North Carolina

Remedy

/ Fran Haley / 15 Comments

another little slice of memoir

*******

Once upon a long, long time ago, I boarded a ferry with my dad and grandmother to visit her sister, my great-aunt Nona.

She lived so deep in the countryside that it felt otherworldly. An old, old place. Old unpainted house, old separate kitchen joined to it by an old porch, old outbuildings…old outhouse. The memory has lost much of its detail now, like an aged sepia photograph, fading and fragile.

What remains are the bright sunshine and the green, green grass where I ran and played while the grown-ups talked and laughed on the porch. They were having a great visit…until I ran through a clover patch and fiery pain seared my ankle.

Bumblebee sting. I collapsed in the clover, screaming.

The grown-ups leapt off the porch in a single bound.

I can’t remember Grandma’s reaction. She was typically soothing: I know it hurts, honey. I am sorry.

I can’t remember Daddy’s reaction. He was typically irritated: All right, calm down! Stop making such a racket.

But I remember Aunt Nona’s reaction.

Sweet-faced, graying black hair pulled into a bun, silver cat-eye glasses…she said to my father:

“Give me one of your cigarettes.”

He did.

She peeled the paper back, put the tobacco in her mouth, made a paste, and dabbed it on my ankle.

“That’ll take the pain away,” she said.

As for me (weird kid that I was), the sight of the wet brown clump on my ankle was nearly as horrifying as the sting. Now I sobbed and screamed.

Sometimes I question the details of this memory: Was that really a cigarette she chewed, or snuff? It was so long ago…but cigarette is what I remember.

And I remember my gentle Aunt Nona, kindest of souls, bearer of wisdom from the old days, the old ways, a humble woman who played piano by ear and composed her own hymns. She lived to be 101.

All these ages and ages hence, I marvel at her tobacco remedy and resourcefulness.

Just a little leaf of memory, now pressed and preserved here, before time finishes burning it away.

Image by jan mesaros from Pixabay

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge

Hey, Beaver

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

On Sunday I wrote a poem about my weekday commute being my “breathing place.”

The poem starts like this:

Along the road
among the trees
the wild things live
and wait for me…

That day, we had torrential rains in our neck of the woods.

The next day, as I drove to work, right smack in the middle of the road, a wild thing was waiting for me, all right.

Well, hey, Beaver:

Covered in mud and what looked like bits of bark, the Beaver considered me (or my car, anyway) for a moment before carrying on with its business. Building, I suspect. Possibly home repairs. Maybe it just needed a breathing place for a minute, too…a break from all the dam work.

(Sorry, y’all – couldn’t resist having a little pun).

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge

My own St. Patrick

/ Fran Haley / 18 Comments

In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt was president, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, and the San Franciso earthquake killed around three thousand people. The Panama Canal was under construction and Cuba had its first president. Susan B. Anthony died that year. Lou Costello, Estée Lauder, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh were born.

In the far reaches of eastern North Carolina, a farm woman named Claudia Amanda Victoria delivered another of her ten children. A boy. She would have only two girls; one would die of diphtheria at age four.

But this baby boy would be hardy. He would outlive them all.

She named him Columbus St. Patrick.

Some folks called him Columbus. Those who knew him best called him Lump.

I called him Granddaddy.

As I grew up listening to the old stories, I tried to imagine living in his era. Seeing an early Ford Model T. Mail-ordering live chickens, delivered in wire cages by horse and buggy. Raising ducks that wandered off to the swamp on a regular basis, only to be herded back home again to eat bugs in the garden and to provide eggs for breakfast. Learning to plant and to harvest, to be in tune with the rhythms of the earth, following the steps of that ancient choreography, the seasons.

He was five when the Titanic sank, seven when World War I began. His older brother, Jimmy, served in the Great War and returned; I would know him and his wife Janie in their old age. They lived in a little tin-roofed house along one of the many dirt roads of my childhood summers. Jimmy and Columbus had a brother who drowned long before my time. Job Enoch. One brother accidentally shot and killed another on the porch of the family home. I knew their sister Amanda, who had a high-back pump organ adorned with brown-speckled mirrors in her house. The organ sounded and smelled of ages and ages past…but she could play it, and she could sing.

