Homesick Read Online Free Page B

Echo Park, Lakemont was a perfect natural habitat for the packs of wild young baby boomers who would soon be prowling its crew-cut lawns. My parents had settled there comfortably in 1954, moving first into a single-story ranch house, and then into a new brick-face split-level next door. The houses were tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac with a few other sparkling new flat-roofed modernist homes—which, to anybody who was looking, might have revealed something about their inhabitants. My father was one of a loose collection of engineers and architects who’d entered the Meridian workforce at about the same time, and in the postwar years a handful of them colonized this little corner of Lakemont, just a stone’s throw away from their offices on the main road.
    On the surface it may have seemed like a typical suburban subdivision, but there was something about the connection among these families that gave the place a sense of real community. “We all knew each other,” Daddy remembers. “Had the same background, education, worked on the same jobs.” They all seemed to have so much fun together. I remember the weekly card games my parents and our neighbors took turns hosting: our house would fill with friends and laughter, the men arguing philosophically as the evening grew late. Mama always knew just the right thing to say; I marveled at her natural social graces, and wondered how I would ever learn what she knew.
    There were no mountains in Lakemont, just hills. But there were two small lakes—ponds, really—and in the spring and summer they became weekend gathering places for the entire neighborhood. Like most people, when I recall my childhood what I am usually remembering are the weekends—warm and breezy, they all seemed to be, and spent in a blur of tireless activity and blissfully uninterrupted leisure. So many afternoons I spent sitting on the bank of one of the lakes, with a cane pole in my hand, waiting for a bream to take the worm on the hook. The little red and white plastic cork would disappear under the water, and I’d give the pole a little upward tug, and haul in the fish, as big as Daddy’s hand. You’d see everybody there, Aunt Sara and Uncle Boots and neighbors and friends, with their coolers and lawn chairs and picnic lunches, talking and fishing, fishing and talking. When they drained one of the lakes, everybody—and I mean everybody—came to catch and eat the fish. It was like a communal feast. This was not in the country, mind you, but in the heart of a modern subdivision. Most of the men and women who lived there were Depression kids like my parents, and they weren’t about to let those fish go to waste. Besides, there isn’t a Southerner alive who doesn’t love fried fish fillets.
    Nowadays the neighborhood has aged, and there aren’t many kids around. The levee we played on isn’t often busy anymore, but I like to think that somewhere Mississippi children are still doing some lazy cane-pole fishing on a Sunday afternoon, not wasting their day in the mall or in front of a computer screen.
    Not far from the lakes were a few scattered remnants of Echo Park, which for us children retained the mysterious aura of things long gone. By the time of my childhood they were largely grown over with brush, but you could still see the entrance to the concrete cave that had once been home to a bear named Chubby. chubby bear’s cave, as the faded lettering still reads, was a neighborhood landmark; we’d crawl in, casting flashlight beams into dark corners to make sure no snakes were lurking, and then we’d scare ourselves to death holding miniature séances by candlelight. There was a persimmon tree hanging over the entrance to the cave, and when the fruits were ripe, we’d collect them as they fell. There were blackberry briars along the roadside by the cave, and we’d stain our hands purple picking the ripe ones.
    When we weren’t gathered around the lake with Mama and Daddy, we kids loved