Hey you all (ok, so it's a south of the mason-dixon line thing but you all is such a useful word!!!!!!!). I am just going to throw this out here. I am wishing for a Thanksgiving/Christmas package filled with things that I cannot get here (or things that are very hard to find) so that I can bake for Christmas. I have been hoarding things for several months now in anticipation of Christmas. If anyone wants to send me a package, here are some things I would love to get. I am also going to post this on my 'love to get' list on the side of the blog:
Spices: dill, nutmeg, cream of tartar, celery flakes
Food items: dried coconut, chocolate chips, white karo syrup, small marshmallows, unsweetened chocolate squares, Pepperidge Farm Butter Mints, fresh cranberries (these would be heaven), canned Mandarin oranges, pie filling (cherry, strawberry, and apricot), dried blueberries, canned pumpkin,
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Old Place
The old place - a family term casually applied but with layers of connotations. It was after we moved that we began to call it this - descriptive in more ways than one. One way of acknowledging what we had left behind. A way of saying that we have moved forward into another life. The place where I grew up, where my roots are, shortly to be mine no more. After owning this land for more than 30 years, my mother is selling. I don't fault her at all - but I want to take a few minutes to grieve a little, for the good and the bad. Stephan King once said a place is yours when you know where all the roads go. I know where all the roads go, even now.
I was two years old when we moved to this 19 acres of farmland set in the middle of a field. I was thirteen when I left it forever. It is the first home that I remember and when I dream, I dream I am in this place. My parents moved an old farm house on the property and there my soul was born. The land was flat and boundaried by trees, with only one being on our land. It was not a pretty place, at least not in my mind. It was green in certain seasons but the land was too flat and the dirt too black for beauty. Cotton growing dirt - the edge of an old plantation, divided and conquered long before my time. So much history that I will never know but lingers there even now. Rumors of an old slave cemetery just across the fence on the back forty. Black and white communities still segregated - both in churches, neighborhoods, and ways of life. Is it any wonder that I grew up with such a keen sense of the past when all I had to do was step outside my door to take it in?
The land I loved, the house I hated. The house was old and broken even then. When I left for good in the 1980s, I had no regrets - only eagerness to be gone. How was I to know then that we would be last family to truly live in this old place of high ceiling and window weights? It was an abandonment of not only a physical place but of dreams. My mother's dream to re-create her farm-living childhood, mostly. It was her dream and my prison and I could not wait to leave. My regrets have come with the years, seeing something so broken and unable to right it. When I was old enough and free enough to drive, I would occasionally visit this broken down place - sometimes to take a few meager belongings that were left, to remember where I had come from but mostly to remind myself that I could leave again. Never again would it be my prison but then again, it would never be my home.
This place is also my greatest bond with my siblings. Our ties begun here and perhaps were the strongest they would ever be. I loved my siblings in this place, I hated them in this place. Never again would we live so closely under one roof. I took my sister's Barbie apart here (sheer maliciousness, I confess) and hid the pieces. Then I forgot where I put the pieces. It was here that I, at the age of four, danced in sheer joy that I would have another baby brother or sister. Her name was going to be Mary Elizabeth if it was a girl (it was a boy and his name is Daniel). The relationships with my parents were also formed here - relationships so complex it has taken a lifetime to unravel the threads and be grateful for the ties that bind. It was here that my independent spirit was born and my mother's words and my grandmother's love were poured into me.
It was in this place that my beloved puppy Butterscotch was run over by a car and I forever became a cat person in my grief. It was here that I learned to be a farm girl - watching my father strip the cow's teats of the final drops of milk, finding where the chickens hid the eggs, passing the corn on the highway, growing tall and golden. It would only be later that I learned to despise the 'country girl' and forever more I would claim to be a city girl. It was also here that I discovered the magical world of books and realized that they could take you anywhere you wanted to go and then beyond. Books were my earliest escape from this place and my final place of refuge even now - always reminding me that there was a world beyond this and if I dreamed hard enough, I can get there.
In the last years, this place was seldom on my mind - I had too much to do and had lived too many years beyond its narrow confines to truly say I missed it. But during the last year or so that I was in the States, I began to research my father's maternal family line. I discovered to my surprise that they had taken abode in two neighboring counties - Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties. My father's family had lived near Damon's Mound in Brazoria County after immigrating from Germany in the 1840s. The second generation moved to Fort Bend County. These people were pioneers in the truest sense of the world, coming to a land rife with hardship, torn with slavery, clearing brush to eke out a meager living on small farms. The land we owned was on the border between Matorgorda County and Wharton County. Wharton County was my mother's birthplace and where her roots are, even now. Matorgorda County was the place of my birth. In the final analysis, I spent my childhood in the geographical center of where my family tree intersected. Perhaps that was more than conidence - perhaps God had a plan all alone and it was not just a random house plucked in the middle of an ugly field.
I think on my deathbed I will think of this place and call it my place of belonging. For better or worse, my roots are deep in this black soil. May it bring joy and peace to those who now hold the title deed to so much more than just a plot of ground. To those of you who hold history in your hand - mine, my family's and the history of those who have come before - honor it always. Selah.
I was two years old when we moved to this 19 acres of farmland set in the middle of a field. I was thirteen when I left it forever. It is the first home that I remember and when I dream, I dream I am in this place. My parents moved an old farm house on the property and there my soul was born. The land was flat and boundaried by trees, with only one being on our land. It was not a pretty place, at least not in my mind. It was green in certain seasons but the land was too flat and the dirt too black for beauty. Cotton growing dirt - the edge of an old plantation, divided and conquered long before my time. So much history that I will never know but lingers there even now. Rumors of an old slave cemetery just across the fence on the back forty. Black and white communities still segregated - both in churches, neighborhoods, and ways of life. Is it any wonder that I grew up with such a keen sense of the past when all I had to do was step outside my door to take it in?
The land I loved, the house I hated. The house was old and broken even then. When I left for good in the 1980s, I had no regrets - only eagerness to be gone. How was I to know then that we would be last family to truly live in this old place of high ceiling and window weights? It was an abandonment of not only a physical place but of dreams. My mother's dream to re-create her farm-living childhood, mostly. It was her dream and my prison and I could not wait to leave. My regrets have come with the years, seeing something so broken and unable to right it. When I was old enough and free enough to drive, I would occasionally visit this broken down place - sometimes to take a few meager belongings that were left, to remember where I had come from but mostly to remind myself that I could leave again. Never again would it be my prison but then again, it would never be my home.
This place is also my greatest bond with my siblings. Our ties begun here and perhaps were the strongest they would ever be. I loved my siblings in this place, I hated them in this place. Never again would we live so closely under one roof. I took my sister's Barbie apart here (sheer maliciousness, I confess) and hid the pieces. Then I forgot where I put the pieces. It was here that I, at the age of four, danced in sheer joy that I would have another baby brother or sister. Her name was going to be Mary Elizabeth if it was a girl (it was a boy and his name is Daniel). The relationships with my parents were also formed here - relationships so complex it has taken a lifetime to unravel the threads and be grateful for the ties that bind. It was here that my independent spirit was born and my mother's words and my grandmother's love were poured into me.
It was in this place that my beloved puppy Butterscotch was run over by a car and I forever became a cat person in my grief. It was here that I learned to be a farm girl - watching my father strip the cow's teats of the final drops of milk, finding where the chickens hid the eggs, passing the corn on the highway, growing tall and golden. It would only be later that I learned to despise the 'country girl' and forever more I would claim to be a city girl. It was also here that I discovered the magical world of books and realized that they could take you anywhere you wanted to go and then beyond. Books were my earliest escape from this place and my final place of refuge even now - always reminding me that there was a world beyond this and if I dreamed hard enough, I can get there.
In the last years, this place was seldom on my mind - I had too much to do and had lived too many years beyond its narrow confines to truly say I missed it. But during the last year or so that I was in the States, I began to research my father's maternal family line. I discovered to my surprise that they had taken abode in two neighboring counties - Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties. My father's family had lived near Damon's Mound in Brazoria County after immigrating from Germany in the 1840s. The second generation moved to Fort Bend County. These people were pioneers in the truest sense of the world, coming to a land rife with hardship, torn with slavery, clearing brush to eke out a meager living on small farms. The land we owned was on the border between Matorgorda County and Wharton County. Wharton County was my mother's birthplace and where her roots are, even now. Matorgorda County was the place of my birth. In the final analysis, I spent my childhood in the geographical center of where my family tree intersected. Perhaps that was more than conidence - perhaps God had a plan all alone and it was not just a random house plucked in the middle of an ugly field.
I think on my deathbed I will think of this place and call it my place of belonging. For better or worse, my roots are deep in this black soil. May it bring joy and peace to those who now hold the title deed to so much more than just a plot of ground. To those of you who hold history in your hand - mine, my family's and the history of those who have come before - honor it always. Selah.
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