Crossing Into a Summer State of Mind

Reflections from a 60's Childhood on the McEntire Farm, Shingle Hollow, NC
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We are driving across country.  The stops will be limited. Dad likes to say he "drove straight through."  Mom likes to echo, "three days, three nights." For me, the California rows of sprawling tract housing are now forgotten.

In the back of the pink Rambler wagon, we three children rotate seats.  Two, side by side, atop the bench seat.  One in the floor on a sleeping bag, confronting the hump in the middle of the car.   At night, I swap seats with mother to serve as wing to the driver.  "Map girl," that's me.

On day two, we feed our red dachshund green and purple grapes. The dog gets gas - and worse. Dad has to stop. He swears. Mom is ordering us out of the wagon to clean, yet again. I watch her pour water from a milk jug into a towel. When she wrings it, the water marks an impression into the shoulder of the road and trickles a run toward the blacktop edge. Mom in her fitted black skirt and lilac blouse, bending and leaning and bending and leaning to wash the seat. The sleeping bag is ruined. I watch a beetle crawl across her white tennis shoe. Every other week mom washes these shoes. She always adds a half-cup of bleach into the machine.

 In the car, we are always hungry. No more grapes. We reach into the bag mom passes us and pull out cans of sausages and sleeves of saltines. I am no longer interested in the novelty of a bad picnic in the car. I visualize my grandmother's plank table in the hollow piled high with a summer's bounty.

  We travel along Route 66. Traders on the highway get a few of our dollars at restroom stops. I buy an "Indian doll" and hold her while peering out the window, suffering the heat of the desert. My sister, straddling the floor hump, is crying. Mother is "shussssing" her. My brother is making faces at me, and we are kicking each other while attempting to share the back seat. He is gesturing that he is twisting my doll. I think I may break his arm somehow this summer.

We cross into the deep south where some roads in the towns are made of old and crumbling brick. The skins of people walking the streets are a duskier shade of dark. My dad sucks juice from boiled peanuts and spits the shells into an empty bag. My mom's head now reclines to rest. My sister now sleeps as if in a well, avoiding the hump. My brother presses his face to the window on his left. I press my face to the window on the right. At a yellow light on a corner, I connect with a girl's brown eyes.

We cross Hartwell. Mom wakes. Dad talks foundations stories of the dam. All stories lead back to his hours at Hoover. I think about one of his crew, a small, Japanese laborer who always wears tan work clothing. It is his size that sets him apart from the other burly workers. Dad says he is the best of the men. When we have cookouts, the man always pats my head and pulls wrapped candy from his pocket. His English is hard to understand. All the men from work are drinking beer with Dad. Cans are tossed like rockets into a waiting barrel by the grill.

Towards the third day's end, we see red dirt, green trees, and rolling foothills. Mom's voice goes up an octave saying, "We're close!" Dad's arm is now bent, resting upon his lowered window. I think he is pretty proud of his effort. The space in the car is unbearable. The food is gone. The dog's tongue is hanging out. Mom suggests, "We should fill the jug." Dad shakes his head "no!"

Just past Gunwiper, we turn left on the final stretch. Mom starts to cry. My brother kicks me in the stomach. My sister rouses.

We pass my Uncle Elzey's home and several of his grown children's homes. Dad begins to tell us we'd "better behave this summer." I'm anticipating a red dirt hill round the bend on the right with my grandparent's two-story white house looking down.

Beyond the house there is a barn where I'll soon build my private spot complete with a library in the corner of the third floor. No one ever finds me there. I'm watching for the swirl of the creek at the turn. I'll play in that creek every day.

I'm spotting the cagey rooster as we crest the drive. I see my tall Grandpa, stooped at the pump with a bucket in hand. There is no indoor plumbing. How old is he now, ninety? Grandma is pushing open the screen door at the back, smoothing her flour-dusted, blue-printed apron. Dad exhales. Mom is wailing, "we're home."

     

A World of Color

I grew up in California, visiting the Carolinas in the summertime. It was much later in my life that I realized I did not learn about racism in California, although my classmates and I were all blended. I learned about racism in the county where I now live. These were my lessons:


4th grade. Mitchell Company. My mother is buying cloth, pulling it from a bin. A young black girl runs up to me and touches my summer olive skin. “You mixed?” she asks me. Later, I ask my mother. “Mom, what’s mixed?” My lovely mother tells me, “We are all within us a world of beautifully, blended colors.”


