About eight years ago, I started writing the story of me. It was a simple concept: I wanted my children to understand their roots, to know about their history. I called my new project Country Girl and set out to find out what I could about people who came and went before I got here. To do that, I interviewed my great aunt Hazel, a spunky country lady who is more like a sister to my mother than an aunt, being only six years older. I’ve known her – my grandmother’s sister, my great-grandmother Maggie’s baby girl – of course, my entire life, and she has kept the family entertained with her stories about our relatives.

I recorded some of my interviews with her, and I love her soft Southern twang and her hearty laugh. Those are very quiet today, though. Hazel is in ICU clinging to life after a series of medical issues including a stroke. She was given twelve hours to live a week ago. But I’m not surprised that when I took my mother to see her today, she was still with us, defying those medical odds she was given. These two matriarchs, ages 86 and 92, had the opportunity to go back to 1928, quietly sharing memories of a six-year-old who used to babysit my newborn mother who was placed in a wooden box in the middle of the cornfield.

Here are the first two chapters of that story I started.

 

Cans

It’s happening again. I’m back there…in the country…the no-car-horns, listen-to- the-bees-buzzing country. This time my husband’s to blame. And it’s all because of a can. I don’t even know what kind of can. I mean, I don’t know what was originally in it. But there it is, sitting beside the house, just by the garage.

“Why is that can there?” I ask him.

“It’s holding up the gutter drain,” he replies, as if people use discarded vegetable cans every day for that kind of thing.

So I stand there in my driveway at 10 PM on an insignificant winter night and feel myself tossed back to the Sandhills of North Carolina…back to long-legged, skinned knees kind of days, back to memories of cans.

In the country, people use cans for everything; my grandmother’s house was ornamented with them.  I think back to cans on her porch – various sizes – cans holding nails, cans holding dried beans, cans holding leftover bacon grease. Sometimes I can still see the faded paper wrapping announcing the vegetable that once inhabited the can, and sometimes I just see can, rusted more often than not. Cans also sit inside the houses in the country. Someone may need to spit. Someone may need an ashtray.

So I look at this can in my driveway, (a driveway that happens to sit smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest metropolitan areas of the state), and I think about the taste, the smell, the feel of the country. About how my daddy once tried to bring the country to the city…by planting a garden in the backyard…he rescued a discarded Green Giant corn can and poked holes in the bottom. Then he nailed it to a two by four and filled the can with water. I watched as he showed my sister and me how to swing it back and forth over the sprouting plants to water them with nice, even streams. The boys next door laughed at us…rigging up something so country when we had a perfectly good garden hose.

Living so country when we were obviously city girls.

Years later, I am just that – a city girl. I have little tolerance for living over five miles away from widespread shopping opportunities; I have even less tolerance for hobbies involving catching or wounding animals.

And while my sister inherited my grandmother’s knack for planting and cultivating flowers, I prefer to plead with the five plants in my sunroom – live, please live! My father, my mother, and my sister all mastered the art of yard work long ago, pushing mowers effortlessly, swinging weed whackers like PGA stars with a 3 wood. Me? I think that there are men who enjoy that kind of thing, and I made certain that I married one.

When I was growing up, after my Granddaddy’s death, my sister and I had to endure the occasional summer week in the country, two short little helpers for Grandma. I dreaded it with all the fervor my young self could muster: as a child I thought the country was undoubtedly the most boring place on earth! My grandmother went to bed at 7 PM…and we may as well have been in bed: there was certainly nothing to do there, and, by the way, it is darker in the country than any individual from the city can imagine. So I spent those weeks in the summer scared senseless at night, lying awake with bulging eyes because no kid in America could possibly be asleep at that hour, and no kid should have to lie awake and listen to sounds that don’t include interstate traffic.

Occasionally, I was scared senseless during the day, too. I was jolted awake every morning by the crow of a rooster. The other daybreak sound in the North Carolina Sandhills is that of a Mourning Dove; that melancholy bird incessant with its rhythmic song is still ingrained in my audio memory.

