Why we can: Memories of my second mother

[Fly by night]

Preface: I grew up in Columbus, Mississippi, a member of the eighth generation of my family to be born there. When I was a teenager (in the mid 60s), it was not uncommon to have the sound mysteriously go off on my hometown TV station whenever Walter Cronkite reported on civil rights activities in the South. Since the same family who owned the TV station also owned the only newspaper and radio station in town, it should not be surprising that it was not until I went "north" to college (Vanderbilt University) that I learned about major civil rights actions that occurred within miles of my hometown.

Fast forward 40+ years: Even though the local news media in Columbus are still owned by the same family, that family's current patriarch (Birney Imes III) is a photojournalist whose award-winning works include the book, "Juke Joint". Birney published the following letter from me (actually, this is just an excerpt of the letter he published) as a full-page spread in a recent Sunday paper. If you are looking for explanations for how and why we have arrived at this wonderful moment in our nation's history, Miz Lilla Rosamond's brave example provides one partial explanation for "why we can". Read, enjoy and live like Miz Lilla did. Peace out.
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Memories of my second mother

Over the past few months, I am sure many of us are assessing just what Barack Obama's election says about our nation's racial progress, regardless of whether or not we voted for him. President Obama has often recognized and honored those Black leaders in our nation's history who paved the way for this day. I want to take a minute to share with you a little story that shows that the way was also paved by the strength, kindness and moral compass of many unknown and unnamed white Southerners. People like my second mother, Mrs. Lilla Rosamond of Columbus, Mississippi, who died last month at the age of 98.

I've been thinking about Miz Lilla ever since I learned of her death. There are so many good things I can say about her and her family. Miz Lilla was born into one of the more prominent families in north-east Mississippi, a family wealthy enough to have both an in-town mansion and a country plantation. Unlike many who are born to privilege, however, Miz Lilla's family was also wealthy for its willingness to serve their community and to help those who couldn't help themselves. Her forebears (great-grandparents or beyond) donated the land for the first public school in Mississippi for my hometown. That school, Franklin Academy, still stands open directly across the street from Franklin Square, their beautiful antebellum home. Miz Lilla's father almost single-handedly funded our small town's YMCAs (both Black and White) and donated the land for their summer camp on the banks of the Tombigbee river, a camp that still exists in the hazy summertime memories of many, including me. So public service was nothing new to this privileged daughter of the antebellum South. But one of my first exposures to her still remains one of my most lasting impressions and one of the best examples of what quiet courage looks like.

Back in the mid 60s, when I first met her son Bill (who would become one of my best friends), I was invited to eat lunch at their mansion, a very formal affair with a butler bringing each course. During lunch, Miz Lilla called her house staff (all Black) into the dining room and asked them, one by one, whether they were registered to vote yet in the upcoming election. There were several who said (timidly) that they had not yet registered, which (in retrospect) should have not been surprising given the risk to employment, life and limb that greeted most Black folks who tried to vote in those Mississippi burning days.

So, after lunch, Miz Lilla walked the few blocks to the courthouse with those house staff who were not yet registered and stood beside each one of them as they completed the paperwork necessary to exercise their franchise. Through her silent, unyielding (and very Southern aristocratic) presence, Miz Lilla was determined to prevent any barriers to full participation in the democratic process being imposed on people who she knew and cared for, some of whom from families that had served her own family for generations. As a result, neither she nor her Black house staff got so much as a peep out of the local election registrar that day. A few weeks later, I believe she also accompanied her staff as they went to vote, most for the first time in their lives.

Back then, my young, naive self thought that Miz Lilla's actions were intrusive or, at the least, patronizing. Of course, as a young White son of another long-time local family, I was pretty clueless then to the real (and too often fatal) risks that Blacks faced trying to vote in my hometown, which was less than an hour away from where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, three young civil rights workers, had just been murdered, their bodies buried as back-fill in a farm pond dam. Thinking back on it now, I realize that Miz Lilla was placing her own standing (and perhaps her own safety) in the community aside in favor of the greater good. Most folks would not have thought of her as a civil rights activist but, by those actions, Miz Lilla proved to be just the sort of person -- a moral, democratic matriarch -- that our nation had to have in order to break down Jim Crow laws and racist practices in Columbus, MS and throughout the South.

If some future dictionary places photographs beside words to illustrate their meaning, Miz Lilla Rosamond's picture will grace the word, "Lady". I owe my broader and more inclusive world view in part to Miz Lilla, just as I know more clearly what having the "courage to change the things I can" looks like in practice. More than some of you reading this, I do know how far we've come and how much better this world is for the brave women and men who came before. Miz Lilla helped recreate our region and our country, a country that now has a place for President Barack Obama.

So here's to all the people throughout history on whose shoulders President Obama is now raised -- the strong, sweat-stained Black male ones and the wisteria and lace-wrapped White female ones. Miz Lilla, you are surely and sorely missed. But you definitely left this world a better place.

Yes we can. Because (yes) a few brave people like Miz Lilla did what had to be done. Miz Lilla practiced her principles in all her affairs, back during Mississippi's own dark ages when it was her turn to do the next right thing. A loving, moral Southern matriarch -- made of silk and steel.

(Fly by night)
Old Natchez Trace Road
Fly, TN 38482

[ccinamon]

1. What a beautiful tribute..

I'm glad it was published -- kudos!

[Fly by night]

2. Thanks kindly. PM me with your email address if you's like to read the entire piece.

As a native Mississippian, I am cursed with the Faulknerian gene, I am afraid. I have never used just a few words to express my feelings, when there are thousands available with which to do that.

Thanks again for your kind comments.

[Barack_America]

3. That was lovely.

A fitting tribute to a remarkable lady.

[Inuca]

4. Very interesting and moving n/t

[catrose]

5. God bless Miz Lilla

but the south is still with us.

Reading this story reminded me of election day, a few states to the west of Mississippi. I was a poll watcher in the last few hours, holding a sign that said, "Have Trouble Voting?" Close to closing time, a young black woman came up and said they wouldn't let her vote. She didn't have her voter reg card, but she'd printed out her entry from the county voting website and carried her driver's license, Social Security card, utility bill, and marriage license to back up her identity and address. She didn't appear on the roll (she had recently moved); so they wouldn't let her vote. They told her to go to her old polling place in the next town, maybe an hour's drive away. "Did they offer you a provisional ballot?" I asked. "No. What's that?" A campaigner who had been outside all day volunteered that the poll workers were not offering provisional ballots. He had helped several people get one that day.

So we went in together, and the poll workers looked at the one of us who was a white woman wearing a suit (a Sarah Palin suit, with a red jacket!) and asked if they could help me. I said, "SHE needs a provisional ballot." "Certainly, ma'am. Come right this way."

And I stayed and watched from a far as she filled out her ballot. Everyone was very courteous.

Afterwards I wanted to take a shower, because even though we had just elected the first nonwhite president, the ugliest part of the south was still alive and well and I was living in it.

[Fly by night]

6. Thanks for the (sad) story of modern-day Jim Crow.

It's why we all need to be Miz Lillas, now that our time to do the next right thing has come.

Looking back, I am so glad that the overt racists left the Democratic party en masse 30+ years ago and found a home with the Rethugs. We may have a big tent, but there's no room in here for racism ... today, tomorrow, forever. (My non-apologies to George Wallace).

[shireen]

7. thank you for sharing this story

It is comforting to know there were Miz Lillas who quietly helped, in their own way, to make it possible for us to have a black president. But we still need more of her; Blacks are still under-represented in the upper income brackets of our country, in technical and scientific careers, and in Congress.

[Fly by night]

8. I'm thinking of a t-shirt: Be the Miz Lillas we need now. (To hell with the corpulent media)

Present-day Commercial Dispatch (the only paper in Columbus. MS) excepted.

[DemReadingDU]

9. What a lovely story!

Thanks for sharing!