Columbus didn’t sing, but he loved country gospel songs and bluegrass to the end of his days.

And Columbus St. Patrick loved Sunday School. He had perfect attendance for years, garnering long strings of pins awarded to him. He did not enjoy regular school. He quit in the fourth grade to work on the farm. Later in life he had some regrets about this. But his father walked out on the family and Columbus rose to the role of provider.

He participated in community hog-killings, with the farm wives taking the backbone to flavor collard greens. The pork was preserved in barrels with salt brine. Some of the folks enjoyed scrambling hog brains into their breakfast eggs.

Columbus St. Patrick worked hard. He plowed fields with mules. He took part in the making of molasses, which required several people. Mules walked in a circle, harnessed to poles attached to large grinder where sugarcane was fed to extract the juice. The juice would be collected and heated in trays over a fire, skimmed numerous times until it became rich, blackstrap molasses. At the end of a meal, he sopped his biscuits in molasses, and poured his hot coffee in the saucer to cool it.

He competed with a scrappy little woman named Lula for the honor of being the community’s top cotton-picker. She often beat him.

Lula would be widowed when her husband Francis hung himself in the woods. One of their daughters would find his body.

Columbus St. Patrick’s youngest brother married another of those daughters.

Columbus made some time to hang out with the young people, attending taffy-making parties in their homes and driving groups of friends to the movies in town…all the while noticing Lula’s daughter with the wavy blonde hair and straight posture. There was a certain spark about her.

She considered him her mother’s friend. The “older” set. She was nine years younger and she had her eye on the preacher’s son, who would surely follow in his father’s footsteps: How wonderful, to be a preacher’s wife!

It didn’t happen. Desires of the heart sometimes come to unexpected fruition: I would be a preacher’s wife, a half-century later.

This daughter of Lula’s ended up marrying a farmer: Columbus St. Patrick. They planned to wed in September but he had the mumps. And so it came to pass in mid-December instead.

My grandparents.

Here’s a photo taken sometime early in their marriage:

Ruby Frances and Columbus St. Patrick, circa 1937–1938.
She would have been around 23. He would have been 31 or 32.
If this photo was taken prior to October 1937, my father was not yet born.

They would endure the Great Depression and the second World War with a small child. My father. When Columbus St. Patrick couldn’t make a go of tenant farming and sharecropping, he traveled to the shipyard nearly 200 miles away with a group of men from down home. He was working there, building cradles for ships, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Suddenly U.S. ship production went into overdrive; the Yard turned out ships in three months versus the usual year.

He would try, after the war, to make a living farming, painting, and doing other handyman jobs. By that time there were three children to care for. Columbus opted to go back to the shipyard, staying in a boarding house during the workweek and coming home to see his wife and children on the weekends.

For ten years.

His son (my dad) became senior class president and entered the United States Air Force after graduation. The oldest daughter was a high school basketball star; Columbus St. Patrick nailed peach crates to posts out in the yard for her to practice. By the time his youngest daughter was ready for high school, he’d had enough of separations. He moved the family to an apartment near the shipyard.

Hilton Village, built between 1918 and 1921, is the first federal wartime housing project in the U.S. It was created for shipyard workers. These quaint, English-style rowhouses would be the setting of my first memories. I would awaken in the dim gray morning at my grandparents’ upstairs apartment and my grandmother soothed me back to sleep while my grandfather, having risen at four, made his own breakfast before going to work. On Sundays, his day off, he took me to the playgound behind the Methodist church.

I felt as safe as I ever have in life, walking hand-in-hand with him.

He retired after I started school and lived another twenty-nine years. He saw my children. He survived the removal of his bladder after a cancer diagnosis. My grandmother would empty the urostomy bag and dress his stoma (surgical opening) every day until his death.

They would lose their middle child, their basketball star, to multiple sclerosis in her fifties. She died on Good Friday; they buried her on Easter Sunday. Their son (my dad) was just recovering from bypass surgery after his first heart attack. He would not survive the second, but Columbus would not be here to suffer the loss of his son.

