competition between men to see whose hound would tree a raccoon first. The hounds would howl once a tree’d acquisition made where they’d stay, relentless in their howling until retrieved by their masters. It would proceed well into the night around the campfire. The men each calling it when they were able to make out the distinctive howl of their prized hunting hound. In the morning, they packed up, relieved the dogs of their sentinel duty, and the ragtag gang would head home, with nothing in hand but bragging rights and their hounds. He could imagine the raccoons returning to their families with wild tales of their alien abduction during the night.
On the’ stead, Tommy would walk about unabashedly in boots and overalls sans a shirt. A giant of a figure, he towered over everyone unintentionally intimidating and belying his magnanimous spirit. His smile belied nothing, it as hearty and wide as his heart. Fairly certain he was descendant from Cajuns, as evidenced by his French surname and his visage, he was missing only a straw hat and stalk between his teeth. Or maybe not? He could envision Tommy chewing on a stalk of grass, but perhaps he imagined it because it seemed appropriate. The Pied Piper was a popular reference when it came to Tommy. There was always in tow of every matter of dog, fowl, and critter that wasn’t caged or penned. Perhaps the straw from the corner of his mouth was a flute.
And who could forget Audrey, the matriarch, and her sisters? The oh so very Irish sisters with their varying shades of ginger hair. Like a coven, they would gather in the makeshift dress shop that inhabited the screened-in front porch. Their laughter and conversation filled every corner of the house, spilling over to the outdoors. The next time he saw that porch, it would have transformed into some other miraculous thing. The sisters were loud, boisterous, and full of personality, but Audrey held particular distinction in this regard. She was larger than life, even more so than Tommy, despite her somewhat petite frame. The woman who told her eldest daughter to introduce herself as her sister. The woman who, when her eldest daughter announced her first pregnancy, exclaimed that she too was pregnant! The woman who, when her eldest daughter presented her with her very first grandchild, presented in return her new sibling(s), the twins. The Aunt and Uncle twins as he would come to know them, the ones just one month younger. Audrey, the rather absentminded woman, whose domestic abilities were always a little suspect, but the ferocity with which she cared for and loved her brood, and the generations to follow Was never.
The scene was awash with examples of the exotic; the long hot, humid days as thick as the character’s drawls, he certain they were speaking a foreign tongue and them laughing at the Yankee’s inability at times to discern what it was they were saying. Swimming in the makeshift pool-pond just off the kitchen porch, a welcome respite from the muddling heat. Horseback riding with the twins, the outbuildings where he and his like aged Uncle twin would hang and swap teenaged tales so grandiose as to illicit a stern glare of disapproval from matriarch Audrey. He remembered the time they tricked all the neighbor kids into finishing their assigned chore of painting the picket fence. Oh wait, that was someone else’s tale. He sighs with a bit of a grin…it might as well have been their tale. Heaven knows they were just as capable of such dastardly deeds. As the humid days spilled over into night, he remembers hovering at the edge of the wood, the glow of fireflies, and the mason jars used to amass as many of their fairy lights as possible. Soon would ensue the Snipe Hunt, directed by the oldest of cousins. The youngest of cousins would be equally terrorized and full of glee, intent on their prey, their pillowcases, and flashlights in hand. Long into the night, he and all the other children would shiver in beds wondering if the hounds’ nocturnal howls meant to alert them to the lurking swamp creature known locally as the Fouke Monster. Heard amongst the crows of that disordered rooster whose inability to mark time meant you might be rattled by his alarms all matter of day and night.
“Yep, I could hang with chickens,” he thought to himself. Morning strolls around the ‘stead would be freeing compared to his current back porch railed confinement. That oh so expansive farm, later dubbed Pop’s Place, was a virtual zoo where he and generations of cousins to come could marvel in the miracle of Spring and newly-born babes.
The characters didn’t end there. He thinks of the Gulf Coast roughnecks, known only from old sepia-tinted photos. The dark and swarthy lank of a man with legs so long they seem to connect directly to his neck. The image on a front porch, embracing what he knows to be his mother as a toddler. Her smile is coy. Her dark, spiraled curls are bowed and bouncy. The image hinting at roots far deeper…even native? The tribal kind that is, not alligators.
There were the well-historied families of his father, weavers, farmers, woodsman traders, and preacher patriarch led clans, all edging each other out of overgrown, time un-told cemeteries.
