Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong Read online

  It’s a Southern woman’s unspoken motto, really: When life gives you imperfect porch proportions, accessorize, accessorize, accessorize.

  It was 1963 when my parents found the land where they’d eventually build their house. I don’t remember one thing about that time because, well, I wasn’t alive, but Sister has filled me in on most of the details. Mama and Daddy paid cash for twelve acres on a dirt road (I know it sounds like I’m writing a country song, but bear with me), and after Daddy decided that he’d work as his own contractor to save on construction costs, they drew up plans for their own little parcel of paradise.

  According to Sister, building the house was all manner of lively. Daddy salvaged some bricks from an old house across the road—he and Mama wanted to use them for the fireplace—but unfortunately the gentleman who actually built the fireplace liked to have a beer or nine as he worked. The chimney, which was on the back of the house, ended up being too short, a fact that annoyed Mama to no end since she’d wanted the chimney to be visible from the front yard. There was also an issue with the chimney’s craftsmanship: it never drew smoke correctly, so smoke would back up into the den on occasion, and really, what good is a fire in the fireplace if you have to open all the windows to ensure proper ventilation?

  Granted, Mama wanted her guests to be warm, but she certainly didn’t want them to suffer from smoke inhalation.

  In some ways, though, the house was ahead of its time. It was one of the first all-electric houses in the area, and Mama’s kitchen featured Coppertone-brown appliances that were all the rage in the sixties and seventies. Since Mama has always loved to decorate, she took charge of the finishes and trims, too. She bedecked the master bath with turquoise and light blue tile and selected a more minimalist black and white tile in the kids’ bath. She elected to use a good-quality wood for her closets, baseboards, windows, and door frames, so there wasn’t an inch of painted wood anywhere in the house. Once the house was finished and all of her furniture was in place, she’d managed to achieve a bit of Danish flair right there in the piney woods of central Mississippi.

  Exactly where you’d expect to find it, right?

  By the time I was old enough to have any awareness at all about where I lived, Mama, Daddy, Sister, and Brother had been in the “new” house for almost a decade. They’d shifted and adjusted to make room for me, so Sister and I shared the master bedroom for a few years while Mama and Daddy took up residence in a smaller bedroom at the front of the house. I thought all five-year-olds got to have a bathroom adjacent to their rooms, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how Mama and Daddy had sacrificed their space for us.

  Life in the house that my parents built wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There were tensions and arguments and resentments. Sister and I both would tell you that we cried more tears in that house than we have in any place since (teenage drama is hard, y’all). And—just in case you’ve forgotten—please let me remind you that MAMA WAS UNHAPPY WITH THE PROPORTIONS OF THE FRONT PORCH.

  Real problems. We had ’em.

  But we also had something else: stability. Daddy faithfully went to work every morning, and even though he never said a word about it, we all knew that he excelled at his job. Mama stayed home and worked just as hard in our house. The two of them shuttled kids to piano lessons and ball games and dance lessons and cheerleading practices and 4-H meetings. They put three kids through college, paid off their house, and tirelessly served their church and their community.

  I don’t recall a single time when they lectured us about responsibility.

  But they didn’t have to.

  Their actions preached that sermon just fine.

  When I type in Mama and Daddy’s old address on “the Google,” as Mama calls it, the street view puts me smack-dab in the middle of an intersection about a mile from the house itself. I’ve traveled through that intersection thousands of times—to the point that I have all of its options memorized.

  If I go east, I’ll pass the Pak-A-Sak (site of many an orange slushie when I was a little girl), the swim club where I spent countless summer days (in this case, “swim club” is really just another way of saying “affordable swimming pool option located on the edge of someone’s woods”), and the big Victorian house that belonged to the Yarbroughs and then the Hollands. Sister and Barry’s wedding reception was there, as was my bridal luncheon. And if I keep moving past the Hollands’ old house, I’ll eventually pass the street where my friend Amanda lived, the turn that leads to my elementary school, and the Baptist church where our next-door neighbors were members. I went to VBS at that church from first through sixth grade. That’s why I can’t look at the steeple without thinking of Bible drills and strawberry Kool-Aid.