[Fly by night]

13. Thanks kindly. Here's the "rest of the story" about Miz Lilla.

In the long(er) tribute that my hometown paper published, there were two more memories of Miz Lilla that also defined her for me. I was so thankful that the paper ran my entire remembrance of her. The entire piece would have been too long for the original OP. But, since several of you have commented on what an amazing woman Miz Lilla was, I want you to read the "rest of the story".
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Over the years, Miz Lilla would model for me many times what graciousness and good sense looked like in practice. Two other memories help reflect that. About two weeks before I entered Vanderbilt University in the fall of 1967, my Dad and I had the kind of argument that often occurs when youthful arrogance clashes with world-weary, whiskey-fueled "wisdom". Dad and I argued long and loud that night about the Vietnam war (a slippery slope) and about my high-school girlfriend (another really slippery slope at the time too). The reasons for our opposing positions mattered little – what mattered was my Dad's utterance of those magic words: "Well, if you're going to live under my roof, you'll do as I say" (and, by implication, "believe as I believe.")

Just to prove that my head was as hard as my Dad's, I went to my room, packed up what I could and left. Like most teenagers at that moment, I had no idea what to do next. So I drove to the Rosamond home. Miz Lilla and I sat in her formal living room and talked for an hour about what had just happened. Then she did two things. She invited me to stay with them until I left for college. Then, when I went upstairs to sleep, she got on the phone to my father, told him I was safe and asked whether he would mind if she sheltered me for a while. From that evening on, Miz Lilla's home was always open to me whenever I needed a place to stay. She knew that the heat of the moment between my Dad and me would pass and, within a year, it did. However, I did decide to maintain my financial independence from my Dad from that point forward, and ended up paying my own way through my four years at Vanderbilt. Years later, Dad joked that he was half-sorry that he hadn't been able to provoke similar arguments with my four siblings, because it would have saved him lots of college tuition money.

The other strong memory of Miz Lilla that is with me today involves the constant attention that she gave my friend Bill's only daughter, Julia. Julia was born profoundly retarded, needing supervision then and now (almost two decades later). Since Bill and his wife Lynn shared the family home, Miz Lilla was always there for her grand-daughter. When Julia was about six years old, she loved to climb the winding staircase in the Rosamond house. It didn't matter that, by then, Miz Lilla was in her mid 80s. As long as Julia's seemingly boundless energy lasted, Miz Lilla would walk those stairs with her, up and down, up and down, for hours it seemed.

The image of Miz Lilla holding tight to Julia's hand as they climbed those steps together, over and over again, helps define for me what unconditional love and unwavering maternal commitment looks like. As sorry as I am for Bill as he grieves the loss of his mother, my heart really aches for Julia, unable to communicate still but knowing (I am sure) that her world is now without Miz Lilla's warm and constant touch, her quiet, gentle voice. What a gray, cold world this must now be for that beautiful and still-silent young woman.

[DemReadingDU]

14. wonderful role model

I hope I can be the same for my little grandbabies

[Barack_America]

15. Indeed.

That is the impression that I was left with as well.

[Barack_America]

16. Thank you.

I was wondering how she came to be your second mother.

If you should happen to have a copy of her obituary, and wouldn't mind sharing, I would love to read it.

[Fly by night]

19. As requested, here is Miz Lilla's obituary

Lilla Pratt Rosamond

Lilla Pratt Rosamond, 98, of Columbus, MS died Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at her home in Columbus, MS. Memorial Funeral Home has beeen entrusted with her funeral arrangements. Visitation will be held at First United Methodist Church in the Fletcher-Jones Building from 1:00 to 2:00 on Saturday, January 17, 2009 with a memorial service at 2:00 pm. Graveside Service at Friendship Cemetery will follow with Dr. Sam Morris officiating.

Mrs. Rosamond was born in Memphis, TN, on Jan. 9, 1911, the daughter of Henry Merrill Pratt and Lilla Young Franklin Pratt. Her family moved to Columbus when she was 4 years old. Lilla graduated from Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, VA, and married William Irby Rosamond Jr., in 1939 and lived briefly in Memphis, TN, before returning to Columbus to live permanently.

She was involved for many years in civic activities serving as president of the Society of Historic Preservation, the Columbus Pilgrimage Association, and the Columbus Garden Club. She was a Life Member of Columbus Junior Auxiliary and served on the Board of Directors of the Garden Clubs of the State of Mississippi, and the Southern Debutante Assembly. She was a lifetime member of the Christian Science Society.

Two of her favorite pastimes were meeting weekly with her Wednesday afternoon “Sewing Club” and her membership, for over 50 years, in the Lowndes County Chowder and Marching Society. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames.

Lilla felt very fortunate that she was able to travel for many years and fondly remembered a special trip to Shanghai to visit her cousin Cornell Franklin. Lilla and Bill also traveled frequently with her sister and brother in-law Merrill and Tommy Thomas.

Lilla was preceded in death by her parents, Henry and Lilla, husband, Bill, and sister, Merrill, who died at the age of 100 in March of 2008. She is survived by her son Bill (Lynne) Rosamond, of Columbus, MS; and her daughter Merrill Rosamond of Tuscaloosa, AL; grandchildren Shelby Sherman Underwood(Bobby) of Seymour, TN, Jodie Sherman Stolle (Chris) of Tulsa, OK, Daniel Sherman of Tuscaloosa, AL, Aja Sherman of St. Augustine, FL, and Julia Rosamond of Columbus, MS. She is also survived by seven great-grandchildren.

Honorary pallbearers include Aja Sherman, Daniel Sherman, Clay Terrell, Ned New, Ray McIntyre, Bernie Ellis, Bob Raymond, Eddie Mauck, Roger Swartz, Bill Land, Wade Quin, Tom Hardy, John Brown, Robert Ford, Ike Franklin, Gen. Shield Sims, Robert Proffitt, Ron Locke, Dr. Joseph Boggess, and Dr. James Woodard. Memorials may be made to The Palmer Home for Children, P.O. Box 746, Columbus, MS 39703 or The YMCA’s Camp Henry Pratt, 602 2nd Avenue North, Columbus, MS 39701

[Barack_America]

21. Thank you very much.

And I'm very sorry for you loss. I unfortunately understand how it feels to lose someone so good, that the entire world suddenly seems a lesser place due to their passing.

:hug:

[Arugula Latte]

35. "Lowndes County Chowder and Marching Society"

Wow ... There aren't many groups with names like that one! :)

[Fly by night]

37. It gives just a little taste of how fun-loving Miz Lilla was.

What I remember most about her is her laugh and her smile. She and her husband, Bill (Sr.) were among the best hosts in our community. Along with Miz Lilla's older sister, Merrill, they were also encouraging of our (their son Bill and me) own young explorations of the world, including the world of politics.

Aunt Merrill left Mississippi at a relatively young age, met and married her husband Tommy, and both became well-respected painters, splitting their time between Greenwich Village and the south of France. Aunt Merrill was the second most outspoken civil libertarian and ferminist that I knew growing up.

The first was my grandmother. (See post #11)

[grantcart]

17. I am reminded of the Christmas story where a poor girl gives a dime

that causes the long silent Church bells to ring when the large contributions of the rich could not.


The steadfast and sometimes modest efforts of people who lived in the south are much more meaningful than the loud noises made in liberal areas where such moves are received with great support and encouragement.



Thanks for sharing the stories about your friends.

[acmavm]

18. You're SO BLESSED to have known someone like that. Very few of us

ever do.

[Frances]

10. Back in the 60s,

I, a young white woman, stood smiling at African Americans who were registering to vote in the Opelika, Alabama, courthouse. I was asked to be there to be a reassuring presence for the African Americans and a deterrent to racists who may have wanted to create a scene.

My husband at the time did the same thing. He went back a second day and the sheriff followed his car to our apartment as an intimidation tactic.

The white man who asked us to come to the courthouse worked in the Pepperill mill. He told us that he had grown up in the small town where these African Americans lived and he thought they should be allowed to vote. He also told us that he had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan until he figured out the Klan was "just making money off of selling those sheets."