Granddaddy died of lung cancer under hospice care, at home his own bed, as he wanted, on a fine spring day. He refused morphine in favor of keeping his mind clear. And it was, to the very end.

St. Patrick’s Day rolls ’round again and stirs all the memories. They spring to life, as rich and sweet as molasses that Granddaddy and I sopped with our biscuits. He was always embarrassed by the oddity of his middle name. I am proud of it. I have loved it all my life, just as I’ve loved him. Fiercely. I have learned many a valuable lesson from Columbus St. Patrick: Treat people well. Help those in need. Money doesn’t buy happiness (back in the old days, he said, nobody had any money but everybody was happier). Love your family. Love your neighbor. Get a dog to love. Work hard. Persevere. There’s always a way. Tend the earth. Do your duty. Spend time with children, for they are precious. Go to church. Trust in the Lord. Return thanks.

One day, he said, we will meet again in a better place. I am looking forward to it.

Me, too, Columbus St. Patrick.

Me, too.

My boys and I visiting Granddaddy for his 91st birthday, 1997.
My youngest was six weeks old.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge

Hark: the hawk

/ Fran Haley / 31 Comments

haiku for the king of our backyard sky:

from on high: the cry
this kingdom is mine mine mine
hear ye, hear ye, all

Our resident red-shouldered hawk was staking its territorial claim on Monday morning. If you look closely at the large tree branches in the center of the video frame, you will find it perched above the “play” arrow. The cry starts at 14-15 seconds in.

I think of hawk symbolism. I will include it below, because it’s fascinating, especially since I am sharing this with a community of writers taking on a daily challenge; I marvel at how much seems especially applicable. I will say that for me the hawk’s wild cry evokes something within that I cannot quite name. A longing, I think. Maybe to rise above the world with clearer vision. Maybe to have been an ancient warrior along green woodland paths, following the king’s bird. Maybe to respond, living thing to living thing, in natural communion as apparently existed before Genesis 9, when animals began to fear people. And, I daresay, likewise. Loss unimaginable.

As I wrote in yesterday’s post: I watch birds and am awed by the way they know and “read” so much. Instinct, you say. Well, of course. And extraordinary intelligence, I must add.

Here’s what artificial intelligence has to offer on red-shouldered hawk symbolism (do a search; this comes up with links):

The red-shouldered hawk can symbolize a variety of things, including guidance, strength, and the ability to see the bigger picture.

Guidance

  • A red-shouldered hawk can be a messenger from the universe, bringing support and insight 
  • It can be a sign that you should trust yourself and your inner wisdom 
  • It can be a reminder to explore the unknown and take risks to reach your goals 

Strength 

  • Hawks can represent strength, focus, and poise
  • They can show you your hidden abilities to lead yourself and others

Seeing the bigger picture

  • Hawks can help you see the bigger picture and avoid getting caught up in small details 
  • They can help you elevate your perspective and activate your inner sight 

Connection to the spirit realm 

  • A red-shouldered hawk can signify a powerful connection to the spirit realm

Vision 

  • The Cherokee believed that red-shouldered hawks are messengers of vision
  • They believed that when you see a red-shouldered hawk, whatever you were thinking about at the time is happening around you

Across cultures, hawks have been used to convey teachings and wisdom.

—There you have it, writer-friends. Hearken unto the calling.

Meanwhile, I know that as I stand watching this magnificent bird, it is watching me, with considerably less awe. I am simply on its turf.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge.
This is my ninth year participating alongside fellow teacher-writers.

Today

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

Today there is snow. After a recent local record of 1077 days without measurable snowfall.

Today I participated in a poetry group writing about aspirations for the future.

Today I had a hard time composing my thoughts, let alone my words.

Today I wondered if it is time to leave some writing communities I have loved and in which I’ve grown so much as a writer.

Today I took time to savor the holy hush in my backyard:

Today I marvel at nine inches of snow in New Orleans and six on the Outer Banks of my own state…

Today I acknowledge that anything is possible.

