On being known

On Thursdays, I answer the phones at the St. Vincent de Paul center at our church. Three caseworkers handle the clients’ needs. One is a retired schoolteacher, another a retired lawyer, and the third is a still spry 80 year old Mercy sister who doesn’t look a day over 67. Yesterday the office wasn’t very busy, so I got an earful of the local gossip. One stereotype about the South that seems to hold true at least a good portion of the time is that everyone either knows your mother or is related to her. These ladies didn’t know each other before coming together at SVDP, but they knew each other’s cousins and the school teacher had worked with the lawyer’s mother and the sister’s cousin was the lawyer’s hairdresser or something like that. The sister comes from a little Irish community a little further north, and she has been stationed around the coast as a nurse most of her adult life, so she either knew everyone in the conversation or one of their cousins.



On Saturday at the festival, I chatted a bit with the school principal and found out she was similarly related to half the city. She had to leave the school’s fun run early to get to the family’s Saturday breakfast, which was attended by at least 15 and sometimes close to 50. They have a standing reservation at one of the casino buffets.


So even though we have felt welcomed and made friends, we’re not a part of the inner sanctum here, because we don’t have any blood ties. And that’s fine – my own family is a rather tightly knit bunch. For example, I once got a call from my cousin asking if I were pregnant, when I hadn’t even taken a pregnancy test. Word spreads quickly on the family grapevine. People are always watching out for others, especially the black sheep. 

Although we don’t have to worry about being on the family radar down here, neither do we have anyone who knows our family history, our own stories of growing up, our successes and trials. Our identity and personality quirks are a fairly blank slate. For instance, the retired schoolteacher at SVDP, who doesn’t attend the same Mass we do, didn’t know we had six kids until this weekend. It never came up in our conversations on Thursdays. But it is sort of a defining identity issue. With the kids in school, I feel a little incognito, and almost wish I could wear a button that says “I am a mother of six. That is why it looks like I didn’t brush my hair this morning.”

It took most of the first year we lived here to make friends. And most of the second year to feel like those friends are good friends. Now just when we're starting to feel accepted and recognized, it's time to start over again in a new place.
There’s something appealing about being known and not having to explain yourself. My husband has called me out on always adding a “me too” story to everyone else’s narrative. I think I’m just trying to make conversation, but maybe it does sound like I’m trying to one-up the storyteller. That’s the nice thing about being around family and people who have known you a long time: you don’t have to try to fit in. That Cheers theme song is starting to play in my mind.

On the other hand, the desire to share my story and to be known is rooted in vanity. Thinking back to the sister at SVDP, she also has had to move around a lot, as sisters do. She doesn’t wear a habit anymore, but dresses in a unnoticeable fashion. Are unanimity and anonymity virtues to cultivate? I feel a little self-conscious about worrying about who I am going to be in Guam. Rather than trying to make myself known to others, I should think more about being pleasing to the One who matters.  And who already knows who I am.

"God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us." (Acts 15:8)

Blooming

Spring peas in live oak leaves. Time to rake

One of the last camellias

Welcome azaleas amid saw tooth palms!



One of my favorite parts of Spring in the South: wisteria



Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love anew,

Spring is young now, spring is singing, in the spring the world first grew;

In the spring the birds are wedded, in the springtime true hearts pair,

Under the rain of her lover's kisses loose the forest flings her hair.

Now in the shadows of the woodland She that binds all

true loves' vows,
She shall build them bowers tomorrow of Her own green myrtle-boughs

There Diana high enthroned on her lovers lays her law -
Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love once more.

-From The Vigil of Venus translated by F. L. Lucas



Lime buds





Spring also brings these guys to town.

 

Their roaring motors are bringing everyone out into the sun.



Weekend Ramble: Trip to Oxford, MS, and Rowan Oak, Home of William Faulkner

Faulkner's library

Faulkner's desk in his living room at Rowan Oak

This past weekend my husband and I undertook to nourish our marriage by taking a trip sans children. We began planning this trip before my husband returned from deployment last fall, and our original destination was someplace a little more far-flung/exotic – Italy, Greece, Ireland? – for an extended period – a week or two? But in the hurry-burry of return to regular life, our romantic getaway shrank in size and scope. Since our time in Mississippi is drawing to a close, we realized we better hurry up and see the sights here, so we decided to jaunt up north for a weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, home of Ole Miss and William Faulkner’s last abode. We were joined by my cousin, who wrote her senior thesis on Faulkner, and her husband, to add to the fun.

