My Southern Journey Read Online Free
Rapture, and maybe a little while beyond.
They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul. From the very steps, you knew if you were welcome or not, knew everything you needed to know about the people inside. My grandmother Velma welcomed the whole world there on those boards, except for a few insurance men and anyone with a pamphlet.Usually, she welcomed them with a saucer of blackberry cobbler, or banana pudding, or a plate of the best meatloaf this world has ever known. My grandfather Bobby, if it was a weekend and the world had not run out of whiskey, sometimes welcomed visitors with something more, but that is another story.
The porch was always cool, as if summer stopped at that first step. The house was like a furnace in the hot months, and the porch, perched in the foothills of the Alabama highland, was a cool oasis in the heat. There was no electric light on the porch, no bright bulb to draw insects or add to the heat. Porches were for talking, and rocking babies, and cutting okra and snapping beans and telling lies. A body did not need a lot of light for that, and—if the lying got out of hand—the darker the better.
I remember its scent, an ambrosia of black coffee mixing in the wind with the sweet smell of canned milk, and honeysuckle, and snuff. It made the babies sneeze. In the evening, the children would retreat beneath the porch to be away from their mamas and daddies but still not quite away, to be with them and yet not right with them, which is a delicious thing that only a child really understands. We convened there to whisper, pinch, fuss, eavesdrop, and enjoy the dark, our heads filled with ghost stories and our fists wrapped around our broken-bladed pocket knives. But then a screech owl would split the night, or a cousin would mutter, “I wonder if there’s snakes down here,” and we would come pouring from around the pylons and up the steps.
I don’t see people on porches much anymore. For a while they even stopped building them after air-conditioning, and television. I see people sitting around on patios, but it is not the same. But people seem to like them. As the late writer Lewis Grizzard once wrote, it is hard to get drunk and fall off a backyard.
Like most people, I have a dream house under construction in my head. The plans shift and reform and sometimes I even scratch out a few lines with pencil on a legal pad, but I always tear it up and start over. I have been building it all my life, slow evening after slow evening. If I had worked with bricks and lumber instead of dreams and paper, I would be sitting about 19 stories high by now. Maybe I should find a good architect. Or maybe I should just get one last, clean sheet of paper, and start with a porch. I already have one in mind.
TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, BOY
Southern Living , Southern Journal: February 2015
T he boy was trouble. You could see that as he pushed through the door, then came stomping past the booths in the Huddle House in his toddler-size cowboy boots. He was wearing a strawberry-jelly scowl, his shirt had ridden up his belly, and his hands, which I am sure were sticky, were touching everything. His tired mother noticed, too late, that he was on the lam, and caught up with him just about the time he made it to our booth. His round cheeks were red—it was clear he had a cold—and he sneezed and then coughed a good-bye as he was dragged away.
“Reminds me of you,” my brother Sam said over his ham-and-cheese omelet.
My mother nodded.
“You was bad to get colds,” she said, and watched as the boy went, protesting, up the aisle. She loves boys.
Well let’s hope, I thought to myself, they don’t treat his ailment the same way my people treated mine. If they do, the poor child will be as tight as Dick’s hatband by time for beddy-bye.
They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were
They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul. From the very steps, you knew if you were welcome or not, knew everything you needed to know about the people inside. My grandmother Velma welcomed the whole world there on those boards, except for a few insurance men and anyone with a pamphlet.Usually, she welcomed them with a saucer of blackberry cobbler, or banana pudding, or a plate of the best meatloaf this world has ever known. My grandfather Bobby, if it was a weekend and the world had not run out of whiskey, sometimes welcomed visitors with something more, but that is another story.
The porch was always cool, as if summer stopped at that first step. The house was like a furnace in the hot months, and the porch, perched in the foothills of the Alabama highland, was a cool oasis in the heat. There was no electric light on the porch, no bright bulb to draw insects or add to the heat. Porches were for talking, and rocking babies, and cutting okra and snapping beans and telling lies. A body did not need a lot of light for that, and—if the lying got out of hand—the darker the better.
I remember its scent, an ambrosia of black coffee mixing in the wind with the sweet smell of canned milk, and honeysuckle, and snuff. It made the babies sneeze. In the evening, the children would retreat beneath the porch to be away from their mamas and daddies but still not quite away, to be with them and yet not right with them, which is a delicious thing that only a child really understands. We convened there to whisper, pinch, fuss, eavesdrop, and enjoy the dark, our heads filled with ghost stories and our fists wrapped around our broken-bladed pocket knives. But then a screech owl would split the night, or a cousin would mutter, “I wonder if there’s snakes down here,” and we would come pouring from around the pylons and up the steps.
I don’t see people on porches much anymore. For a while they even stopped building them after air-conditioning, and television. I see people sitting around on patios, but it is not the same. But people seem to like them. As the late writer Lewis Grizzard once wrote, it is hard to get drunk and fall off a backyard.
Like most people, I have a dream house under construction in my head. The plans shift and reform and sometimes I even scratch out a few lines with pencil on a legal pad, but I always tear it up and start over. I have been building it all my life, slow evening after slow evening. If I had worked with bricks and lumber instead of dreams and paper, I would be sitting about 19 stories high by now. Maybe I should find a good architect. Or maybe I should just get one last, clean sheet of paper, and start with a porch. I already have one in mind.
TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, BOY
Southern Living , Southern Journal: February 2015
T he boy was trouble. You could see that as he pushed through the door, then came stomping past the booths in the Huddle House in his toddler-size cowboy boots. He was wearing a strawberry-jelly scowl, his shirt had ridden up his belly, and his hands, which I am sure were sticky, were touching everything. His tired mother noticed, too late, that he was on the lam, and caught up with him just about the time he made it to our booth. His round cheeks were red—it was clear he had a cold—and he sneezed and then coughed a good-bye as he was dragged away.
“Reminds me of you,” my brother Sam said over his ham-and-cheese omelet.
My mother nodded.
“You was bad to get colds,” she said, and watched as the boy went, protesting, up the aisle. She loves boys.
Well let’s hope, I thought to myself, they don’t treat his ailment the same way my people treated mine. If they do, the poor child will be as tight as Dick’s hatband by time for beddy-bye.
They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were
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