7th grade, age 13? I have moved to NC. Each day I am up very early to ride a bus from the hollow into town. This is a first in this community, this act of desegregation busing.

My friend, also a Teresa, spills something on her shirt. She is embarrassed because of the large stain. I tell her I have a spare shirt in my book bag that she may wear. She gratefully accepts. Before riding home that day another friend asks me, “What will you do if she returns your shirt, throw it away?” I look at my friend confused. It is only later, I realize the full intent of the remark. My happy friend, Teresa, returns my shirt, clean and pressed, and I wear it the rest of the year without pause.


11th grade, age 17. A friend loves someone white, and he loves her, but with the reservation that he cannot take her to his home. Later, when the love does not leave them, his father threatens to disinherit him if he continues the relationship.


Married. Age 25. I now have a young son in preschool. My son’s favorite friend is Yolanda. I frequently ask Yolanda’s mother for a play date. When she finally acquiesces, we sit together one afternoon while our children run in and out of the house and about the yard. She looks at me and “thanks me,” for having them over. She apologizes for the delay in bringing Yolanda to play, and she remarks, “she hasn’t had a white friend before Luke.”


Age 32. My oldest daughter is a recreation league cheerleader. I become aware that one of the other cheerleaders, whom I’ll call Shan for this share, may have to quit the squad because transportation has become an issue. I offer to pick her up on the way to the practices and games. Shan’s mother accepts my proposal. The first day I take them, the girls run together ahead toward the gymnasium. Another mother comes walking up and asks me if I gave “Shan” a ride. I say, “yes.” This mother, whom I liked, quips, “Aren’t you afraid your children will get lice?”


1990. 36. Life has been good. We have a large swimming pool in our backyard. I am teaching a summer-school class in town in one of the (now) “Section 8” apartments. I invite my class to come swim as a reward for good attendance. The students all show, and we have a great day together. A “friend” who observed the gathering asks me if I plan to “drain” the water after…


At 46: I make friends with a small, neighborhood lad, Tyson, who wants to sweep my drive for a quarter. I thank him, pay him, and offer him a snack. He looks at one of my youngest child’s books. “Read it if you’d like,” I offer. “I can’t read,” he replies.
The next time Tyson drops by for another chore, I respond, "Only if we practice reading first."  He agrees. Soon after, I have Tyson's grandmother’s permission for my husband and I to read with him together a few times a week. As a treat, we walk sometimes to the nearby playground at a church on a corner. Not long after we make this a habit, Tyson and I find the gate around the play area now regularly locked. I wonder….but I cannot fathom.


About a year later. I am 47. A young biracial girl comes to live with me, Si. Her mother is dying. She begins attending church with me. Same church from previous story. Around the third time we visit, one of the deacons stops me on the way out of the door. He tells me he has always “liked” and “respected” me, and that he likes my children. “But I am not in agreement with mixing races,” he says. Today, I ponder the life of my friend, the deacon...his grandchildren are both beautiful and bi-racial.


2001 continues. I have not been successful in finding a home for Si. I refuse to let her slip into a foster system, and although I wonder if I have the energy to fully raise another child, my husband and I have met with an attorney to begin the adoption process (before the miracle and a family for Si comes forward). This is background and not part of this telling.

I am in a store at the mall near our only movie theater. The older gentleman, a clerk, states to me as Si and I are “checking” out our items, “Your grand? Terrible what our children do to us these days.”

Last night. A conversation at Sacred Ale about racism.  We discuss and ask, "Are we making a difference?"  This morning, I read friend Steve's FB post.  I read the article Steve shares: “My White Friend on Facebook Asked Me to Explain White Privilege.”

I feel this flood of memories. I read Steve’s closing comment on his post, “We need to lookout for it in our own lives and not be complacent when we witness it. Plus if you make some of these remarks to my kid....I'll put some grass stains on you…” Steve and his wife Mary, and their beautiful blended family.


I am almost 61.

I hold fast to my mother’s lines. “We are all within us a world of beautifully, blended colors.”