There is a family story that one of my ancestors found out that one of his former slaves had registered to vote during Reconstruction. The ancestor accompanied the former slave, not a poorly paid farm worker, to the polls and had the man take his name off the rolls.

So, hopefully, my action helped compensate for my ancestor's action.

[Fly by night]

11. Back in the 40s ...

... my own family got into trouble (or at least felt their ears burning) for violating two racist traditions of Mississippi farm owners back then:

1) My grandmother (a Canadian born, Irish Catholic suffragette who my grandfather met and married when he went to med school in Chicago) always fed my family's Black field workers the same lunch meal that she cooked for her own five sons when they came in from the fields, instead of serving substandard slop to the non-family members.

2) My Dad (who already owned his own farmland when he was 17, before he went off to WWII) was the first to pay his Black field workers $5.00/day, the going rate for White field workers doing the same work in that day.

My Dad, who grew up to be a physician like his father, was revered in the Black community, both for that action and for always coming when he was called out on a medical house-call, regardless of the race of the patient. I heard that story over and over again as I was growing up. Makes me proud to this day to be both the grandson and the first son of those two Dr. Ellises.

BTW, thanks for your story from the 60s. Far from being a racist monolith, the South was (and is) full of freedom and equality-loving people.

Yes we can. Because (yes) we (and those who came before us) did.

[grantcart]

12. k and r

[Fly by night]

20. Images from Miz Lilla's visitation and funeral

(I wrote this after returning from Mississippi to my deep hollow home in Tennessee.)

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Faces at the Memorial – I remembered (from the paper) that Miz Lilla's services were at the First Methodist Church. I just had a hard time (for a few minutes) remembering which hometown church that was. So I drove by the First Baptist and then the (shuttered) First Presbyterian until (two blocks later), I found First Methodist. As usual, the best sign that I am where I am supposed to be in my hometown were the faces of a familiar classmate and another of Bill's close friends, Eddie, and his wife Janice. I parked my car and joined with them to enter the visitation, a half hour before Miz Lilla's memorial service.

As expected, the visitation hall was crowded. It took me about a minute to get to Bill and to give him a big hug. He looked fine, his wife Lynn close by sharing in the greetings of the many, many people who filled that room. I have been gone from my hometown for over 40 years now, and so it is not surprising that I knew only a few faces there. There were at least a half-dozen classmates, though, several whose faces have still not changed a second since our graduation while grizzled folks (like me) must confirm for others that we are, indeed, who we've been pointed out to be.

I had that "are you Bernie?" experience with another amazing woman from my young adulthood, Mrs. Swartz, a transplanted Swede (or was she Norwegian?) who came with her husband from the upper Midwest to work on one of the large remaining plantation farms on what we call our Black Prairie. Miz Swartz birthed some of the most handsome and athletic men and women who ever came from Columbus – her four sons all 6'2" or better, her three daughters ... (well, they were also statuesque and very, very pretty). We hugged and visited for a few minutes. Then I circulated, shaking the hands of classmates and their wives, and the hands of Miz Lilla's friends who thanked me for the remembrance that my hometown paper had printed.

Fifteen minutes into circulating, another White classmate reminded me of the names of two of Miz Lilla's Black male house workers who were just about our age. I had worked side-by-side with them when I had said my own young man's magic words: "Is there anything I can do for you while I'm visiting this time, Miz Lilla?" She had put me to work with Henry and Willie, in the steamy heat of early August, to clear a grown-over bank that ran from her mansion's portico to a never-before-seen (by me) sitting garden in a wooded place below. The three of us, all in our late 20s, worked like east Indian coolies all afternoon, cutting through the kudzu and the honeysuckle, snipping and dragging and pulling and toting all that living greenery (and the rotting wood it covered) further down the ravine below the now-uncovered wrought iron benches. We worked hard and broke every hour to replace with ice water the rivers of sweat that greased our steep descent that day. At sunset, Miz Lilla could once again see her favorite reading spot clearly from the house, standing in the wall-size window above us in her father's study. She had waved and smiled back then, proud as she was of all three of us.

That hot, sticky memory came flooding back as I shook Willie's hand (two fewer fingers than before) and then Henry's. All it took was for me to say "do you remember that day.." for them to be back there with me. A quick laugh and then a quiet condolence for why we three were here. We couldn't visit long, because too quickly, we were called into the service. I had hoped to have time to change into my dark suit, because I had arrived at the visitation in a sport-coat, a chamois shirt, clean jeans, new boots and my most sacred piece of Indian art, a Zuni sun god bolo tie (a small piece, made with obsidian, turquoise and mother-of-pearl.) I looked well-dressed by Southwestern standards. But, to many of these small-town folks, I likely looked like I was fresh off the all-night train from New Orleans.

No matter. I was escorted in with the other honorary pall-bearers, men who included the retired commander of the Mississippi National Guard, General Shields Sims and others from a society I scarcely know. I was bracketed by two classmates, one of whom joked quietly about the time (when we were 18) that Bill and I had invited a roving band of leather-clad bikers to hide their Harleys in his basement and spend the night stretched out on Miz Lilla's formal living room rug, an unexpected part of their thunderous herd's ride to California. (Lordy, the things we are still remembered for. That is certainly another story, for another place and time.)

[Inuca]

22. Your words have painted

an interesting and deeply moving picture of an era and place that I know very little about, thanks again.

[Fly by night]

24. For you (and for all y'all): a few more word pictures

Really appreciate your kind words. This is more from my follow-up piece, "Six moments at Miz Lilla's funeral (and an afterword)".
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The funeral – The funeral hall filled quickly for Miz Lilla's service. Since I was with the honor guard up front, we stood to watch everyone else file in, starting with the family. Miz Lilla's family filled two full pews, with children, great- and great-great-grandchildren, cousins and third cousins. And all the Black workers, and their descendants, who joined us there that day. Perhaps 50 people in that extended family, seated warmly there together, Bill and Willie and Henry and the rest. All more closely related to Miz Lilla than me, her second son.

Two ministers spoke, mainly reading passages from scripture and from Christian Science writings (Miz Lilla's own religion.) A massive and delicate vase of flowers framed the altar, so heavy that it swayed a little back and forth every time the ministers moved. (My classmate, Eddie, and I whispered our furtive plans for a tandem mad-dash rescue in case that vase decided to take a nose-dive.) The Methodist minister made reference to those segments of my remembrance that were published in the paper (for which I am thankful). But beyond that, the preachers hewed close to scripture. It gave all of us a chance to sit and think about Miz Lilla, in the presence of two very different pictures of her up there on the altar.

The closest one, the one up front beside the ash-filled urn, was a colorful photograph of Miz Lilla in her prime, taken perhaps in her 70s, wrapped in full fall foliage with her Zuni sun god smile. The other, a portrait, was much larger and so recessed behind the altar, wrapped around with flowers. That portrait, of Miz Lilla back when she was young Miss Lilla, was one that, at first, I thought I'd never seen. But then I realized that it had always been in Bill's father's (Mr. Bill's) home office all along. Now, like others, I was really looking at that painting for the first time.

That portrait of Miss Lilla is of a woman in her mid 20s, a woman just betrothed to marry, somewhat older than the norm. A woman who did not know that what was left of her life from that soft portrait's time ‘til now would be poured with equal measure into two bowls – one bowl that, for almost 35 years, would be her married life; and the other 35 year bowl that would hold all the rest. None of that was in her face, but the graceful force to face all things that come was there, even then. I had just noticed all of that, and I'm grateful now I did.

When I returned home, I e-mailed Bill for a copy of that portrait and he sent it to me. If any of you who have read this far would like to see that portrait, send me a message and I'll gladly send it to you. I told Bill that if I ever wrote a poem about Miz Lilla, that portrait has inspired the words:

"Miss Lilla's face fulfilled the form with which the masks of gods were made."