Today I contemplate my own words (written yesterday) about finding beauty despite brokenness.

Today, this is all I could manage for a poem on my aspirations for the future, beginning with the starter This is the year:

Imagine

This is the year
that we say
I love you
anyway.

Today, let’s try.

Glorious

/ Fran Haley / 12 Comments

Last Friday, in preparation for the advancing winter storm, our school system dismissed three hours early.

This gift, so to speak, would take an unexpected and exponential turn.

Driving along brine-dusted backroads many thoughts crowded my mind…concerns about work, about people in my life who are facing battles…all I really wanted was to get home, to rest, to feel hopeful for a little snow, as we’d gone over a thousand days without any measurable snowfall. My granddaughter Micah, age three, has only seen flurries on a mountain vacation. She’s never made a snowman.

It’s hard to remember exactly what my thoughts were as I rounded the bend where a patch of woods borders a field:

I glimpse the body of the deer by the roadside. Bright pink innards exposed, the only shock of color in the entire brown-gray landscape… when suddenly there are wings extended wide, curled at the ages…

Buzzard, says my brain. I see them all the time. But in that instant, a flash of white.

An eagle. An eagle. An eagle. Rising on its mighty wings, barely three feet away.

Oh oh oh.

I don’t know how I know, I just do: it’s not really flying away.

I’ve already passed, so I stop the car to look in the rearview mirror.

It’s still there. Plain as day, back at the carcass.

Only one thing to do…

I drive a short distance for the first safe place to turn around. Happens to be a tiny church tucked into the woods. I pull onto its driveway – broken concrete, in need of repair – and call my husband while circling round:

You won’t belive what I just saw – an eagle by the road! Eating a deer!

Wow…you better keep your eyes on the road. Be careful.

That’s just it, though. I WAS keeping my eyes on the road.

I am still keeping my eyes on the road, going back…

It’s still there.

I know I can’t get too close or it will fly again.

No other cars are coming down the road in either direction, so I get a short video:

Apologies for the erratic movement…

The video doesn’t capture the magnificence of the bird, and I wish I could have recorded it taking flight, the incredible majesty and grace of it, like some kind of winged dancer… I had to move on before someone came around the bend and found me stopped in their path.

I took the next road on the left…

The name of it, on a green street sign: Glory Road.

One more time I passed the field, slowly. One more time I saw the eagle, just as a school bus came along behind me…I had to keep going, but could see, in a quick rearview mirror check, that the bus had slowed. Not because of me; there was plenty of distance between us. Not to make a drop-off, either.

I am sure that bus was full of children who, like me, paused to see the eagle for a moment, so close, so huge, rising on its glorious wings.

Right there in sight of Glory Road.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge

Note: Eagles primarily eat fish. In winter, when fish are harder to come by, eagles will eat roadkill. I almost entitled this post “Provision.”

A tail to tell

/ Fran Haley / 12 Comments

I happened to catch sight of it through my kitchen window.

A big brown creature in the yard, over by the birdbath.

First thought: Neighbor’s cat.

But in the milliseconds it takes to process thought, I knew the creature was too big, too low to the ground, too oddly-shaped, too uniformly brown to be the cat.

Oh! A groundhog.

They’re pretty common around here, usually sighted standing up by the roadside like little totems.

The groundhog sniffed the air like a dog…what does it smell?

I grabbed my phone for a photo. Better yet, a video…the granddaughters will want to see this…

The groundhog bunched itself up. Humpbacked, it made an about-face and trotted away alongside the fence toward the woods.

That’s when I saw its tail.

A very long, very ratlike tail.

You are not a groundhog.

Their tails are furry. Wider, flatter.

Clearly not a beaver, although, come to think of it, how does one tell a beaver from a groundhog unless one actually sees the tail?

What ARE you, strange creature?

A muskrat.

I showed the video of the muskrat to my husband.

“It’s HUGE!” he said. “I thought muskrats were a lot smaller.”

“It has that rat tail,” said I.

I showed the video to friends at church.

“It’s not a muskrat,” said one, an avid outdoorsman. “It’s a nutria.”