Three Indelible Marks in Jock Lauterer’s Running on Rims

Three Indelible Marks in Jock Lauterer’s Running on Rims
2004 photo, T. Price

Recently, I revisited one of my favorite reads:  Runnin' on Rims by Jock Lauterer.

Lauterer's Rims captures personality, place, and the heritage soul hunkering down
and lingering in western North Carolina.

Three Rims profiles are most familiar to me:  J. Lewis Hardin and the old Hardin's store; and Grover Robertson and Saney Monroe McEntire from the Piney Knob Community Shingle Hollow Community.

Grandpa Fred McEntire and I walked often together to the J. L. Hardin's store, the hub of the hollow.

Lauterer informs before this community at the feet of Pinnacle Mountain was called Shingle Hollow, it was marked on the map as "Nanito," an Indian name of unknown origin.

For generations in the hollow, the source of pubic information had long been communicated from the base of Hardin's store.  Lauterer writes, "The mail was delivered by old Oscar Geer riding on mule-back from Darlington to Nanito with that mail sack slung over the mule's rump.  The post office consisted of a window on the south side of the Hardin's house."

Grandpa Fred and I walked regularly to Hardin's to watch the checker games in
progress on the table sitting on front porch planks, to drink brown bottle ice-box Orange Crush, and to collect available community news.

At the time, two of the famed Hardin Store Checker Champions (and the title changed frequently according to the fan re-telling the event) were my Uncle Virgil (Jerry) McEntire and my Great Uncle Dan Breeden.

I was a young, mischievous girl known for constant pranks.  My favorite prank at the store was to climb under the table where champions McEntire and Breeden (nephew and uncle) challenged one another.  My Uncle Dan had a wooden leg, and for a reason that I am sure had to do with science and orthopedic construction, there was a small round hole in the center of his rebuilt leg.

Planning my own strategy, I had great fun hoisting his trouser cloth and putting items into that hole in Uncle Dan's leg, usually a pencil or such. The victory for me was to accomplish the prank without riling Dan's detection, knowing that he was fully engaged in his cunning and often winning moves.

Just east of the Hardin Store and around the curve from Grandpa Fred's house, lived an old man, Grover Robertson.  Robertson's shack was within eyesight of the Piney Knob Baptist Church.

In the sixties, folks at the Knob Church occasionally claimed fame to housing one of the Reverend Billy Graham's first pulpit sermons.

For me, a hollow visitor from California each summer in the sixties, the time was a world away from city streets and a time for renewal outside.  It was also a time when children ran regularly across fields on bare feet, rode horseback, and often walked miles to drop in on friends and family.  Sammy Crain, my favorite cousin and fellow prankster, lived a stone's throw past Grover's place.  My summer horse, my old blue Schwinn, and my ground-hardened feet carried me there.

Grover was a curiosity all of his own.  He lived in an open three-sided shack erected near a stately, but crumbling and deserted white clapboard house.

Grover's shack coaxed a woodstove to burn year round.  In my mind, I can still see that trellis of smoke wafting from his old shack's roof.

Mama and I visited Grover frequently where she would often gift him with her fried pies, cold roast beef slices, rabbit dumplings, and whatever leftovers Grandma Maggie would have sent from her McEntire kitchen.

On these stops to deliver food, aside from teaching me ministry and the importance of serving others,  my mother also taught me the best place to rest and get a cold drink of water from a spring across the road from Grover's shack.  Since taking that tin dipper off a laurel's limb and lifting it to my lips as a young girl, I have never tasted better water.

Mama taught that serving Grover also meant taking the time to get to know Grover.  "When you are out walking, just throw him a wave or two as you pass," Mama said.  "He'll not bother you, and he always be glad for the hello.  He is full of good stories, too."

In reading Rims, I learn more about Grover that what my mother had nurtured.  I learn that he once attended Kentucky's Berea College and was on the debate team there.  "Come to see the ol' Indian fort, have ye?"  Grover asks Lauterer.

Grover claimed to Lauterer that the government had interest in preserving his home and land as a historical site.  He explained to Lauterer that at a time when "there warn't no hospitals in Rutherfordton," that the very place they were standing served as the county's hospital during the war.

Lauterer also shares through Grover's remarks that Grover's homestead once belonged to "William Guffey," and before Guffey, a "Mr. Smart," and prior to Smart, "W. P. Patterson and his sister," and before them, "Ol' man Jesse Scoggins who had it from 1836-1902."

In Lauterer's record, Grover describes Scoggins as a "Vet'inarian, tooth dentist, and a sergeant doctor."  Grover holds firm on his research that aside from serving as a hospital, his ground was once an old Indian fort, and he claims that there are both unmarked Indian and soldier graves there on his land.  Some of my online searches since have yielded a few maps and notations that cause me to consider there is validity to Grover's stories.

After a visit with Grover, mother often took a similar basket of food around another bend to her Uncle Saney Monroe McEntire's house.  Lauterer's interview resurrects my great uncle's claim as being at that time, "Rutherford County's oldest living World War I veteran."

Saney McEntire lived in a small frame house near his nephew, and my mother's older brother, Elzey McEntire.  Similar to our stop at Grover's, our time at Uncle Saney's was for sharing a meal, home visitation, and a swapping of stories.  Uncle Saney loved to spin a yarn, and he also claimed mastery at checkers.  Where you found Saney, you often found his other nephew, my Uncle Virgil, also mentioned in Rims.

As I grew older still, and when I continued to visit Uncle Saney, now bedridden, he would get my attention by lifting a thin, round aluminum disc that hung on an old strip of ticking fabric from around his neck, asking, "Child, do you know I am the oldest living vet?"

Runnin on Rims for me is a keepsake book.  My copy belonged to my mother, and I treasure where she scribbled her notes, particularly in the columns of these three profiles.  Lauterer's photojournalism and creative nonfiction reminds me that each life makes an indelible mark, and each community marks a significant place.

Teresa Price, © 2004

The Blue Train Case

I grew up in California.  My first home, a travel trailer parked on the shore of Long Beach. Later a dilapidated rental in Orcutt, and then years after we moved to a three bedroom pink stucco on Edgewood in Santa Maria.  
My father a concrete foreman was constructing missile bases on Vandenberg.  In the summertime, my parents took us to both Carolinas.  But we largely went to visit my mother's parents, the octogenarians.  
It wasn't that my grandparents needed caretakers.  I think it was more my mother needed her community.

Mother was blessed with good genes and a large, healthy family.  One of her paternal aunts, Essie, lived to 106.  When Essie was, oh, a hundred or so, my mother took me to visit this aunt.  Arriving on the street where Essie lived, we pulled into her drive.  Essie unbent her ancient frame from pulling weeds in a garden, wiped her hands on her long apron, and waved, welcoming us to her home.

In the early nineties, newly divorced, and which brought great shame upon my folks, I moved from my comfortable home to a small trailer that I'd bought and placed into the yard next to my mother's country home.  Mother needed help with Daddy.  Although I had children, and I had been a faithful wife, I was now the single one in my family and had been taught that marriage was intended for life.  Therefore, when Daddy's cancer was clearly not going to go away, someone had to help mother.  And, well, we were a family that by example, took care of our own.  My siblings and their families provided constant help to our mother.  No one had to ask me, "Will you go help, also?"

Since this post is not about my father's journey with cancer, or the next five years of a daughter's care-taking, I'll push past to my witness of what happened in the aftermath and Dad's gift, post death, to my mother and by association, his final gift to me.  
The evening of my father's passing, a gentleman from the mortuary in town visited my mother's home.  This visitor spoke with us and brought to us written instructions my father had dictated. In other words, my father had prepared in great detail how his earthly life would close.  He had loved and maintained my gentle mother well for more than forty years; in death he would no less. To be brief here, all plans were made and visible.  Due to my father's attentive foresight, we now had a sense of direction. The next steps were taken with minimal effort.

After this caller's visit bearing my father's directions, my mother was left to simply don her silk black dress in preparation for a funeral...his funeral.  She next retreated inwardly for years to the grief in her own mind and as my father knew she surely would need to do.  Before he passed, Daddy reminded us to treat her with respect and to allow her to make changes at her own pace.  I soon moved again, this time to a cottage in town.

Four years passed, and as a result of a car accident, my mother's tragic and untimely death felled me to my knees.  Named her executor, my time to serve had come once again.  When I was strong enough to stand, I knew the first steps.

Mother had prepared me well. She had told me more than once, "I'm a McEntire. I'll probably live to be a hundred, but Teri, if I don't, look in my blue train case."

I knew this luggage as it was the only set I had ever seen Mother use.  A set she had lovingly maintained since early in her marriage to my father.  Her packing was meticulous, and when she carried her "good luggage, she did so proudly and with memories in tow. 

Mother stored her train case on a high shelf in a narrow hall closet.  I removed it from its place one afternoon late May a few hours after her passing and relocated to her tidy kitchen.

It was there upon a familiar childhood table and among the contents of an old blue train case that I drifted though my mother's mind, back in time and through the layers of her life.  In her train case, my mother had grouped items for my viewing. Some of these included: (1) Read this first. (2) You'll enjoy these. (3) This needs to be done. (4) I'd like for this to happen... (5) Cards I've loved. (6) For Teri, my tumbleweed. (7) You know you'll have to...  

Mother had tied each packet with a small white, and ribbon, and in her neat and beautiful script, she'd left notes, anecdotes, instructions, and musings for my review.  Sitting there, I imagined her hands as she had written and wrapped these items.  Not only was my mother a stunning beauty, she was willowy.  Her hands were tender, her finger long.  No one touched like she.

I studied the fine script of her notes.  Her touch came across my face.  She stroked my arms.  I read her menagerie in gentle peace.  Some of her notes were detailed to the umpteenth.  Some were direct, some her silly-funny, some gentle, some sad, and some introspective.  Some were secrets.

As I sat there drinking tea, celebrating my mother's life, and looking deeper into a soul that I realized I had only known in segments, I had the impression that a gentleman with instructions on how to proceed had just entered into the room.  Through the contents of a blue train case, a map had been provided.  I could don my simple frock.

Published by T. A. Price
2009, Open Salon (Scupper)

The Fruitcake Memory

The Fruitcake Memory

The year was 1994 and each evening in fall just as he had for thirty-six years of my life, my father, Randolph, began to crack walnuts, pecans, and Brazil nuts as he watched in sequence evening news and re-run westerns on the television.  Throughout my childhood, a round wooden nut bowl centered with metal picks was placed near his recliner, and each year in autumn I listened for the familiar sounds of breaking shells.  

At night, between the intermittent disruptions from my mother as she worked about the home (wherein he might stop and pull her into his lap as she walked by), his inaudible commentary rankled toward the news, and his laughter at the antics of a TV cowboy, my father after a long day's work forming concrete, patiently sat night after night cracking nuts, prying meats from inside shells, and periodically discarding the remains.  At day's end and sometime before his sleep, my father bagged these pieces and packed them into the household freezer.

When November came, large tin tubs, pounds of brown sugar, sacks of flour, refrigerated sticks of butter, bottles of Karo, and plastic cartons of green and red cherries began to claim the spaces and shelves of our small kitchen. Before the purchasing of a food processor, I was often assigned the jobs of organizing spaces, and chopping candied fruits. On mixing nights, my father’s large construction-firmed arms folded thick and lumpy batter into the rich, dark fruitcake mix that would soon be baked, soaked in brandy, and swaddled in cheesecloth.   I have learned since that fruitcake is one of those desserts that is either "loathed or loved."  For our family, fruitcake was pure love. Each December, after a night of robust sampling, we wrapped our loaves for distribution to a variety of friends and relatives across the Carolinas and beyond.

The recipe of making fruitcakes, at the direction of my mother, Fern, was an honored and symbolic part of the season for my parents, as were many of the other traditions they held so dear. My parents loved stringing the big, bold, brightly-colored red, blue, and green lights and refused to exchange them out when smaller, whiter, trendier lights became the preference of many. My mother asked for and chuckled each year as we found and cut the “Charlie Brown” tree and hauled it homeward from the pasture below our barn. She made popcorn and cranberry stringing a “job” for us all. She played endless Christmas albums on a large 1960’s stereo console that my father once brought home after a rousing, buddy-night game of cards in Santa Maria, California, and she wore a variety of red and green embroidered Christmas sweaters that I am sure have surfaced again in someone’s holiday tacky-sweater party.  She saved and treasured the ornaments children made, and these were the ornaments that adorned our tree, save a few blown glass bobs that today would be a collector’s joy.  In terms of charitable giving, both parents insisted that we all make and purchase gifts to share with those less fortunate. Providing good food, new clothing, and simple gifts to those in need was an expected rite of passage in our home.

When I asked my mother once about her devotion to these traditions, she shared that as children of the depression, both she and my father had experienced similar Christmas pasts. They shared a joy of fruitcakes, peppermint sugar-stick candies, oranges, and brown treat bags that the church distributed to attending guests. Along with Christmas carols and attending the annual church program, these traditions were the holiday delights of their childhoods.  Fondly, in my home, we experienced a passing down of sorts, and as a family all took part in the preparation of the cakes.

The year was 1994, and my father passed away in August after an eight-year battle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  That November, the house was dark and silent in the night, and the nut bowl sat empty by his chair. Come December, no music played, no tree was up.  

Today, I don’t recall much about that Christmas, except that we somehow all mangled through.  I told someone once that when my father passed, I felt as if the sandbags holding my life in place had drifted out to sea.  What I do recall about that season is that my Aunt Hazel Guffey, one of my mother’s elder sisters, arrived one chilly November night with a bag of pecans she had shelled from her Florida trees with a chiming message for my mom and for us all,  “It’s time to make your cakes, Fern, it’s time to make your cakes.”  And so, together, we did.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Teresa Price

2015

Before we settled in a row of tract, before we settled at all, we scrambled about from one concrete site to another in a small travel trailer.  This particular travel trailer replaced a former that was destroyed in an Idaho storm when I was but four months old.

The story I heard my mother tell was that the trailer began to sway while Rander drove.  Somehow she had the wherewithal to run and grab her babe.  My brother, five years older, was riding in the cabin with my father.  In my mother's version, she had no sooner lifted me from where I lay sleeping when a television soared off the stand and crashed  upon my fresh imprint.  This near death fiasco so close to the fact that my mere conception was post a late season miscarriage, led my mother to believe in the intention of my birth.

For about a year, we lived in a pitted lot overlooking a stretch of beach near Lompoc.  In the pictures I have of my mother she is soft glamour amidst dilapidation.  She in her skirts and cotton blouses.  My brother soon made friends with the hoboes who ate better for at least a year due to my mother's generous offerings.  Apparently the relationship was allowed to continue until  he incorporated and slipped a string of colorful phrases  into our compact home .

(L-R children on the beach - Randy, Teresa, Fern), Long Beach, California, 1959

My father's work hours began early and ended late, but on the weekends he was free and on reserve.  Each Saturday, these Saturdays long before lawn clippings and cans and beef barbecue, he removed the dust and grit and damned-ness of his week and pulled slick waders in their place.  I often sat and watched him fish.  He knee deep in the surf, me buried in the sand, my brother God knows where, my mother boiling coffee.

I composed verses there on the shore.  I did not know it yet that I was writing.  Only that the ocean blue carried me too, adrift and beyond.  I sang for captains in the offing.  I was just a girl contented in her own head, with a brother at play, a mother who called me the minstrel, and a father bringing fish for dinner.  Years later, I began to write everything down.  Boxes have since trailed my life, boxes filled with letters and hoarded scrap.  Still, I'd love to know the words now lost to Euclidean, the words waves once washed from a tender line and carried on divided cleft to some imperceptible space.

Teresa Price © 2010
rev/2016

Tryon Soap: Buy Locally at Tryon Mountain Hardware

Tryon Soap can now be purchased locally at the SoPoetry Soap Shop, 341 South Main St., Rutherfordton, NC.  The shop is open on Mondays and Fridays 1-4 PM and also on Saturdays from 10 AM to 6 PM

You are invited to visit the SoPoetry cottage soap shop soon to browse the Tryon Soap selections.  Tryon Soap is the SoPoetry brand of soap specializing in small batch soap making with creamery goat milk and with coconut milk.  The soaps  come in a variety of scents and textures from mild to scrubby like a loofah!  Simply good soap, naturally!

Let SoPoetry soap shop provide you with your soap needs for a pure and natural soap experience.  Natural...Indulgent....Pretty!

SoPoetry is owned by the owner of this blog, poet T A Price.