Friendship cemetery – Miz Lilla's ashes were buried after the service at Friendship Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in north-east Mississippi. I spoke with a local judge (a few years ahead of me in school) who told me that, at first, our hometown had been picked to be a Confederate fortification, and that battlements had even been built on the northeast side of town. But Shiloh, and all the carnage that flowed downhill from there, had turned our hometown into a hospital city, a place where, at first, Confederates and then all sides were treated for their wounds and, too often, buried.

Thus, my hometown was spared the bombardments and other ravages of war. As a result, all its magnificent mansions still remain, some with wood floors still stained with that war's blood. Instead of our town being bombarded, it was spared as necessary for the survival of all sides. Because of that, Friendship Cemetery contains a large section of Union as well as Confederate dead. The flowered ceremonial remembrances of all those graves in the immediate post-war years helped cement this place's claim (among several) as the birthplace of Memorial Day. It was a fitting place for Miz Lilla's ashes. I fit myself there for the moment, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Willie and Henry one last time, to say our "amens" together to the benediction, and then to shake hands and hold them together, briefly, in our respectful embrace.

Miz Lilla's forebear smiles down at me (for the very first time) – The last stage of the day, the post-funeral gathering and meal, took place in the family home, Franklin Square. Wood fires were smoldering in the grand fireplaces at both ends of the house. (I should have taken a moment to do them right, to get them burning. But that was not my place.) Another chance to mix and mingle, to say "hello" to more old schoolmates and their mothers. I brought a case of 24 small jars of blueberry jam and placed it in a side room for everyone to share. I was already getting antsy about getting back on the road to my deep hollow home (with a cold night ahead requiring hot wood-fires back up there.) Bill was busy greeting the steady stream of visitors, and so I filled a plate with Virginia ham, biscuits and relish and settled in an easy chair in the formal living room.

Like so many antebellum homes, Miz Lilla's mansion is a portrait gallery of those that have come before. Some of the faces are unique enough that I remembered them in passing. But the portrait off in the corner, above the piano and facing the southern fireplace, was one I had not paid much attention to before. Today, I could not have helped but notice her -- to have broken from her loving gaze would have been rude. That forebear of Miz Lilla's, dressed in her Quaker head-garb, beamed a warm and thankful smile at me and wouldn't let me look away. Because I am a child of the South (and also of the Southwest), I know for a fact that the magical sometimes does become real. If only for a moment, if only in my mind. This was not the first time I've seen a smile like that from somewhere I don't yet know, but it is the most recent. In future talks with Bill, I look forward to getting to know just who that radiant woman is (you'd know why it's hard for me to say "was" if you had just seen that smile ...).

Epilogue: messages I've received -- In the week since Miz Lilla's death and the circulation of my remembrance, I've heard from lots of you, from as far away as Cameroon, Windy Croft castle in Great Britain and Darwin, Northern Australia (thanks kindly), and many others besides. Some of you have shared with me your own personal stories of the Miz Lillas in your lives, which reminds me how much many of us have been deeply blessed by good example. I've even heard that Miz Lilla's real-life family is circulating the remembrance among themselves. For all of that, I am grateful. But what I am most thankful for is the chance to re-engage my friendship with Bill, to re-establish a foothold in the land of my own people's birth. We'll just have to wait and see what comes.

There are two email messages I've received from Bill this week that serve a fitting place to stop this message to you now, and to get back to work in the quiet foothills here, now that my ridge-top rows have begun to thaw (I hope.) I asked Bill for more information about Willie and Henry's family and he wrote me back as follows:

"Henry Sanders is the oldest of the three brothers who worked for us. Mark, the handsome and sweet younger brother with the beard, has a degree in education from MVSU and teaches math at West Lowndes Middle School. (Our family helped any of our workers' families who wished to attend college.) All of Willie's (middle brother) children have higher degrees of some sort - one is an industrial engineer, one is a nurse etc. I can't remember all of their family, but their parents had 7 children.

"The sweet old butler you wrote about was John Robinson, a man I loved very much.. He was a gentle, thoughtful soul. He was my grandfather's chauffeur. Let me tell you about another wonderful man, Ike Brown, who used to take me fishing on Moore's creek, not too far from our house. Ike gave me a silver dollar when I was a young boy (that I still have in my dresser). Imagine what a financial sacrifice that must have been for him in the 50s.

"I was really blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life, and I miss them all. Stella, who was part American Indian, basically raised Merrill and me, had a family of her own to raise, and yet was always available for us, at no matter what sacrifice she had to make of her own, sometimes having to walk home alone at night. Both of her sons grew up to be minor league professional baseball players in California.

"Nostalgia and sadness. I love you, man".

Then, at 5:00 am yesterday morning, I received this email note from Bill about his daughter Julia:

"Apparently Julia has now realized that Mother's gone. Lynne found her this morning sitting in a chair across the room from Mom's bed, crying. Julia had frequently gone to Mom's room early in the morning to lay in bed with her before she had to go to school. We think she understood what was going on last Tuesday night, because when she went up to visit Mom before bedtime, she sat in the same chair across the room and did not get into bed with Mom, as per her normal routine. It was tough for Julia when Mom became unable to walk with her and play the piano for her. Julia loved to dance in the formal living room when Mom played."

Now it's time to move on, all of us. Thanks, wherever you are, for sharing this memory of some parts of the past that I'm made of (at least the magnolia-scented parts). If you'd like to receive the portrait of Miss Lilla as a young woman, please email me back and it will be yours.

Until the next time, just do the next right thing. For me, there is always the Garden.

Fly by night

[DemReadingDU]

25. Thank you for the extra chapters

May Miz Lilla rest in peace, forever, in heaven.

[grantcart]

28. Do you realize that you are on your way to a workable screenplay?

Start with the funeral and use flashbacks.


Anymore hints and you will owe me a percent.

[Fly by night]

30. See post #29 below. If you like what you see at that link (more of my writing),

it's definitely worth a percent to get your advice and counsel.

Hell, it's worth more than a percent -- it's worth at least two percent. :^)

Thanks kindly. I would love to do something with my writing someday.

Just don't know where, don't know how.

[AwakeAtLast]

23. I read this once

but I am bookmarking to read this again - of course it was great the first time!

K & R!

:kick:

[MadMaddie]

26. Fly by night thank you for sharing

She was a very brave woman who stood up against tyranny and bigotry during a very dangerous time in our country.

May she RIP and I hope she with many others are looking down at the work that they did, because for every gesture and action that they participated in they advanced America.

[stillcool]

27. What a gifted writer you are!

I loved the story, but really enjoyed the art of arranging words on a page, that bring such poignancy.

[Fly by night]

29. Thanks kindly (blush). If you'd like to read more ...

... go to www.saveberniesfarm.com, and click on the "The Diaries" folder.

I am in the seventh year of a battle with the feds over my farm that I've owned for four decades. As part of that battle, I was locked inside a federal Bureau of Prisons halfway house for eighteen months. There were many blessings while there, but one of them was the chance to write (and the lack of any distraction -- like real life -- to prevent me from writing.)

To begin, jump right in the middle and read: "One year and 18 days in: Giving thanks, I lit three fires." It is about my first approved visit back to my farm in almost a year, for 12 hours on Thanksgiving day, 2006. Hope you enjoy.

And thanks again for your kind words -- nice to read them right before bed. Night, all y'all.

[grantcart]

31. the link to "Giving thanks, I lit three fires" tells us that it will be posted soon

Ok now I am being serious. With the charachters you have in the thread and the web site you have a story that moves from the deep south, AA culture, civil rights struggle, Native American culture, the meaning of loss and redemption, a lone guy standing up to the Federal Government, and the license to add as many strange charachters at the half way house as you want.


So yes you definitely have a viable screen play for a major motion picture here.



Bernie played by Robin Williams.



There anymore and you have to cut me in for 5%.

[Fly by night]

32. I didn't know "Giving Thanks" wasn't posted yet. Try this one instead.

Six months and 17 days in (the halfway house): In memorium and in preparation ...
(written on Memorial Day, 2006)
---------------

“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”

John Philip Curran, Speech Upon the Right of Election, 1790

Happy Memorial Day. My prayer today is that we can honor our war dead without adding to their numbers quite so fast as we are today, once we wrest control of our country back from the fascists now in power. But that will depend on all of us. I fear the shooting’s not over yet.