He can see the quaint single-storied family home of his father’s upbringing, with its maze of rooms haunted by the ghost of a prematurely lost little brother. The house always smelled faintly of Dr. Pepper, the kind that filled his grandfather’s refrigerator in that yellow tiled kitchen and the ever-rotating parakeet of the same name. “Or was it pink?” he wonders at the realization that his colorblindness reckons him a not so reliable source. In it resided the overtly racist grandpa with his grimace inducing jokes and the gentle, soft-spoken grandma, who, in all her demureness, was occasionally known to chide her adult children for being too hard on her grandchildren.
The odd pairing of these two was endearing in the story of their marriage. Two depression era, star crossed teenagers sneaking away to meet a local preacher who married them in a car. They were the inventors of the drive-through marriage long before it became a “thing” in Las Vegas. Afterward, in their naivety, both went home to their respective families, telling no one. It was many weeks before the families discovered their secret, followed by the dramatic and urgent immediacy of establishing a household of their own.
The soft-spoken, demure grandmother didn’t appear remarkable on the surface. But looking into her soft, delicate face, you were gazing straight away at that quiet giant, her Pa Weaver. A remnant of that tall, lanky man whose highly ritualized pipe smoking would fill the house with the scent of musky tobacco and vanilla.
He pauses and thinks for a moment to his own Navy son with all his height. His son was undoubtedly a throwback in a family of short folk.
It was with incredible skill, honed over decades that Pa would simultaneously rock in his chair, drinking hot coffee from a saucer without spilling a drop, despite the palsy settling into his seventy-something-year-old hands and the need for double canes to get around. He could see Pa’s 6-foot frame hunched in his designate chair, slowly pouring hot coffee into the cup’s saucer. As if presenting some steamy piece of recently passed House legislation to the Senate, hoping it might cool just a bit for their preponderance.
He remembers being a small boy in tow, as Pa would make his morning rounds with quiet and deliberate purpose. The sentinel frogs marking the rise to a front porch leading into his small house. The back screened-in porch door with the rifle hanging atop. The not so small pasture and a herd of cows just out that back door. While his Pa never commanded it (at least not out loud), reverence and respect emanated without effort when in his presence. It was organic,
the natural order of things.
Pa had been a man of many careers, an entrepreneur of sorts, from an extensive and respectable family. Pa’s father had been a physician. Did he still have that old-timey photo somewhere, that photo of Pa’s family, taken for posterity, no doubt? It featured a very tired and frail-looking doctor front and center, overshadowed by the sheer volume of children flanking him. He chuckled, thinking about it…” Funny, no one ever looked happy in those days.” ” So much work, too many children.”
Pa’s house was full of warmth, less so by Pa than by his wife. She’d passed too early for her grandchildren to get to know her, but she was ever-present in that house. Her energy felt when crossing through her kitchen, in the Victorian button-up boots, her faith reverberating in those Jesus paintings with eyes that would follow you wherever you went. Pa mourned her something terrible.
Not to be outdone by any of the other characters in this drama, Pa had his brush with infamy as well. It was in his grizzly discovery of a victim of Texarkana’s Phantom Killer. The never discovered serial killer that terrorized that small town in the mid-1940s, spawning that 1976 Horror flick, The Town That Dreaded Sundown. A film predating classic Horror flicks referenced today, and allegedly the impetus of the favored campfire ghost story of two young lovers parked on a dark, deserted road. You know the story, the terrifying scratching on the roof.
He remembers stories of a great, gray grandmother, ruminations of “That God Damned Lincoln…” and reinvoked delusions of Antebellum southern life. And there was the much later discovered story of a Mississippi River steamboat confiscated by Union forces after its lent support in the Confederate cause.
Current political lamentations float to the fore. He turns them over in his hands slowly, comparing it to the vehemence, the brutality of politics of the past. The right side or wrong side of history? Did it ultimately matter? It was his family’s history and part of this nation’s history. It’s lessons profound.
His stomach growls as it senses the nearing breakfast hour, and his mind and nostrils awash with aromas of catfish and hush puppies, collard greens and ham hocks, fried okra, and pinto beans. From a distance, he can hear Audrey yelling, “Someone add some more water to the soup, Verne’s staying for supper!”
His mind ticks out the beat from an old Folk-rock song. “America?” he thinks. “Oz never did give nothing to the tin man that he didn’t – didn’t already have.”
Draining the last drop from his mug and stubbing out his stogie, he reaches for the back door, making his way out of the misty cold and into the warm, softly lit house.
He wonders, will Arkansas call tomorrow morning? If it does, will he pick up?