My husband and I have lived in these parts for over thirty years and have never seen a nutria before (to our knowledge; maybe a former “groundhog” or two may have been this creature instead?).

We had never even heard that nutria live ’round here.

My daughter-in-law, a Louisiana native, knew it right away: “Oh, a nutria rat!”

I looked them up.

Nutria have frothy white whiskers and giant, terrifying orange teeth. They live in marshlands. This one was headed back through the woods toward a field; marshes are nearby, but in all the recent rains, everything out here is marshy. Nutria also detroy wetland ecosystems (I learned on Wikipedia that Louisiana loses wetland acreage the size of a football field every hour). Needless to say, the creature is a rodent. Invasive. A nutria can weigh upwards of twenty pounds. They carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans.

I stopped reading these fun facts and switched to symbolism instead.

In various cultures, nutria stand for good luck. Balance. Humility. Resourcefulness. Strength. Resilience. Prosperity. The interconnectedness of all things.

I’ll be honest: It had a rather friendly face (I couldn’t see the teeth).

Its rather inocuous name means “mouse-beaver.”

In Brazil, however, nutria are called ratão-do-banhado: big swamp rat.

I gotta say the Brazilians hit the tail—er, nail—on the head.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Changed and transformed

/ Fran Haley / 14 Comments

This week, my friends from across the country have reached out to see if my family and I are okay in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

We are. Here in central North Carolina we did not suffer damage like the western part of the state, where many people are dead and many more are still missing. East of us, a tornado flattened buildings in a city where my youngest son once served as a church worship leader.

Speaking of my son: He was in the North Carolina mountains when the storm struck. He and his bride spent the last day of their honeymoon without power, food, and water, trapped by downed trees on the only path to the main road. After someone eventually arrived with a chainsaw, my new daughter-in-law navigated their journey out by using her phone to pull up road closings.

They were fortunate to even have cell service. Thoughout the region, service failed just when it was needed most. It has yet to be restored in many places, meaning that families and friends still cannot communicate with loved ones.

Travel remains precarious. 300 roads are still closed, many of which are shattered with portions and bridges washed away. Mudslides added to the havoc of catastrophic flooding. The picturesque little village of Chimney Rock has been wiped out; “there’s nothing there,” says one eyewitness, except muddy brown water and debris choking swollen Lake Lure. A clogged sea of splintered wood and trash. A friend of mine was in Boone like my son during the deluge and saw a house carried off by the river; it floated away before her eyes. Asheville, a favorite destination and home to the famous Biltmore, is devastated. My husband and I watched the news unfolding and saw this beautiful city submerged. It looks wartorn. We no longer recognize the familiar streets where we love to walk. Recovery will extend well into next year, meaning that the major tourist season and local income is also destroyed.

We North Carolinians know that bodies are still being recovered (some from trees) and that the extent of the damage is not fully depicted in the news.

Words that keep recurring in the reports are transformed and changed. The mountain communities have been “utterly transformed and cut off from the outside world.” An artist with the River Arts District of Asheville, a hub of warehouses converted to thriving studios, galleries, music venues, and businesses, spoke to its ruination: “This changes everything.”

Loss does change everything. Life is forever categorized into before and after. Overcoming is a long, arduous journey, moment by moment, like breathing. Even though restoration may eventually diminish the pain of loss, soul-scars remain with us as long as we live. We are changed.

For those of you who pray, please do so for the victims of Helene. For those of you with means, please offer any help you can to organizations taking donations for those who have lost all. My school, my church, my community are doing so.

I think of the process of refining gold. I will not apply it to suffering and loss but to the effort of alleviating them. In this act, I believe, we are most transformed… in responding to the alchemy of the Spirit working in us to love our neighbors as ourselves.

It changes everything.

with thanks to all of you reached out to check on my family this week
and to my fellow Spiritual Journey writers

Dig the past

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Way back on Day 10 of this current Slice of Life Story Challenge, I had a lot of fun playing around with a prompt asking what the first line of my autobiography would be. I really prefer the idea of memoir…my definition: Mining one’s memories for the stories that matter most, digging in the storied strata of one’s past.

