Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in Alabama all my life. I was raised on cornbread and catfish in the rural community of Marcoot. I used to be embarrassed to admit I came from a place called Marcoot. Not anymore. Now I understand the great privilege of a childhood surrounded by cousins, riding bikes on dirt roads, swimming in the creek, and sitting on Granny’s porch drinking Coke with peanuts in it. I left Marcoot many years ago, but Marcoot has never left me.
Heirloom Hope
“Thought you might like these.” She spreads the handles of a plastic shopping bag wide, inviting me to inspect its contents. Long, linear, lanceolate leaves rise from a mass of dirt-caked tubers. Fibrous, tentacle-like roots reach out in every direction.
My one raised eyebrow questions her.
“Daylilies,” she answers.
All I see is sweat and defeat. One more thing requiring my attention when I’m already spread thinner than mayonnaise on a poor man’s sandwich. How can I be expected to keep plants alive when I’m barely doing that with my daughter?
These days everything feels oppressive and hard to bear. Rising prices, shortages, violence, political scandal, social unrest. Neverending arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong. Feels like we’re in a war.
The world has changed so much these last few years. What will it be like when my daughter ventures out on her own? Worry pulls my muscles taunt, wakes me in the dead of night.
“Your grandfather gave me some of these when you were just a little girl,” she says, halting my downward spiraling thoughts.
“I don’t know.” The last word stretches into a long sigh.
“I thought it’d be nice for you to have some.” Her voice is bright, too bright. “Like a family tradition. Carry on something he started. You know?”
Grandfather was a quiet man who smoked cigars and cleaned his fingernails with a pocketknife. He wasn’t the sort of grandfather who played hide and seek or took you fishing. He plowed the fields, tended the livestock, went to church. All with the same measured reserve.
Many times, we sat side by side on the porch in silence. He, puffing his cigar. Me, trying to guess what thoughts might be swirling around in the cloud of pungent smoke.
Long before I was born, he’d faced the Viet Cong and lived to tell about it. Except, he didn’t. At least, not that I’d ever heard.
Grandma once told me my mother was conceived on Grandfather’s first night home from the war. I blushed to think of them that way. She went on to say that later that same night he woke up sweat-soaked and screaming. The Viet Cong had followed him home.
I picture him in the past, bent over the dirt. He turns it over with a trowel while helicopter blades echo in the rumble of a neighbor’s mower. A distant hammer’s blow sounds like gun fire. The children run and play around him.
On the side of the house, in a patch of earth that gets the morning sun, he buries the roots and the past, covers them over, pats them down. He mourns what’s been lost and gives thanks for what’s been returned.
I imagine him waiting to see which will break the surface first, the plants or the past. That first bloom must have been a relief. A promise of good things left to hope for. All was not lost.
Perhaps I too should bury my fears and nightmares among the flowers. Turn the soil while my daughter runs about the yard. Perhaps I too should cultivate courage and possibility. For a moment, I catch a glimpse of myself years from now, gray streaks in my hair, passing my daughter a bag of roots and leaves, the past and the future mingled together.
My eyes meet my mother’s. Her smile is like the sun, warm and knowing. Slowly, I reach for the bag as though I myself am a flower, leaves unfurling after a long winter slumber. I pull it open and lean down to breathe deeply the warm musty smell of earth and promise. Grandfather smelled this way.
“Okay,” I say.
For the first time, I picture hues of yellow, orange, pink, and peach displayed in a bed at the side of the house. The side that catches the morning sun. A spot just right for a planting of daylilies. My mother’s hand brushes mine as she slips the plastic handles onto my arm. The clump of earth-caked roots doesn’t feel like sweat and defeat. It’s much lighter than I’d imagined. It feels like hope.