Once I woke up with an ax-wielding Granny standing over me.  Although I was sure that I must have seen so many scary movies, that I was now in one, actually Granny needed my assistance with a classic country chore – chopping the head off of a chicken. I was pronounced the “holder of the chicken.” I had a problem with this job on many levels, none the least of which was that Grandma the Chicken Slayer could possibly miss and chop my hand off. Also, I love animals, all animals, and to this day can’t even step on a spider in my house, preferring instead to hoist him onto a tissue and deliver him outside. So the chicken chopping, fish catching, deer hunting country has never been for me. (By the way, chickens DO run like they’ve had their heads chopped off…in a circle…all over the yard.)
            Also… don’t get me started on the lack of conveniences…My grandmother didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was married and had my own children. I was pretty sure that there were creatures that had not been identified in the abyss that was the bottom of the outhouse. Sometimes I was brave enough to look down there in that hole, but there was nothing discernable – only black forever and ever. The fear still lurches in the pit of my stomach today, just thinking about how I felt when Granny made me sit on that hole.

I like sidewalks and indoor toilets. I can only breathe in a place that has more than one shopping mall; I am a city girl! But occasionally, like tonight, somehow I feel the country in me. Some object, in this case a can, or some sound – a rooster, a mourning dove – will toss me back there.

Sometimes I’m sad that my kids don’t know about the calmness that is the country. Big city children, they are. The country girl inside of me screams with a sudden sense of urgency, “Tell ‘em! Tell ‘em before it’s too late!” And I know what I have to do. I have to talk to Hazel. And then I have to write it all down…

Hazel

In the South, we don’t have the kind of aunt that rhymes with croissant. That’s the most formal rendition of the word, and it represents siblings of parents or siblings of grandparents who belong to someone else. I use this pronunciation when I read classic literature aloud to bored, yawning seventh graders. There are always croissant aunts in classic literature.

The country aunt rhymes with saint, like Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show. And that is Hazel. Aunt Hazel is my mother’s aunt, my grandmother’s sister. She’s eighty-four years old and lives alone on the same land where she was born in Moore County, North Carolina. She did leave once, to become a city girl, for forty three years. But now she’s made full circle, and she’s back to her beginnings. She and my mother are the only two remaining relatives who know the stories of my life, the stories my city children need to know. So I gather up my mother, help her into my car, and make the two hour drive once a month, just to listen…to listen to the sounds of the voices of the country, voices with a volume that I’ve turned down for way too long.

It’s a shame that Hazel Ailene Kennedy Hamilton lives alone and rarely entertains anyone, with the exception of her cat, Willie, with her stories. Listening to her is addictive: her soft Sandhills twang is infectious, and after five minutes I find myself mimicking her accent. I watch as she and my mother reminisce, and I feel like an intruder…as if I’m accidentally privilege to information that is confidential, a long ago pinky sworn secret between two little girls. My mother and her aunt are only six years apart in age. Their memories are intertwined yet separate, many times two opposite versions containing the same characters.

Sometimes my mother sits back and listens herself; she doesn’t hold this particular memory or that one. Or perhaps she does know pieces of them but defers to Hazel for the telling. At any rate, it’s a nostalgia festival, and I’m along for the ride…that is until all of the dates have been shared, the names have been pronounced, mispronounced, and repeated.

Then the only thing left to do is tell the story again. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of me….

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Of course, I won’t include the entire book here…and there is a lot more to write. But I wanted to post as a tribute to a different kind of teacher, those “elders in our tribes” like my aunt Hazel.

Here she is as a young woman:

And here she is with my mother. They’re on a golf cart but not on a golf course. Instead, this is how they ride from Hazel’s house to cousin Jerry’s store to get a Coke and nabs in the country (you may have to be from the South to know what “nabs” are.)

And here they are today, holding hands and telling each other, “You are all I have left,” (which had all of us cousins looking at each other and thinking What are we? Chopped liver?)

But we get it. We do. They are the only two left of their generation. The only two in our family who remember the Great Depression, World War II, and family members who are long gone. These two have been side-by-side for eighty-six years. They are all that’s left.

Except there is a little story out there waiting to be told. I just don’t know the ending.