Oxford is quite different from coastal Mississippi. You can imagine that its rolling hills at one time would have been quite wooded, and although many of the buildings built before the Civil War were burned by Union troops, the town still wears a little of the stamp of antebellum life. Wide two-story porches, tall windows and other elements of Greek revival architecture dominate the homes. We stayed in an inn characterized by those elements, although with minimalist furnishings, right between the University and the center of town, Jackson Square, so we could walk everywhere.

And walk we did. The weather couldn’t have cooperated more favorably – the sun warmed the mercury to about 75 for the weekend, and the warm temps brought out the co-eds in their shortest mini-dresses. Oxford seems to be a town with a high proportion of pretty girls, but then again, it is not hard to be beautiful when you are young.


Oxford also has a nice high proportion of book stores – the main square has three, although they all seem to be related: Square Books, a glorious incarnation of what a book store should be – shelves and shelves of books, arranged by genre and author and subject, so that you have to explore to find what you are looking for; Books on the Square, Jr, the children’s book store; and Off the Square Books, featuring sale and remaindered items, a sort of sad, bargain basement store where books go to yellow. I did my part for the local economy and purchased a copy of a book of children’s ghost stories told by William Faulkner to his daughter and niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, who authored the collection Ghosts of Rowan Oak, for our kids, and a Library of America collection of four of Faulkner’s books. Although I am almost through Go Down, Moses, one of the books in this collection, I wanted to read A Fable, Faulkner’s retelling of the Passion narrative through the experience of a soldier in WWI, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, but the only copy the bookstore had was a badly printed, poorly bound paperback. The  complete L of A collected works runs four or five volumes.

A third thing Oxford has going for it are delicious restaurants: our best meal was at the City Grocery, a place deservedly awarded a James Beard Best Southern Chef award. Most delectable was the starter: a slice of savory cheesecake made from chevre with roasted peppers and crab on a pecan crust. Too good.


The highlight and purpose of the trip was to peek into the life of William Faulkner. Visiting his home for the last 30 or so years of his life, named Rowan Oak, offers more than just a peek. The University of Mississippi has preserved a number of the acres surrounding his home, so we could walk through the woods where he used to sneak off to imbibe some local liquor. The trail was accessed just a couple blocks from our hotel and winded about a quarter mile to the house.  Baseball fans and traffic murmured in the distance, but the mockingbirds did a nice job of contributing to a feeling of remoteness.

You can visit the grounds of Rowan Oak any time, and when we first approached, early Friday evening, we interrupted a couple of romantic picnickers, who had brought a guitar along for serenades. But I can’t imagine the lovers reading Faulkner to each other without starting to drift into a late afternoon snooze.

The house appears grand with a brick walk flanked by cypresses planted to deter yellow fever leading to the main entrance, but it is not large. The property is beautiful, and in a couple weeks, it will probably be even prettier when the jonquils and redbuds burst into bloom.


Visiting historic homes is always a little funny. As museums, they are wonderful ways of envisioning the past, but a lurking feeling that you’re trespassing still haunts you. Faulkner’s daughter Jill only died a few years ago in 2008. You wonder how she felt about people gaping at the artifacts Faulkner used in his private life on display: cameras, a tobacco tin, his and  her riding boots, a box of Shakespeare's collected works. On the other hand, she apparently set many of the terms of the preservation of the house, dictating, for example, that there would be no gift shop. (A welcome term, I think.)


The tour of the home is self-guided. We came back to the property Saturday morning and shuffled through the halls, peering into the cordoned-off rooms, and studying the display cases in the hallway of some Faulkner ephemera.  I especially enjoyed browsing a large scrapbook of newspaper clips. Plaques with excerpts of Faulkner's works and interpretive information prevented the house from feeling truly homey, but they added quite a bit of background information, such as the tidbit that Faulkner and his wife Estelle were high school sweethearts. Her father did not approve of Faulkner's desire to be a writer, so their romance was cut short, only to resume years later after she divorced the man of  whom her father approved. 