I came up with this “opening line” for it:

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Truth.

From the moment I entered this world, my grandmother and I were bound together by blood, love, and namesakery. Long after she’s left it, our bond remains unbreakable.

Were I ever to write an extended memoir, her stories would be layered throughout. I am part of them; they are part of me.

She would say, You were named for me like I was named for my Papa. I loved him so. He was very religious, sang in the choir every Sunday. He had a beautiful bass voice…he used to keep bees when I was young and I’d help him get the honey.

She was sixteen in March of 1932 when her Papa, Francis, died by suicide. On his sixtieth birthday. I don’t know the whole story but what little I do know, I shall keep for now. Grandma told me they brought him home in a wooden casket lined with black oilcloth and that she sat up with him all night before the burial.

The point is that my grandmother’s stories made me hungry to know as much as I could about her childhood, daily life long ago, how people endured such hard times. Many didn’t. The old cemeteries tell stories of their own.

I asked her about the 1919 influenza epidemic: I don’t remember it. I was little. I do remember people talking about “hemorrhagic fever” and Mama saying she made big pots of soup for the neighbors who were sick. Papa carried it to them and left it on their porches. He wouldn’t go in because he didn’t want to bring the sickness home.

I asked her about meeting my grandfather: Oh, we always knew each other. He’s nine years older than I am and he and Mama used to pick cotton together…

Granddaddy would say: We’d all see who could pick the most cotton and it was always Lula [Grandma’s mother] or me. That was before the boll weevil came along and people started planting tobacco.

Grandma said: When tobacco came along, I was a looper…you had to be careful. That juice was sticky and would stain your clothes; it was hard to get out…using a wringer washing machine or washboard, I might add.

The setting of all this is a tiny community called Campbell’s Creek, established around 1700, way down east in the far reaches of Beaufort County, North Carolina. It’s part of Aurora although the actual town is five miles away. Most of the town is now in serious disrepair and the place is so remote that when I happen to encounter people who’ve been there, they typically say something like “I thought I was going to the end of the world.”

It is one of the places I love best on this Earth. The beginning of everything…Aurora is Latin for “dawn,” you know.

My grandparents, Columbus St. Patrick and Ruby Frances, were born here in 1906 and 1915, respectively. They married during the Great Depression. Their first home was a tenant house; their first child, my father, was born there. Granddaddy was a sharecropper. He plowed fields with mules. He was skilled with farm tools that people seldom use now, like an adze. This would give him a unique advantage when he “couldn’t make a go” of farming and went to Virginia to find a job as a shipwright, just as war broke out and ship production went into overdrive. When the war was over, he tried his hand at a number of things, but he had two more children to provide for; he went back to the shipyard until he retired.

All of his life, Granddaddy was a farmer at heart: I can remember when we ordered chickens by mail and they’d be delivered in cages by horse and buggy. I was three or four when I saw my first automobile…

That would have been around 1910. A Model T.

Time was, he’d say, in his country dialect bearing faint traces of Elizabethan English, that the whole family could go off for a week to visit somebody and you didn’t have to lock your house or barns because nobody would bother them. People looked out for each other. There won’t no nursing homes. When somebody was sick we all took turns helping out.

Grandma said: I was sitting with a friend’s mother. She’d been sick awhile and we all knew her time was near. She hadn’t spoken a word in days, hadn’t moved or responded to anyone. She was just lying there in the bed when all of a sudden she sat up and opened her eyes. She started laughing: “Can you hear them? Can you hear them?” Her face just glowed...it had to be angels. A little while after, she was gone.

I grew up on these stories and so many more.

My summers were spent learning things that I wasn’t even aware I was learning, things that will drive my interests for the remainder of my days: story, history, culture, nature.

Faith.

And science.

