My Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born at James Walker Memorial Hospital in Wilmington, NC to a Southern father and a ex-pat mother (Pennsylvania Dutch from Tulpehocken Township). Grew up at Carolina Beach, where except for Sundays we went barefoot or in flip-flops nine months of the year – except, of course, when picking blackberries, where sneakers and long pants were required in case of snakes. At twelve, I was forcibly relocated to Garner, NC, where I finished high school, then attended college in Winston-Salem, NC. I’ve lived most of my adult life in Athens, GA, with brief intervals in Gaffney, SC, Statesboro, GA, and Albany (All-BENNY, that is), GA. If that’s not Southern, I don’t know what is. (PS: The One True Barbeque is Eastern North Carolina barbeque – pulled pork with vinegar and pepper sauce already on it. Amen.)
Ginger Lily
Against the rail fence,
the ginger lily unfolds
its white blossoms
like the pages of a book
called “Summer’s End.”
Each year, the pages turn
more swiftly, though I long
to linger in this last
chapter, long to slow
the days and seasons
back to childhood’s pace,
when summer days flowed
one after another in a stream
of heat and high white clouds
and water, when we lay
for hours in the grass and thought
of nothing, tracing the paths
of ants among the sand,
when every meal offered
the sharp tang of ripe tomatoes,
the chill ruby flesh
of watermelon, the juice of berry
and peach, when we ate nothing
but those tomatoes and fruits
and sundaes, sherbet, ice cream,
the jangling bell summoning us
from screen porch or the far corner
of the yard, those slow hot
afternoons, sticky with ice cream,
nowhere to be but here
for days that felt like years,
those afternoons that stretched out
forever, shading to twilight,
then to dark punctuated only
with fireflies’ dances
and the waltzing stars, night scents
of roses and jasmine, the hope
of coolness, the possibility of rain,
the certainty of another day, another,
the conviction I can’t sustain
as I survey the years unrolled
behind me, consider what lies ahead,
the drawing in toward winter,
its cold ache deep in bone,
the gray sky thrown like a metal sheet
between me and the sweet summer sun,
that long good-bye the little girl
I was never quite imagined, never felt,
those days before I knew that every summer
ends, even – impossibly – my own.