After wandering the grounds, peeking into stables and servants quarters and resting in the sunshine a few minutes, we hiked on to the cemetery to find Faulkner’s grave. The grave occupies an unassuming spot on the side, not the crest, of a hill, rather close to the road. Faulkner was laid to rest in 1962, and ten years later, his wife Estelle was buried next him. Above his head is buried his stepson. A vacant spot for another member of the Faulkner family remains next to the stepson, but I suspect that plot will remain empty. How many Faulkner descendents remain unburied?  Offerings littering the gravesite include cigarette butts, pennies, and a broken Jack Daniels bottle. We offered up the “Requiescat in pace” prayer for the man who said to students at University of Virginia: "Christianity has never harmed me and I hope I have never harmed it. I have the sort of provincial Christian background which one takes for granted without thinking to much about it, probably . . . within my own rights, I feel I am a good Christian - whether it would please anyone else's standard or not, I don't know."  Then we moved on.

This summary of the weekend would be incomplete if I failed to mention a couple other highlights: Saturday evening, in lieu of hanging out at one of the college bars or going to a Jimmy Eat World concert, we attended a performance of baroque pieces entitled “The Virtuouso Viol,” performed by Alison Crum on the viola da gamba accompanied by Roy Marks on the theorbo, an instrument I had never heard of before. The husbands were commended for staying awake. And for Sunday Mass, we participated in the service at St. John the Evangelist, the parish right in front of the gates to the University, which was preached by a youngish priest who gave a rousing homily, which he closed by noting that new construction was beginning on the parish hall behind the church. “Parents, please practice extra vigilance with your children,” he advised, “And kids, if you play in the dirt, the devil will eat your face off!” A little fire and brimstone for Sunday morning.



The woodland path



Yellow cedar line walk to Rowan Oak




Faulkner's fireplace

 




  

   

The smokehouse

Servants' quarters



Faulkner's grave is in the background.



*I am not being recompensed by the city of Oxford for this travelogue, but I'd happily accept if offered compensation!

Books on the Square - delight!

Bathroom at the bookstore

Signed photos of visiting authors



Breakfast at Triplet Day Drugstore on the coast. Beignets as big as your head for dessert.



Required tourist trap.

Spring is here!

Irony

Autumn ramble

It rains! Hurrah! I was beginning to get tired of all the sunny, mild weather around here. Nothing like a good November rain for enjoying warm beverages.


I have to say, this fall has been much more colorful than last year. Based on my impressions last fall, I would have been quite dismissive of autumn in the Deep South, but whatever proportions of sun, rain, and temperature are necessary for vivid foliage fell into line this year. Our neighbor’s maple tree, the only one around for miles, brings fiery hues to our usually dun colored street, and we don’t have to rake any of the leaves. Of course, there is nothing like the cooler weather to make me long for a Midwestern autumn, even though I’m enjoying what we have here, especially early morning runs with my husband. Quite often we are greeted by pelicans and the harsh cry of herons. If only the casino didn’t block the view of the sun on cresting the bay...

Our last couple of weekends have included cultural activities, in addition to the seasonal soccer games.  Last weekend it was an art fair and the opening of the new Frank Gehry designed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum. We went on the family day, when Americorps volunteers were present to help the kids make booklets about George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, and paper crowns. (For Mardi Gras? Or to keep the little girls happy while the boys had crazy mustaches painted on their upper lips?) I kicked myself for forgetting a camera. The museum was extremely small, and not being a connoisseur of pottery, I don't know that I'll be back often. The sculptures by Richmond Barthe were stunning, though.  Made the art fair offerings pale (except for the booth where you could pay $5 to pose with a little street vendor monkey.)

A model of the museum:

George Ohr:

 This weekend included a drive to Mobile that was absolutely glorious (despite our intended destination being a car repair place), and discovering the free Fort Conde with its miniatures and wax figures brought back memories of Ft. Monroe - a nice cap to the day that included a visit to the Exploreum to see the sea lion show. Of course, the display of photos of past queens of the krewe of the Conde Cavaliers, who sponsor the first parade of the Mobile Mardi Gras season, was more to the liking of my young ladies, but at least there was something for everyone.

This year's Mobile Carnival Association queen from: http://blog.al.com/entertainment-press-register/2010/02/royal_splendor_mca_queen.html

Artifacts and fossils

Yesterday on a bike/jog around the neighborhood bordering the bay with my younger kids, we stopped again at the vacant lot to pick a few lonely scuppernongs clinging to the vines. I told the kids to hunt for a more while I ran to the dead end and back for exercise.


As I jogged back, I saw the kids all sitting on the crumbling curb. They were waiting to present me with a treasure: a brown glazed pottery urn found buried near the fence line under the vines. The six year old saw it first: he thought it was the turtle we had released several weeks ago, only now it had flowering vines carved on the back. Then he realized it was a vase, so he and his brother dug it out to give to me.


Although caked with mud, it looked fairly pretty, having a crackled glaze, embossed peacocklike birds, and an uncommon shape. The only flaw was a broken handle, which snapped when they tried to pull it out of the ground because a root had grown through it. My admiration was genuine, as opposed to some times when I have to feign joy over a piece of broken Corelle, or chipped brick. Failing to find any “made in China” stamped on the bottom, I indulged an “Antiques Roadshow” fantasy: “Yes, my children found this urn in a vacant lot. It was probably washed away from some household during Katrina. . . . You mean it’s Shearwater pottery worth thousands?! . . . Oh, I’m going to hold onto it since it was a gift from my children, but it’s nice to know I could fund their college with it if I wanted to.” It was enough to make me want to find that piece of handle.

They showed me the spot where they had found it, and where we also saw three blue-tailed skink skittering under the detritus of rotted leaves and scuppernongs. Apparently their nest had been disturbed. I disturbed it further by sifting through the dirt by the fence. I found one piece of the broken handle, but another tiny brown fragment still lies buried for the next generation of archaeologists. I had to give up the search to go pick up another child. All day I plotted how I might jump on the bike to ride back over, but a free half hour never surfaced. Maybe tomorrow.

This adventure in archaeology serendipitously occurred shortly after reading Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. I picked it up because it went from the “New Books” shelf at the library to the “Recommended Reading” shelf, and because I had read a picture book, Stone Girl Bone Girl by Laurence Anholt, which I found more remarkable than the novel. The picture book’s simple illustrations reminded me a little of Barbara Cooney’s, and the author told the story in a way that made you interested in the fossils that Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot found, but the focus was on Mary as a little girl.

Chevalier’s story focused more on the unique friendship of Philpot and Anning, and on their identity as women in a men’s field rather than on the fossils themselves. Other than mentioning how the fossils contributed to theories of extinction and the resulting pressure on religious beliefs, Chevalier doesn’t delve far into the geological questions of the day, nor does she really frame the religious questions with clarity. Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of the World opened my eyes to those wonders in a more thorough way.

What becomes tiresome about Chevalier’s book was overemphasis on the barriers these women faced: that the women were unconventional in their pursuit of fossils and in their friendship is interesting, but reading repeated comments about these constraints is not. I get tired of being told how oppressed women of previous centuries were because they had to have chaperones and mind their manners. Whenever I read historical fiction I wonder about this emphasis on the unfair trials women of yore had to endure: did they really resent the restrictions as much as their modern sisters imagine? Take Jane Austen, who gets a mention in Remarkable Creatures, for example: some of her characters chafe against their societal roles, but more often what they struggle with are the constrictions of class, not gender. We judge the oppression of their cultural regime by our standards.

Maybe I expected too much from a novel that has been on the library’s special features shelf. This book ties into the resurgence of interest in Charles Darwin, which has resulted in renewed interest in natural history, or maybe vice versa. It’s a fascinating period of history, which makes reading Chevalier’s story entertaining. But of most value is its proposition that the story of the past is written in the rocks beneath our feet, and that if we keep our eyes open we can find extraordinary treasures in ordinary places, that time is more spacious and full of possibility than we can imagine, that our relationship with God can expand to include these possibilities. And maybe by articulating these thoughts I’ll hold onto that glimpse of wonder every time I look at our potential treasure of a lost artifact, a record of perseverance in the face of a storm’s destruction.