Today I have thought much about my Dad, about his time in World War II, about how his adult life was spent with untreated PTSD which he self-medicated every day with drugs (ethanol and nicotine) that profited many in control of this country, but took him from us too soon. How, despite the trauma of what Dad had lived through in the Pacific, despite the burden of remembering the numbers (though not the names) of the Japanese young men he had killed himself (a number somewhere in the 80s – 87, I believe), despite being dragged home from post-war Japan where he had vowed to remain and start a new life – despite all that, he still lived a life of great service, he still gave his children unconditional and gentle love, he still developed and maintained strong bonds with his brothers, his lovers, his friends.

I keep wondering, though, whether his life would have been more peaceful, more serene, more balanced, buoyed by more unadulterated lightness of spirit if his own father had allowed him to return to the land that Dad had owned as a teenager rather than selling it out from under him, giving him the money to go to school and to “get on with his life”. If only he had been allowed to exorcise his homicidal demons amidst the lowing sounds of mother and baby cows, surrounded by the faint, familiar whistles of bobwhite quail and the soft coos of mourning dove, bathing in the shimmering heat of summer hay fields and the sharp clarity of the cold early evenings of January days in the Mississippi black prairie. Who knows what might have been -- certainly I don’t. Still, for a forever wounded man, Dad lived a good life, and a very productive life of service as a small town physician. For that, and for his service, he has earned respect on this day. But I miss him terribly, right now, as I wish his life had been different without the unremovable burden of war.

I’ve also thought today about one of my high school football teammates, two years older but without the rankling arrogance that generally accompanies the relationships between high school seniors and sophomores. The first time I met him (when I first moved back to Mississippi to live with my father), Rocky (that was his name) talked to me about the pettiness of that arrogance, even though I was just another new face – another young blocking and tackling dummy for a very talented first team that played for the state championship in the fall of ’64 – back when I first showed up at practice to begin my own preparation for fitting in and for manhood. I am sure that Rocky was nice to me because he was a good friend of one of my older cousins (Leon), but also because he was just a good person at heart. Today, at my age, I can recognize those “good at heart” people pretty quickly. And my life today gives me much practice in wheat vs. chaff detection at work, on the streets and in the “house”. Back then, though, I was thankful for Rocky because he was nice without having to be and because he supported me on and off the football practice field, those two years before I became a part of yet another very talented first team, one that didn’t go as far but that nonetheless went down fighting.

I think about Rocky today because he is the one name I have found, and touched, several times on the great black Wall that is our nation’s Vietnam Memorial. Given my age and the fact that large numbers of my classmates were drafted out of Mississippi and shipped to ‘Nam before the Tet Offensive and the other great battles that made 1968 the bloodiest year for young American men, I am aware that there are likely several other names of people I once knew on that great, silent Wall. (Though for our 58,000 names, Vietnam could build a Wall with forty-fold more names on it, and that bamboo Wall would only honor their lost soldiers, not the non-combatant “collateral damage” of that colonial disaster.) There are also most likely names of young men who I faced on Friday nights across the scrimmage line as we played our own risky games of growing up, as we willingly took our places as the latest wave of gladiators before the naively blood-thirsty crowds in small Mississippi towns, between those hot and steamy nights of early September until the last of us who were still standing cracked heads on cold November nights, nights so cold that it hurt to pull our helmets over our near-frostbitten ears. Nights when our blood still ran and stained our maroon and white jerseys, when winning still mattered (though less than it had earlier in the season) but when surviving meant even more. Last nights in the bright lights, when the voices of those of us who had fallen mingled with the voices of those who had never set foot on those striped battlefields. Final nights when, like the opening scenes of Bogdonavich’s “The Last Picture Show”, we were about to awaken to another world, one no longer defined by sidelines and goal-posts, a world we could not predict even though its outlines were visible all around us.

Rocky spent his final teenaged, soul-filled night badly wounded, in a foxhole somewhere in Vietnam. Disoriented from the pain and the chaos all around him, I wonder what Rocky thought about, whether there was anything in the memories of his nineteen years of experience that gave him any comfort that night, in the moments before he forgot where he was and stood up, stood straight up out of that foxhole, in clear sight of another young man across that deadly scrimmage line, a young Vietnamese man who ended Rocky’s playing days for all time. I miss Rocky today, because of the kindness he extended to me, a young stranger who had just moved into his Dad’s hometown, a kindness out of character with Rocky’s age and our differing rank.

I also think of John Robert Ellis, my great-great-great uncle, whose tombstone lies in our family cemetery along with his other brothers, all but two of whom died in the Civil War. John Robert was too young to have had children before he went to war, though he had married his sweetheart shortly before leaving with his older siblings to repel the Northern aggression. And unlike his brothers, John Robert’s bones don’t rest under that Beersheba cemetery tombstone but instead lie entrenched and entangled with his many other “brothers” from the 43rd Mississippi regiment who were bombarded unmercifully by Yankee cannon at the Battle of Franklin, in the cold late fall of another ‘64, as that war was winding down.

Growing up in a tight and large family, I had always been told about the other brothers who had died – at Vicksburg and at Shiloh – and whose remains had been marked by my forebear and then later sought out, disinterred and returned to the family cemetery. I had not been told about John Robert and about how my great-great-great grandfather – by then the only surviving warrior from our family in that war – had been forced to leave that Franklin battlefield without knowing where his younger brother was or even whether he was alive or dead. As what remained of the badly beaten Rebel forces fled that battlefield, those wounded confederates who could be rescued (for brief moments with all too many) were taken to Carnton Plantation to be tended – a few mended – by surgeons and nurses who worked until these soldiers’ lifeless limbs made towering flesh-and-bone piles beneath the still green magnolias under that frigid early December sky, until the blood of those who lived for more years and those who were soon-to-die stained through the oriental rugs of that plantation owner’s home and discolored the wood beneath. Stains that remain today, a century and a half later.

Last summer, before I was sentenced to this “house” and to my life of uncertainty hereafter, I walked that battlefield and toured that Carnton Plantation house with my oldest nephew, Daniel, among the kindest and most gentle of my relations, the one who has reached out to me most often before and after I walked onto my own legal battlefield (where my own enemy remains, and where the potential loss of my own homeland still threatens, where I am unarmed, doing battle with my own country, in the fifth decade of this never-ending great Drug War). Unlike our forebear, Daniel and I could visit John Robert’s grave-site, could touch the ground under which his bones rest, could put ourselves in his place because our consciousness is somehow tied to his, in physical and spiritual ways we do not understand. We could find his burial place, his spot in the long trenches of the nameless and forgotten dead, because John Robert had survived six days with his wounds after the Battle, long enough to give his name to the doctors and nurses, who could then pass his name on to the grave-diggers when it came time to lay him down. And then to mark his resting place with his initials, amid his regiment. I wonder what John Robert thought about for those six days, whether his own heart-sick mind returned to the steamy summer hayfields and the clear cold winter twilights he had also spent on our family’s land, to the soothing voices of the quail and the dove, to the faces and the feel of his loved ones. I miss John Robert today, though his blood-line slowly drained into the Tennessee soil for those six days, and ended for good just a few miles south of here, so that I never knew anyone who sprang from him. Another senseless death, another sad ending to a still-young life.

Today, on this Memorial Day (2006), I have no friends or family members who are now in Iraq, defending the American oil that mysteriously now flows under Iraqi soil, or who are now in Afghanistan making that country safe again for the production of CIA heroin. But there are likely to be those among you who read this message who are gripped in fear now, wondering and hoping for the safe return of your daughters and sons, your nieces and nephews, the good kids with kind hearts from your own neighborhoods and your own kids’ ball teams. My prayers and living hopes are with you now, that your children (and the children of others that you care for) will make it home safely. Because as much as I hate war, I have come to understand that there are things worth fighting for. And this country, what it is still supposed to be, is one of those treasures worth fighting for. But that looming fight is here, not around the dark side of this earth

As President Gore said recently, there are precious few options available in this country between a definitive Supreme Court decision and a violent revolution when the democratic process is subverted so completely and with such unbridled arrogance as has occurred during the past decade in this, our own dark ages. So – as sad and sobering as it is to contemplate – we may face future Memorial Days missing many more of those who had to fight and die to rescue this country from the dark forces who are now in control. The path of peace that would prevent this bloodshed – the ballot box, that great leveler and controller of power for the past two centuries in our country – has fallen by the wayside, has been crippled by an malleable technology that is anything but mindless and color-blind. For when the votes are cast and counted on machines built by the “Reds”, the whole nation can appear blood-colored, even when it is anything but.

The monthly state-by-state polls for May, 2006, published in the last week, show that the Smirking Chimp has the support of a majority of voters in only one state – Montana (which perhaps should be renamed Dumbfuckistan). In only two other states, Wyoming and Idaho, does our coked-out frat boy still maintain plurality support. In all three states, “W”(rong)’s support margin can be counted on the digits of one hand unmarred by Iraqi IEDs. In all other states – in all 47 other states – pResident Bush-league has the support of a minority of voters -- in some of those states, of only one in five voters. Here in Tennessee, 60% of the voters disapprove, while only 37% approve, of the actions of the worst leader (sic) this country has ever elected (not).

How, you say, can someone elected with such a “clear mandate” fall from grace, so far and so fast. Well, it’s hard to fall from a pedestal that the American people didn’t place you on in the first (or the second) place. Since the Republi-Nazis do not yet control all the mechanisms for recording public opinion, we know that the ship of state is listing dangerously and many of us (those hopeful romantics who consider ourselves political progressives) still believe that unfettered democracy, left to its time-tested devices, can and will save our nation. If not, if the ballot box remains in control of the Red-eyed demons who dismiss the American voter as incapable of guiding our country’s course, then our ship of state will founder. And our nation’s future, like the futures of all other countries throughout history that have been attacked from without or subverted from within, will depend on the will of those voters (and the non-voters who nonetheless love their country too) to fight back.

If that day comes, I will mourn those who will be lost on those battlefields, and I know that I will know many more of them (or would recognize them by their strong yet kind eyes) than the warriors in the Philippines or in Vietnam or in Franklin, TN. But as much as I will miss them, I would miss the loss of this country more, forever more.

Happy Memorial Day.
My thoughts and prayers are with all of you.
God bless all peoples, and may God help America (while She still can).

[Fly by night]

33. Here's "Giving thanks, I lit three fires"

And now (back) to bed. Thanks again, all y'all. (PS: Grant, I see myself as more the Jeff Bridges type. Perhaps because he stars in my all-time favorite movie (about another sensitive sociopath), "Rancho Deluxe."
---------

One year and eighteen days in: Giving thanks, I lit three fires

(One year and twenty five days in: a prescript

It is a beautifully crisp early morning here, in the 30s, with the promise of another cold, clear day. I can almost smell the pinon burning in the fireplaces of northern New Mexico, 1,200 miles and many moons to the west. This diary entry has taken a while to finish, as I am now confined to short periods at Kinko’s in the early morning and late afternoon, sandwiched around hard days in the dirt. But I will try to finish this morning, and get on with this “cheap spa experience.” Here are my memories of Thanksgiving Day, and my 12 hours back home. Enjoy.)

Ah, the moment before everything changes. It seems particularly quiet at these times, as if even the birds and the small ground critters stop their chatter and their leave-rustling to think about what has been, what is happening and what lies ahead, just around the corner. Today, it is in the low 70s here in Tenase (the name the first settlers – the Cherokee and the Shawnee – gave to this place, waiting too late themselves to build their own fences to keep us foreigners out). Tomorrow, after some hard winds and much-needed rain, it will be in the 20s. I am glad that I spent the day planting tulips and daffodils and pansies, spreading topsoil and tucking everything in with shredded pine mulch. That way, the rains will not wash away the new soil nor expose the balled roots of the flowers or the small, brown balls that will be flowers. That way, everything will settle in, take root, hold on during whatever winter is to come and then take off in the spring. That is, I hope it happens that way.

I hope all of you had a relaxing and family/friend-filled Thanksgiving. For this diary entry, I want to share with you how my day of thanksgiving went. Or rather, the part of it that involved my first “approved” trip back to my farm since last Christmas. In most ways, it was a wonderful day, filled with appreciation for what I’ve had and still have, a busman’s holiday in the garden, a time with my two dogs, a mostly quiet time. A time unlike most of yours, but comforting nonetheless.

Like all other residents at the “house” who had behaved themselves (and that’s not all of us), I was approved for a 12 hour pass on Thanksgiving. Although I had received invitations to join many friends at their Thanksgiving tables (thanks kindly, Dub and Nevernal and Chicken and Ed and Sherlene and Jonellie), I could only go somewhere that had been previously inspected by the powers that be. That place for me – and the only place I really wanted to be – was my deep hollow home. I chose my 12 hours to be away from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, and to get ready for the trip home, I did four things:

a) installed new brake lights on my pick-um-up truck, bright lights that now work whenever I hit a toggle switch on my gear stick. (That way, I could squeeze every minute out of the time home, instead of having to leave early while the sun was still up)

b) bought new king-sized sheets and pillow cases and washed and dried them using the “house” laundry room in preparation for taking a long nap in my own bed (something I have wanted to do every night that I’ve tossed and turned in my single bed-sized cot at the “house”, on my plastic mattress and pillows, with my roomful of unawaredly and mostly unconcernedly noisy neighbors, even though they share the grown men’s dorm with me)

c) sorted through my clothes and books in my small locker to take home the extra pairs of shorts and tee-shirts that I won’t need until I go home and the books that no one else at the “house” wants to read.

d) went shopping for my Thanksgiving dinner – a pound of rib-eye steak, big russet baking potato, a young tender bundle of asparagus, tomatoes and an avocado, sliced sourdough bread and fresh brown turkey figs. Delicacies I had mostly not eaten in at least a year, food easy to fix and fit to fill me up. Food unlike the Pilgrims, or all of you, ate – but just what I wanted.

With the clean sheets, the extra clothes and books and the foodstuffs in my newly brake-lighted truck, I left the “house” at the moment the punch-clock turned 6:00 am. Actually, I waited an extra minute to allow one of the younger residents to check out ahead of me, a young man who had been in prison for the past three years and was headed to be with his wife and 2 ½ year old daughter, together at home for the first time ever. My dogs didn’t know I was coming so I knew they could wait a while longer. This young man (part Cherokee and Shawnee himself) had two loved ones waiting for him, two people he shared his soul with, and he needed to move on out the door ahead of me.

The Nashville streets were mostly empty as I headed south out of town. A quick stop at Starbuck’s for a “large coffee” (I can’t get myself to say “vente” or “grande” there, I’m not quite that precious yet) and two cinnamon doughnuts for the drive. I could drive the way home with my eyes closed, I have done it so much over the past 36 years. But my eyes were wide open that morning. To see the frost on the early morning fields, the horses waking up by nuzzling each other’s backs, the cows resting near their sleeping calves, the fall crop that had just been with us for a short time. A few deer grazing on the edges of fields, a few farmers up and on the way to their barns, a few wispy clouds catching the sun’s rays, a few formerly fast miles that dawdled that morning. I stopped in Leiper’s Fork for two sausage and biscuits, and made a short side trip to Sherlene’s to pick up my chainsaw and other garden tools. That detour got me to take the even more back roads to home – Pinewood to Shoals Branch to Bootlegger’s Lane to Tom Rail to Beard Road to the old Natchez Trace. To find my way to the back way to the farm, across Sharkey Shouse’s hayfields that now are mine (at least for a while longer), off the ridge and into the hollow.

Home at last, home at last, great God(dess) almighty, I was home at last.

If you know my pick-um-up truck, you know everything about it is distinctive. Including its mufflerless growl and rattle. So my dogs were to me before I made the last turn in to the house. Grinning, dancing, running back and forth in front of the truck, finally moving to the side to allow me to move a little faster to my stop in front of the house. As soon as I opened the door, Annie and Duke – all 200 pounds of them – were in my lap, licking my face, pushing their heads under my hands, knocking each other (and me) senseless with their greetings. Bless her heart, Annie was shedding tears, or maybe her eyes were just runny that morning. I know I was close to tears myself, though protecting my teeth from their hard-headed kisses kept me distracted enough not to be lost in the pleasure of their much-missed company. We stayed there for several minutes, me allowing them to have their way with me, making no effort to move, just saying all the sweet nothings that came to mind in the presence of my two unconditional friends, my furry family.

But there was much to do. And I was there to do it. So I finally pushed my way out from between the two of them, walked slowly over the north-facing deck and unlocked the kitchen door. The familiar coolness of the house surrounded me as I entered. It was as I had left it, and then again it was not. Since the water in the house is not working (probably some broken pipes somewhere), there were dishes in the sink that I had left after my last meal there (last Christmas). There were books on the kitchen counter that I had also brought home 11 months ago. But there were also several big bags of dog food that my good neighbors had brought to the house, the neighbors who have come to the house at least once a week for the past year+, keeping the dogs fed and at home. Something old, something new.

As with most cool late fall mornings in my home, the first order of business was to start a fire in the wood stove. My neighbor’s daughter Cheryl had a porch-ful of dried oak and hickory, gathered there during the short time when she actually stayed at the farm. But before starting the fire, I checked on the condition of the wood stove. Good thing I did, because below the metal cover was a very large mouse nest, built with insulation and wood chips. Had I started the fire without looking, the house would have smelled like wood smoke and mouse pee for my entire visit. Nothing living in the nest, so after I removed it, I got the fire started, an empty dog food bag covered with twigs, small broken branches and the cured wood from the porch. Within minutes, the stove room began to warm and, with it, slowly, the rest of the house.

I got the food out of the car and into the refrigerator, still running because Cheryl has continued to pay the electric bill, even though she seldom visits the house except to feed Annie and Duke. Then it was upstairs to put the clean sheets and pillowcases on the bed, to re-cover it with the deep blue bedspread and two of Miz Kelly’s hand-stitched quilts, the Dresden Plate and the Sunshine and Shade. Boy, had I looked forward to a long nap in my own bed. And now it was ready for me. But then again, so was the rest of the farm.

After the house fire was lit, there were two more fires to build. I gathered some more cured wood and headed for my sauna, to get the fire going there hours before I planned to sweat. That way, the walls, benches and floor would all radiate heat, as well as the bedroom stove that was the firebox there. No mouse nests here, just the sound of flying squirrels scurrying behind the sauna walls, being rudely awakened by me for the first time in almost a year. The same family of squirrels had made their home in those walls for years, and hearing them made me feel at home, again. I got the sauna stove up to a dull roar and, for the next several hours, stoked that fire to keep it red-hot and ready for me, whenever I slowed down enough to climb in.

The last fire was a small bonfire, built between the sauna and the house. This fire was an indulgence, because the day was warming up and there was no need. But there was something comforting about building that fire also, for its reminders of the days and (mainly) nights when I had sat by similar bonfires in that spot, alone or with loved ones, friends and family, quiet in my own thoughts or filled with braggadocio, laughter and longing. Besides, that fire would have a good purpose today. The black walnut trees around the house had shed their annual crop of lower branches, littering the yard and making it hard to walk around. If I were living at the farm, those branches would be used, a few at a time, each morning to start my house fires. But now they were not needed, because that fire was built and would have to last until Christmas. So my little bonfire became the destination for those branches, broken across my knee or bent until breaking on the ground. A place to clean up the yard, a start to that process which would not, could not, begin in earnest for a number of months yet.

All of this motion was buffeted by soft emotion, by my smiling at being here, by my having things to do, for my place, in my place. It was still early, and there were still at least two things I wanted to get done today. The first was cutting the lawn grass, to make the ground around the house look lived-in. That was a tall order, literally and figuratively. The grass had only been cut one or two times since my departure, so it was THICK and TALL. But my lawnmower was there and my neighbor had brought fresh gasoline at my request. So with a few pulls, the silence was broken by the little (lawnmower) engine that could, slowly, ever so slowly, carve a spot in my baleable front yard.

My house is built near a creek, all of whose waters flow from springs on my farm. So despite the highness of the grass, it didn’t take long to clean up the yard, stopping every so often to add more black walnut branches to the fire. So, warmed to the task, I took on that section of lawn that borders my garden, cutting the grass in one direction only, pushing and then pulling the lawnmower back over the same strips of ground, so that the cut grass could all be blown toward the garden, where it built up as a nice mulch around the edge of my closest raised beds. The garden itself was a mass of weeds, clogged with vines of morning glory and honeysuckle. But as I mowed the grass, I could see the many colorful gourds that had volunteered in the garden, laying on the ground or hanging, weed-like, on my many trellises. So as I finished one chore, another presented itself.

But first, a short break. I had worked steadily for more than an hour, had shed first my sweater and then my long-sleeved shirt. And I was thirsty. Though the electricity was on, somewhere my house water pipes had broken and there was no water in the house. But not to worry. I grabbed a quart mason jar and walked down to the creek and alongside it, balancing on the loose stones and the rock shelf, to my big spring. A spring so big and faithful that it was marked on the first known map of my county, as a place for Natchez Trace travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries to get good water. Now it was mine and the water was flowing there for me. I dipped the mason jar in the closed in spot I had built to keep the creek water out of the spring in heavy rains. And drank the cold, tasty water – not one but two quarts of it to fill me up. And took another jarful to the porch, where I sat a while, with Duke crawled up clumsily in my lap, drinking spring water and eating my first container of figs. Enjoying the quiet, the occasional bird calls, and nothing else.

After the break, it was time to get on my knees. I knew that weeding the entire garden would be a many day task, so I picked out two of the raised bed rows, four feet wide and 120 feet long, to get weeded today. The ground was soft and the weeds (at least most of them) yielded easily. The weeding was helped by my decision to plant annual rye grass last fall, before entering the “house”, as a ground cover for the garden. That ryegrass had died and its stalks and blades had made a thin mat of mulch to keep the ground underneath moist and malleable, making the weeds grip the ground gently, allowing them to yield to me without protest. Slowly, on my knees, I worked my way down the row, gathering the gourds as I went and concentrating them in one row to be covered by the weeds I was pulling. Sometime later, maybe at Christmas, I would retrieve those gourds and lay them out in my barn loft to dry, to be protected by the barn snakes against any field mice who might want to bore their own holes in those gourds. To dry there, to lose their yellow, orange and green coloring for mottled shades of brown, to be retrieved later by me, Jonellie and her two sons, to be taken as a gift to her sons’ school to allow all their school-mates to make gourd nests for hummingbirds, chickadees and other small city birds. That would be nice, to take that unexpected bounty from my fallow garden and turn it into a teaching tool and a chance to support what was left of the wild in east Nashville, to shelter the color and the sweet life of the birds there.

Once or twice, as I weeded, I got up to re-stoke my three fires. The sauna was toasty, and my time in the damp of the garden, on my wet knees, made it all the more inviting. Given how much food I had brought, I knew that I would have to sauna first. So after finishing my two rows, planting them again with ryegrass to start that cycle over again, walking to the barn to retrieve some papers from my former life, sought after by some Navajo friends to help them with yet another project to bring sobriety to their families, it was time to get naked. And to sweat.

Before getting in the sauna, I made a call back to the “house”, one of my several accountability calls made that day to reassure the CMOs that I was indeed where I was supposed to be. Normally, the “house” rules were that inmates had to stay near a phone to be ready to accept a call from the CMOs at any time during the 12 hours. But I had asked Ken and Hazel (the two CMOs on duty that day) if they would mind if I just called them regularly instead, so that I could work on the farm and sweat in the sauna, two places and activities which would make hearing a phone ring impossible. They were both fine with that, so every 90 minutes during the day, I stopped and called them. “Yes, it’s me. I’m still here. Talk to you again soon.”

With that accountability done, and with the sun creeping slowly over the southern sky, it was indeed time to get naked. And hot.

The sauna must have been about 200 degrees when I crawled up on one of the benches, the one that allowed me to look down the creek toward the spring. I was sweating before I stretched out, on a sheet with a beach towel for a pillow. Lord, the heat and the still faint smell of cedar from the last time I had done a sweat and put cedar chips on the stove to let the experience be a soul as well as body cleansing (before I entered the “house”) wrapped around me. I lay there, not doing much besides settling into the heat, which came at me from all directions. I had to take my glasses off and put them outside, for fear that the plastic frames would soften. But then, it was just get comfortable, breathe deeply and be thankful for being there, at that moment.

It only took about 15 minutes before I was ready for a cold plunge in the creek. I walked the 100 feet to the place where the creek widens at the spring, and taking a galvanized bucket that I leave there, I poured five buckets of cold spring water over my head. It felt cold, of course, but a pleasant cold. The kind of cold that counterbalanced the heat that was soaking into all my muscles, joints, bones, brain. After the fifth bucketful over my head, I walked back to the house, leaving a trail of steam behind me. It was time for some music.

I grabbed my big yellow workplace ghetto blaster and propped it up n the sink in the anteroom of the sauna. Given how deep my home is in the hollow, I could not pick up much. But I was able to tune in the Nashville public radio station. Instead of music, I was blessed with a recitation by the actor, Charles Laughton, on the meaning of spirituality and its many forms. And the first words I heard were from Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, recited by Laughton in a deep sonorous voice. It had been at least three decades since I had read any Kerouac, but it was easy to remember what an influence that beat poet and writer had had on me and everyone around me in the late 1960s. His celebration of the simple, of the mist in the High Sierras and the smell of bear’s breath, of the walking meditation that he and Neal Cassidy experienced together climbing Mount Tamalpais before Neal left for a sabbatical at a Buddhist shrine in Japan and Jack went north to work as a fire spotter in the Cascades, to write and to meditate, and to drink too much wine.

Listening to those words, written by a dead man and read by another ghost, was such a gift. To be reminded by what forces of intellect and nature I had come to this hollow, had come in hopes of sharing a similar trail as Jack and Neal, and later to learn that I shared the vision of a peaceful, rural life with Helen and Scott Nearing and the other back-to-the-landers whose writings had confirmed by own dumb luck and bucolic choice, that long-ago trail that brought me here. To my home. For now.

The segment ended on NPR, and I turned the radio off to end the sweat in silence. Something about the piece got me thinking, hard, about the Third Step in AA, where we “make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of (our Higher Power) as we understood (that Higher Power)” Sitting in this hot sauna, seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling the presence of my Higher Power, Mother Nature (the Great Mystery), I meditated on trust and on the moment.

Two more cycles of sweating and cold-plunging, more time to think about what I have had and still have. It was a peaceful way to spend my last few hours home, before another accountability call and dinner. As I left the sauna for the last time and lingered naked in the creek to cool off, two neighbors drove slowly down the ridge to check on me and the farm. They were bundled in jackets and pullover caps, but as we talked, they shivered in their seats. I asked them why they were so cold and they said, “Seeing you standing in the creek, naked, pouring spring water over your head, anyone would be cold.” Well maybe. Anyone but me.

The sun was beginning to fade, so I quickly cooked my big Thanksgiving (not) dinner and sat on the porch, throwing pieces of the steak to the dogs at my feet. It was oh so filling and the fullness extended from my stomach to my heart. But I knew that my time was running out, too soon. I considered laying down on my freshly made bed, something I had dreamed about for months, but I knew I just couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time to really relax into a nap for fear that I would oversleep.

Rather than feel sad about that, I received a phone call from my family (two brothers, one sister and their offspring), extending some holiday cheer and concern up the Natchez Trace from Columbus, Mississippi, where they were gathered and where I was part of the eighth generation born in the southernmost county of the Appalachian region, as the hills descended into the black prairie that ran all the way to Big Muddy. Once the call was done – the catching up on family news, the jokes, the review of unencumbered plans (my god-daughter, Cactus, talking about taking a semester in college to study in New Zealand. My immediate response, “Fuck yeah!!”, was a little too gangster for the speaker-phone, but my excitement shown through.

The sun set as I hung up the phone. All that was left to do was to make sure that my three fires of thankfulness were on the way to burning themselves out, were safe to leave behind. I took what was left of my unneeded clothes from the truck and threw a few more books and a winter coat in there. Duke tried for the last time to pin me in place with his injured leg and Annie stayed on the porch, looking sad and finally looking away. I pulled away from the house in the pink and orange dusk. At the farm gate, I stopped to lock up behind myself and saw the dogs one last time, staying a respectful distance away on the road, knowing I was gone again. Not knowing when I would be back.

Hours later, standing on the front porch of the “house” watching other residents straggle in from their own short times home, listening to the noises of the city and surrounded by its buzzing neon and fluorescent lights, I spied the sliver moon. Breathed deeply. And gave thanks.

The heat of the sauna lasted all night, in my small bed, in my room full of strangers. Keeping me awake, to think of you.

Until the next time, take care. Give thanks, whenever and wherever you are.

Turn your life over to the care of something that is kind and tender, strong and loving, and bigger than yourself. It is all good.


Postscript: “Get yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars once in a while, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural favors, take flower-arrangement classes and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for krissakes, get a friendly human-being gal who don’t give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen.” (“Oh”, says Alvah sitting up glad, “And what else?”)

“Think of barn swallows and nighthawks filling the fields….”

Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

[Fly by night]

36. Sorry about highjacking my own thread, guys.

I am a sucker for compliments about my writing, and still insecure about doing anything about it. If the links at my web-site had been working, I would not have attached "In memorium..." and "Giving thanks ..." here.

Thanks again to everyone for reading and applauding Miz Lilla's life. Her spirit and her example should be enough for any FU thread.

[RFKHumphreyObama]

34. That's a beautiful, powerful and very moving tribute

It's important we don't forget the courage and the compassion of people like Miz Lilla and how, in their own way, they laid the foundations for a better world for future generations to live in. People like Miz Lilla and all the good they did in this world must never be forgotten

[Jstolle]

38. More personal than you know

Hi. I am Mrs Lilla's granddaughter, Jodie. (Merrill's second daughter) I am having a boring night at home with all kids in bed so I googled my name and found this. I have been here in front of my computer for the last hour reading and not able to look away. I have never heard any of these stories of my grandmother and am so pleased to have heard them now. I always have held my grandmother high on a petastool as she has helped me through many tough times in my life. ( I too stayed with her during a very hard time in my life)

I have not lived in Columbus for 6 years now and regret not being with her in her final days. The last conversation we had was about a week before her birthday (Jan 9th). I called her and we talked about the weather then I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She told me she wanted to go dancing! I told her I would do my best to make the 12 hour trip down and I would take her out for a night of dancing. As you know she passed away 4 days after her birthday.

My family and I were at the service before anyone showed. While all was quiet, I walked to the table that held my sweet grandmother and only in my thoughts told her I was sorry I missed her birthday and the opportunity to take her dancing but that I knew she was dancing in heaven with my grandfather (who I never met) and with my Aunt Merrill. I had been so stressed before that moment but when I exchanged those thoughts with her, I felt a calm like never before. I kissed my hand and placed it on the urn and walked away. I thought once I got home to Tulsa I would have my grieving and would cry and be angry, but it has never come. I believe that she gave me that strength. I love her and miss her everyday.

Thank you so much for sharing you stories. I would love to talk with you more. I am new to all of this but if there is a private way for me to give you my email, I would love to have the chance to hear more about my sweet Meamaw! Thank you again and God Bless.