Tennessee (L)

The cast of characters from my childhood slowly fade, while my old stone home’s background disintegrates to strip malls and condos. I feel a surprising dull ache to hear that my field that we played “Army” in, with its small ledges and waterfalls, the deep mud that once consumed my small yellow slipper is now torn up, waiting to become concrete and pavement like the other fields around it. This field was my Tennessee solace. I would run to it, escape in it, sit in it and watch for signs that it was safe to come home. We played in those fields as we could never play at home. Open and wild, creative and free. We sled over cow patties in the winter and cut through it to get home from school in the fall. We hated our parents for selecting this little ugly house with its paint chipped walls for our home. It was so unlike our friends gleaming new houses in friendly subdivisions. Our home was surrounded by fields and cows and further down the dirt road, small forests. We saw it as a means to hide our dirty underbelly of a life, slovenly and drunk, full of violence and hatred that one would have had to whisper in a subdivision where your neighbors might hear. In our lonely little stone house, we felt trapped, isolated and alone with no one to hear or to help. With no neighbors to casually drop by, our home was kept filthy and shameful, and we were mostly too embarrassed to have friends over. I used to see it in nightmares once we were safely ensconced in Maine, in rental houses with fresh paint.

After years of living in the beauty of Maine, where trees are out of every window you can find--home, shop, car. I understand my parent’s choice a little more. My mother must have thought she could stomach the conservative suburban south a little more if she could look out a window in the fall and see a swath of orange trees. It must have felt a bit like home to drive up a dirt road, past fields and farms, to come home every night. Sadly, I can almost never remember my mother outdoors in Tennessee. Whatever she might have hoped to recapture in the beautiful nature that stood stubbornly on our road, as the world around it was swallowed by progress, she never had much opportunity to appreciate. Whatever my mother did not take advantage of in our surroundings, we made up for in spades. She gave us what she had...fields and forests to roam and grow in. I am so grateful now that my childhood memories are full of trees and meadows, falls, streams, and even a small cave. That I spent hours alone cracking open rocks to find fossils and wrapping sticks with vines; that we found a secret clubhouse in the hollow insides of a fallen tree; that nights were spent picking harmless ticks from my head; that I grew up dirty from playing and running and climbing trees; that the fast world running by me was stampedes of cows running loose as we hid on our porch; that we had so many fields and forests around us that we had not one, not two, but three childhood hidden escaped convict stories to tell. Even with its peeling paint and shabby walls, our stone home was so much better than living in one identical to the 20 around it. But its essence of farm and field is therefore so much more painful, and ultimately likely, to lose. I know I had poor eyesight as a child, but there are sadly never any prescriptions for hindsight.