Fossilized coral petoskey stone, Lake Michigan

Car Ordeals

One more week until the glorious homecoming! Plans are underway for Dates with Dad. The list of good places to eat and fun places to play and discover has grown. Also planned, of course, is lots of quality time at home, including multiple evenings on the lanai with summer beverages.

Unfortunately, in the midst of our pre-homecoming preparations, we had not one but two car malfunctions last week. This should not be surprising given the age and mileage (17 years and over 300,000 miles combined) of these vehicles.  With only one driver in the house, getting the cars fixed required a bit of forethought and finagling. To be honest, only one of them has been fixed so far. Figuring out what to do with the GMC – the entire molding is falling off the passenger door –  has been postponed by liberal use of Gorilla tape until I can get it to the body shop, or let Dad take a look at it during one of his days of liberty.


The problem with the Volvo was a little stickier. The window wouldn’t roll up. With rain in the forecast, I couldn’t ignore it any longer, so I took the car over to the import place in the next town and made arrangements for a friend to pick me up. The station manager quickly diagnosed the problem and replaced the switch for a relatively inexpensive price before my friend arrived. A relief.

The deal was sweetened even more because in the waiting room magazine rack, not only did I find back issues of The Oxford American, but also a photocopied essay about Julian of Norwich. The best car repair shop reading I have ever come across.

Summer in the South

There is a heaviness here from heat, humidity, ill humors.  Instead of complaining about the heat, I could complain about my 6 year old biting and spitting on me while I was trying to hold him in time out after he bit and spit on his brothers and strangled his sisters. Or I might moan about my 12 year old threatening to run away or my 8 year old whining for playdates.  The 4 year old steals gum from my purse and leaves it, with all the flavor chewed out, in inconspicuous spots to be sat or trod upon. Then my 13 year old, the arbiter of justice, is angry because I don’t follow through on meting out fitting punishments for these evils deeds. Meanwhile, the 10 year old asks hourly to play Wii or computer games or to get another new pet until my ears begin to feel stuffy.

In a couple of weeks, they all go to school, and I will feel guilty about dropping their discipline problems into the laps of other more capable professionals. Despite their quarrelsomeness, I really, really feel sorry that I am not keeping them home to sit around and read The Incredible Book Eating Boy one more time with the youngers or to talk with the two olders more about To Kill a Mockingbird, which they just read and I just reread for the first time in at least 20+ years. (Why did I wait so long? I thought it was a courtroom drama. I didn’t love it the first time around so many years ago, wondered why all the fuss. But this time I had a pang in my heart and folded over every other page corner to go back to. Is it that I’ve become more sentimental in my middle age? That I’m in the south and suddenly the setting is more familiar? That I understand the difficulties of the relationships better because they remain difficult 50 years later?
The boys actually didn’t say much to me about the book, but neither did they complain when I came home from the library with the black and white movie. Instead they wanted to watch it w/o the youngers, and they wanted me to make the 10 year old wait to watch it until he had read the book. But I let him watch it, and I let the youngers watch until the courtroom drama began and then I packed them off protesting to bed.)

But it is still summer. I was happy to hear one kid complain about being bored yesterday. Finally, we are not busy. Like Jem and Dill and Scout, the kids have tired of some of their games. So we are fighting. Because when you go outside you start to sweat and the ants bite you between your toes and you don’t stop itching even when you rub the spot so hard that dirty skin starts to peel off.

But when you go outside sometimes you find a box turtle in the yard and you have to take it around the block to the vacant lot next to a creek and there you find scuppernong grapes that you teach your kids to suck on until the sweetness fades. And you notice the tiny pink portalucas that bloom in the sidewalk cracks and catch a glimpse of what you are sure is an escaped yellow parakeet flying after a mourning dove and wonder if you can call it to you and keep it as a pet. Maybe the kids spend a few moments climbing up the low branches of a twisted live oak and running through the neighbor’s sprinklers. They eat the last of the neighbor’s blueberries that are sour now and then flop in the grass and complain about the heat and beg to go swimming or to eat another popsicle. So for an hour you sit at the side of the neighbors' pool while they are at work (with permission) and pretend to read but really watch the kids compete in big splash contests and races and playing at sharks and minnows. You note with bittersweet pride and cautious approbation that the baby holds her breath under water and spins and then swims from one end of the steps to the other. She doesn’t need you to hold her in the water any more. You can sit and read your book or watch them swim away. Or dive in and race them to the other side.

May showers bring lots of flowers

Since everything in my house is brown, I've decided to change my blog background to plain white. Plus I hear the text was hard to read on a blackberry.


So since I've been messing around with layout long enough to realize my incompetence, I'm just going to post a few photos.


Yesterday I was on my way to pick up my son, and a friend called to warn me about quarter sized hail falling around the school.  I waited about ten minutes before leaving, and was able to witness these fabulous clouds.

                         
My son capturing the clouds and his reflection:

The dog hides under the desk during storms:


The tropical downpour this weekend ruined what little hope I had left for doomed project. I tried planting herbs to donate to the church festival plant sale. Here’s how they looked a month ago:

And now, after all the rain and heat, sadness:

The seeds I planted in the raised bed look more pathetic. I spent about $15 to feed the snails and to prove that seedlings don't do well with too much moisture.  Even the nasturtiums decline to grow. I think there may be more mulch in this bed than dirt.

On the other hand, the hydrangeas are amazing. I had nothing to do with them, or the sweet gardenias that were finished off by the thunderstorms, but I’m happy to enjoy them. Thanks, landlords.

I didn't see the tulips and daffodils I'm used to this spring, but in late April amaryllis started opening up everywhere. They're almost finished now, but here's a photo of a chain link fence with some:

Perhaps if I had gotten out of my car, I'd have a better photo.

Gator sighting

Drove down Highway 90 along the coast Wednesday and saw orange vested workers laying out large black garbage bags – full of trash or material to fight oil? Also noticed large areas marked off with sand fences to protect the nesting least tern. Maybe they’ll hatch their broods before the potential catastrophe hits.

from National Geographic

The irony is that we went in search of nature this weekend while my parents were visiting, and here are these terns right down the street. We drove out to Pascagoula to find this estuarine research area I had read about, but the directions I had transcribed made no sense in the locale. While wandering cluelessly, we happened to pass by a shed with a sign out front reading Gator Ranch, so I circled back to ask directions. The Cajun in charge didn’t know the place I was talking about, but he offered us a swamp boat ride. The price was too stiff for our large crowd, but we did pay $5 each to see the gators at the ranch.

We received a personal tour from one of the newer Cajuns on staff, who told us he got the job because he just loved running swamp boats. He showed us the baby gators and the toddler gators and then we got to look around on our own to see the teenager gators. It was worth the five dollars to see him walk into the gator pen barefooted.

I didn’t know that gators could grow a foot a year until they are about six; then they only grow about an inch a year. Their metabolism really slows down.

I also didn’t know that snapping turtles can live up to 200 years. One of the more excited incidents from my youth spent next door to a retaining pond, was the capture and barbecuing of a large snapper. The one at Gator Ranch is supposedly close to 110 if his rings can be trusted. He was also in old man metabolism mode and barely moved.

I can’t decide if this counts on my siting list.

Got back in the car to find the nature center and ended up at a city park that had a playground, lake with walking path, and a little building designated the nature center, which was closed by the time we arrived. Driving up we saw some nature in action – a mallard trying to mate with a scovy. So we stopped and ate our picnic supper with the ducks and gulls, then walked around the pond. The kids surprised me by not complaining. Instead they had a great time picking up trash off the bank. They ended up finding a collection of balls in the scum at the edge of the pond. The balls and a couple of plastic toys ended up in the back of the car to take home. Now I have little black beetles in the back of the car.



We tried to find an old Spanish Fort that is supposedly in Pascagoula, but again were frustrated. Instead we ended up at a pier where we watched the sunset and then drove slowly home down the beach road, admiring the large homes with coastal views until we hit the end of the road: a big lot where some big building had been destroyed by Katrina right across a little inlet from Northrup Grunman. The lot was full of fishermen, trying to catch their dinner at dusk, I suppose. It must be a hot spot. We also spotted these handsome ducks, which even my father, the birdman, didn’t recognize.

After checking the bird book, I think they are black breasted whistling ducks.

So we didn’t make it to a trail through the wilds, but we had a good time exploring.