  If I go north, I’ll see every house and landmark I passed on the way to Aunt Choxie and Uncle Joe’s or to my high school or to the Winn-Dixie where Mama often sent me to buy some grocery item she’d forgotten. Since that way led to most of my friends’ houses, it was the road I traveled more than any other once I started driving. There’s not an unfamiliar turn or curve; even now I’m almost certain that you could spin me around ten times, put me in the driver’s seat, and I’d be able to drive it blindfolded. That road led to Methodist Youth Fellowship on Sunday nights when I was in high school, and a few years later, I followed it all the way out to Highway 45, where I turned left and drove to Starkville for college. In so many ways it was the path to independence. The fact that it ran straight by my favorite fried chicken place didn’t hurt one bit either.

  (Sometimes I would visit the drive-thru for a little of that fried chicken before I’d start the journey back to Starkville.)

  (It was my little pre-travel secret.)

  (Except for the fact that if you’d scrutinized my freshman year weight gain, you would have eventually said, “I believe she’s consuming more than her fair share of fried chicken.”)

  If I click south at that intersection, I’ll dead-end at the building where my friend Kimberly and I used to take aerobics classes back when people wore leotards and leg warmers. Turn left, and I’ll eventually end up at my friend Ricky’s old house, which was where we did a whole lot of laughing and SNL watching in high school. Ricky’s house was on the way to one of Myrtlewood’s main thoroughfares, which just so happened to be the place where teenagers used to cruise up to the Sonic and back down to McDonald’s on Friday and Saturday nights. I hated everything about that particular teenage ritual—mainly because the whole exercise seemed pointless to me: a waste of gas and a waste of time. Mamaw here would have rather stayed home and watched Fantasy Island reruns.

  Head west, and well, that’s the road that used to take me home. I’ll pass the country store where I’d buy a copy of Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger in the mornings so I could read whatever Rick Cleveland and Orley Hood had written about life and sports in Mississippi. I’ll see the subdivision where the Haleys and the Cades used to live; we carpooled to dance lessons for a year or two, and Mrs. Haley, who had a wonderful, deep, almost-baritone voice, wore so much gardenia perfume that I developed a lifelong aversion to it.

  If I continue to click my way down Pine Tree Road, I’ll start to see the houses that are etched in my memory not so much for their architecture but because of the families who lived inside them: the Snowdens, the Hursts, the Gwaltneys, the Lloyds, the Saxons, the Walkers, the Bonds. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know their names, when I didn’t overhear Mama and Daddy talking about this person’s mother passing away or that person’s sister finding a new job or somebody else’s son getting a scholarship to college.

  That road spans the gap of most of the joys and heartaches of my childhood; it’s a road that was paved with casseroles and pies and progressive dinners, a road with an extensive collection of CorningWare and Pyrex—all carefully labeled with masking tape, a name, and a five-digit telephone number. It’s a road where most of the houses had a vegetable garden in the back, where neighbors swapped recipes
for squash pickles and bread-and-butter pickles and pickled okra. It’s a road where I shelled peas and dodged traffic on my bike and carried on long conversations about everything and nothing over the fence that separated our house from the Easoms’.

  It’s just a road. But it’s so much more. Because it was home.

  I haven’t lived in that red brick house in more than twenty-five years; it has probably been five years since I’ve even driven past it. So I guess I expected that clicking my way down Pine Tree Road on Google Maps—and clicking to see the house where I grew up—would fill me with all sorts of nostalgia. I thought that it would prompt me to think back on all the funny and hard and awkward moments that I associate with my childhood home. I imagined I’d get to the point where the house was front and center on my computer screen, and I’d reflect long and hard about The Mistakes I Made, The Drama I Created, The Times I Cried, The Lessons I Learned.

  I thought that, given our history, the house and I would have ourselves a moment. Courtesy of Google and Apple and the worldwide interweb.

  But the house and I didn’t really have a moment at all. Oh, the house was special—no doubt. It was special because it was ours. It was special because I grew up there. I can see so many lessons just from the way Mama and Daddy took care of those twelve acres; over the course of our time there, they remodeled, they added on, they reroofed, they painted. They raked, they mowed, they tended, they watered, they pruned, and they weeded. They figured out what was broken. They fixed it.

  And Lord knows that they planted and they sowed.

  But the Google Maps, as it turned out, taught me something that I wasn’t really expecting.

  The house is significant, yes. But really, it’s only part of the story.

  Because what flat-out captivates me is the road.

  I DID NOT grow up in a house where church was an option.

  And I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m mad about it. I’m not mad about it at all. In fact, I’m grateful. Now that I’m grown, I can recognize that something is going to be the center—the core—for every family, and in ours, it was church. Life at Mission Hill United Methodist was woven into and through every single part of our lives. Church was the priority—a higher one than family, I think—and it was nonnegotiable.

  I’ve been thinking about the whole church thing a lot lately because of a discussion I had recently with a friend. She feels like once kids are a certain age—fourteen or fifteen, maybe—they should be able to decide if they want to go to church or not. I totally see where she’s coming from; in fact, it took me about ten years to work through all my church-related issues once I became an adult, and I spent about six of those years trying to stay as far away from a sanctuary as I could.

  But now that I’m a parent, I’m a little more old school than I ever thought I’d be. I tend to land on the same side of the fence my parents did—a side that might best be articulated this way:

  If thou livest in this house,

  And eateth this food,

  And enjoyeth the water, power, clothing, and shelter

  That thy parents hath provided—

  Then thou will gettest thy tail out of bed on Sunday mornings,

  And thou will goest to the church house,

  Where thou will learn about the Lord in the presence of His people,

  Regardless of however thou might feeleth.

  Amen.

  I’m not sure that you’ll find that particular call to worship in The Book of Common Prayer.

  But I’m thinking of having it engraved on our son’s door frame nonetheless.

  And, oh heavens—it’s certainly not like I had some idyllic experience with church life when I was growing up. My parents, who were a solid 9.5 out of 10 on the Involved at Church scale, let me see all sides of it.

  The good, the bad, the joyous—and sometimes even the ugly.

  The fact that my daddy grew up Baptist was a source of endless curiosity to me when I was young. Mama is a fifth-generation Methodist who prayed with her whole heart that Daddy wouldn’t expect her to join the Baptist church after they married, and apparently the Lord was on her side, because Daddy became a Methodist. By the time I was born, he’d been steeped in the Wesleyan tradition for almost fifteen years. He even sang in the choir at the little Methodist church where we were members, and it was hard for me to imagine him in an environment where the Apostles’ Creed wasn’t part and parcel of a Sunday morning service.

  I was in second grade when Mama and Daddy decided to move their membership to Mission Hill UMC. Aunt Chox and Uncle Joe had been members there since they married, and while I never really quizzed Mama and Daddy about what prompted the move, I think they just felt like it would be a better fit for our family. Mission Hill was full of couples their age, and I am here to tell you that they welcomed us with open arms. Within weeks it felt like the only church I’d ever known.

  Granted, I was all of seven years old. But Chox was my Sunday school teacher in the first- and second- grade class, my cousin Paige and I got to sit in church together, and all the other kids were really nice—including a boy named David Hudson who didn’t go to my school but made me laugh a lot. Plus, his mama, who I called “Miss Martha,” was really sweet and always gave me compliments when I was wearing a new dress.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was just something about that place that felt like home.

  By third grade, I knew every nook and cranny of Mission Hill UMC. Mama taught an interdenominational women’s exercise class at the church three mornings a week, and if I didn’t feel like stretching and twisting with the leotard-wearing ladies, I’d explore the Sunday school building. I’d sneak into the room where the Friendship Class met and “teach” a quick grammar lesson on the chalkboard. Afterward I’d walk down to the nursery and wave at the babies, who were there for Mother’s Day Out. I’d cross the hall to peek in the room where the ladies in macramé class were making plant holders, and then I’d amble down to the fellowship hall to practice my scales on the piano. If I happened to have a quarter in my pocket, I’d buy myself what had to be Mississippi’s coldest bottle of Coke from the old drink machine next to the youth room. The youth room was where the older kids would play four square and Ping-Pong at Methodist Youth Fellowship, and sometimes I’d sit on the sofa in there and look through the latest copy of the Upper Room or stare at the cover of The Way Bible.

  (The Way Bible was groovy, man.)

  (I think that it would have been fast friends with The Message if it had been around at the same time.)

  Eventually I’d walk up the stairs at the back of the youth room, maybe peek in the pastor’s study to see what he was up to, and then I’d check in on Mrs. Nell, our faithful secretary, who surely had to have set speed records when she typed on her IBM Selectric. Sometimes I’d help Mrs. Nell fold the bulletins for the upcoming Sunday service, and I’d usually walk over to the choir room, where I’d play my scales on the piano again and look at the chalkboard to see what music the choir was rehearsing that week.

  Finally, to cap off my tour, I’d go into the sanctuary, where I’d (1) pretend I was a bride walking down the aisle, (2) pretend I was a preacher delivering a message, or (3) pretend I was playing the organ.

  (Sometimes I’d even turn on the organ and play a few notes.)

  (I can only imagine how my improvisational melodies inspired the pastor as he prepared his sermon for the week.)

  The bottom line is that I was utterly comfortable there. Perfectly at peace. Nothing was off limits. Nobody was unkind.

  I was safe. In heart, body, mind, soul.

  That’s how church should be, don’t you think?

  By the time I was in fourth grade, our Sunday school crew was pretty firmly established. There were eight or nine of us who were regulars, and even if we didn’t see each other during the week at school, we’d catch up in a hurry on Sunday mornings. My friend Beverly was the person I’d look forward to seeing most, and that was because she was h
ilarious. Her running commentary on everything we did—whether we were memorizing the books of the Bible or coloring pictures of the Good Samaritan—kept the kids and the teachers in stitches.

  One year our favorite teacher, Miss Diane (well, honestly, we just called her “Diane,” though in retrospect that seems very un-Southern of us and maybe even a little rude), suggested that we take up a special Lenten offering and then use that money to help a child connected to an overseas outreach program run by the Methodist church. I can’t remember exactly how much we needed to sponsor a child for a year, but I’ll never forget when Diane showed us a piece of paper with pictures of all the kids who needed sponsors. Beverly looked at those pictures for approximately six seconds before she said five words that David and I still repeat to this day:

  “OH MY WORD, THE BONNET!”

  We all sat still as stones, not having any idea what she was talking about. Then Beverly started pointing.

  “Look at this little girl with the bonnet! We have to pick her! DO YOU SEE THIS BONNET?”

  Beverly was adamant; there was no room for negotiating. So we picked the little girl with the bonnet, and that was that.

  That was also my first experience with anything related to missions.

  Please don’t judge me.

  Every week after Sunday school we’d have refreshments in the fellowship hall. There was always coffee, and depending on whose week it was to serve, there might be an assortment of store-bought shortbread cookies—the ones that come about two hundred to a pack. If Mama and Daddy’s Sunday school class was finished with their lesson, I could usually convince Daddy to give me twenty-five cents for the Coke machine.

  Mama and Daddy’s class was in a tiny room at the end of the fellowship hall, and the members were so faithful that I can still name many of them today: Mama and Daddy, Martha, Chox and Joe, the Partridges, the Beavers, the Turnages, the Kents, the Dixons, the Williamsons, the Walkers, and the Torrances. Mr. Torrance liked to place his folding chair right outside the doorway so that he could hear the lesson but not see who was teaching it, and he’d chew on a cigar from the opening prayer to the closing prayer since he couldn’t smoke in church. He actually became my signal in terms of knowing if the class was finished or not: Mr. Torrance still sitting in the doorway chewing on his cigar = class was in session; Mr. Torrance standing outside the doorway and chewing on his cigar = class was over. It was a method as reliable as a ringing school bell.