Waiting for the Sun

atlantic sunrise

It's an unremarkable trip I've made many times, except on this particular trip, it was the first time my mother wasn't on the other end. The last time I saw her, I crept into her nursing home room and she was asleep. I sat beside the bed and waited.  I can still conjure the scent of antiseptic and urine that permeates institutional life. The moment when she awakened and laid her eyes on me is an image I pray I will carry with me all my life because it is a look I will never ever see again. The look of pure love. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will ever look at me that way again.

I didn't take the long way, I started late and had to drive the super-slab (I-75) south and was pleasantly surprised that the decade long road work in south Georgia was finally completed and the ride was smooth and painless. I dialed up Foxy 97, an excellent station with a heavy rotation of classic R and B out of some nowhere place called Statenville. As Alicia Keys schooled those tuned in on the virtues of a woman's worth, I took in those long lonesome vistas of green stretching out below the giant sprinkling crawlers.

Lochloosa in my brother's domain

The first stop was to see my brother in a little town east of Gainesville; very near Cross Creek where the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and wrote her famous book "The Yearling". You talk about lonesome, this is a land as flat and endless as you ever saw. There's nothing here and there is no "economic recovery" either. I love it though, its where I was born and believe that my cells know that I have returned because I am operating on a different frequency now. There is no way to escape a certain melancholy with these trips to Florida. The story is both beautiful and messy and the easiest way to tell it is to simply say that Im glad I live in north georgia where my history is a short one and of my own creation.

My brother and I have a similar approach to life which requires an enormous amount of solitude and personal space in both a physical and emotional sense. The entry into his domain is exactly my own: the locked cattle gate and no indication whatsoever of what might be behind it. I stayed only the one night which is plenty when you have a shorthand of communication based on a shared childhood. He is a great brother and just riding around in the truck "looking at stuff" as we call it was a treat and time that I truly cherish. I pushed off around  2 that day and took the back way to the coast avoiding the smoke from nearby wildfires that caused a deadly pile up that very afternoon.

I stopped at roadside fruit and nut establishments and bought the requisite bags of grapefruit and oranges, admired the air plants tucked into shells, postcards with gators biting the asses of beach babes, salt water taffy and those pitiful hermit crabs that are doomed to die in some yankee tourist's terrarium.

I love roadside Florida, the tackier the better, so I was delighted to happen upon this mexican tin and pottery junkyard that was situated under some beautiful oaks at the crossroads where one tractor trailer after another passed by loaded with either slash pines or oranges.

I will sometimes divert from my destination to drive around in old neighborhoods with classic cracker houses looking for a salvage yard. I am on the look out for double loop fencing, a certain old timey Sears garden gate, metal bendy rocking chairs and the tacky metal door decorations that support a screen door; usually featuring herons and cat tails or possibly gators. If I had the means, I would purchase a cracker house and have it broken down, shipped up to Georgia and re-assemble it. I am trying to create at Chickory something that looks like "grandmother's homestead" if in fact, I had had a grandmother with a homestead. In other words, an idealized idea about how it was but wasn't.

This house has the gate I want

I arrived on the coast found a decent room. I wanted one night that was just me and the ocean before I headed south to see my Daddy. I was on the top floor. I was horrified to find that the room did not have sliding glass windows but only a door that had no mechanism to hold it open and windows that could not be opened at all. What a joke! The whole point was to fall asleep to the rhythm of the waves! Like I am sure every other guest before me had done, I used the balcony furniture to prop the door open. But it was cheap plastic furniture and hardly able to hold the door open against the astonishingly forceful wind, so I added a luggage rack to the equation and finally got at least close to what I wanted. But I didnt sleep well and eventually got up before sunrise and sat outside and waited for it.

Now I am at my Daddy's house and I am having a sweet and meaningful visit. It is a very good thing. Just like with my brother, our time always involves driving around "looking at stuff". All of us in this clan visit in this same manner. Next post: out at the ranch.