I’ve written much about the little dirt road that ran past Granddaddy and Grandma’s house. It’s one of my life’s greatest metaphors. I can recall, in the 1970s, when it was covered with gravelly “rejects” from phosphate mining, Aurora’s biggest industry since 1964. Granddaddy and Grandma were so excited for their grandchildren to come digging in the road to find sharks’ teeth—some were quite large — coral skeleton, and various fossilized bones of sea creatures. Someone of official status must have soon realized the value of these rejects and they weren’t scattered on the old dirt road anymore. Instead, they were taken to a newly-created fossil museum in town. Today, children from all over come to dig for fossils they can keep, and they can learn about the history in the little museum. There’s even an annual fossil festival at the end of May; last year I went for the first time with my seven-year-old granddaughter.

This excerpt is from an article in the April 2023 edition of the magazine Our State: Celebrating North Carolina:

Beneath our state’s soil and waves is a lost world waiting to be discovered—a geologic trove we claim as our own…about 50 years ago, coral specimens were found in drilling samples near present-day Aurora. They were sent to the Smithsonian Institution, whose scientists soon visited—and identified the area as one that proclaims the most prolific fossil record of the Miocene (2.3 million to 5.3 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) marine life on the Atlantic coast.

About fifty years ago… I’d have been a child playing in the gravel on the old dirt road, collecting shark’s teeth, unware of the true treasures of my life.

The Aurora Fossil Museum, writes the author, “continues to keep the past alive.”

It’s analogous to to me: Scientists finding bits of ancient creatures, trying to piece them together to understand stories of this “lost world,” and how I hold to bits of story from this same place, the lost world of my grandparents.

Generations rise and fall…layer upon layer of story strata settling in their wake.

I am a remnant of their world. From early childhood Grandma infused me with story, unknowingly turning me into amateur oral history exacavator, archivist, curator…the stories still live in me.

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Imagine my delight when I learned last year that the Aurora Fossil Museum had been approved for an official historical site license plate with the NCDMV. I applied for one right away….it finally came, a couple of months ago. I’m among the first to have it:

I imagine Granddaddy’s beaming face. I hear Grandma’s typical expression of surprise: My land!

Dig the Past! the license plate reads.

I do it every day that I live. I go on mining my memories for stories, working their meanings out bit by bit, trying to preserve them for the priceless treasures they are.

Keeping the past alive. For the future. For right now.

That’s what memoir is for.

*******

Composed for Day 30 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Eagles

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

I grew up in the city, a child of sidewalks, stoplights, bridges, and clattering trains. I could walk to church, to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees or candy, to Woolco buy the latest hit song on a 45 RPM record, and to all three public schools I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

The memories of nature from my neighborhood, other than the maple tree which dropped its leaves in the front yard every fall, are the gray roly-polies I played with on the concrete steps at the back door, the slugs I salted to watch them dissolve (sorry, slugs), ants, and eastern tent caterpillars with their beautiful rainbow patterning. I caught them put and them into recycled butter tubs with lids, to be disappointed when they turned into such plain moths. Oh, and the random mouse that got in the house to startle my mother, who screamed. And the ditch rat that got into my bedroom… another story for another day, that.

I know there were birds. There had to be birds.

I can’t remember them.

I longed to live in the country, with my grandparents. Even though the mosquitoes, yellow flies, and ticks might eat me alive, I could find tiny gray toads the size of my thumbnail. I would marvel at the dazzling colors of dragonflies, once I got over my terror of them. Hummingbirds zoomed past me for my grandmother’s flowers, never minding my presence, their emerald and ruby feathers gleaming like jewel-fire. Cicadas rattled the earth and my heart with their rhythms. There were deer, rabbits, snakes (alas!), and birds, always birds, chattering and singing incessantly in the dense woods…

The longing never left me, so when my husband and I settled in the countryside, I knew I was home. I rejoiced that our boys would grow up treasuring a closeness to nature…

So I thought.

The oldest always wanted to live in the city (is this always the way? Wishing for the exact opposite of what we have?).

He grew up. He went to the city.

He was miserable.

He came back…got married, became a father…

He texted me a photo recently, with tremendous excitement: Look what I just saw!

A barren field along a deserted country road…

Where stood two bald eagles.

His eyes sparkled when he saw me later: They were huge! So beautiful…

It is better than I ever dreamed, this life, here in the country.

Isn’t it, Son.

*******

Composed for Day 22 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers