a walk on the last day

how it went down

On Friday I realized that my father would be 105 if he’d lived until now.

He’d have surpassed his older sister who survived becoming ill in two different pandemics, 1918 and 2020, to die two days after her favorite college football team won their bowl game, when she was 103.

She made the best poundcake. She fried chickens on Sundays, pickled peaches, grew roses, made a concoction called curried fruit that was always stored in a gallon jar on her kitchen counter. She lived her entire life in the home her father and grandfather built, recalling how they’d erected the rambling, porch-wrapped home straight out of the bare dirt. She became the family’s fulltime cook and caregiver at age eleven when my grandmother was sent to the Chattoohoochee State Hospital.

It was epilepsy, so the story goes, but everyone, at least when I was a kid, said Chattahoochee was an old Indian word for cuckoo. My father was nine and never saw her again. It wasn’t a thing anyone talked about, and the time I tried, from the backseat of our Delta 88, my Aunt and my dad shut it down. Dad by setting his mouth in a sad straight line, my aunt by changing the subject to point to a neighbor as we passed, That gal’s daughter has the sweetest voice, but lord! she’s as wide as the side of a barn.

I learned early, learning by the sticky osmosis of living in the south, that 99% of everything is about keeping heat away. Also, that heat can be felt but not seen, and that it draws lines that also can be felt but not seen.

High ceilings let the heat rise. Clackety fans: blow the heat somewhere else, hopefully as the saying went, somewhere out towards East Jesus. As a kid E.J meant a place where people sweltered, hell on earth, all the bad things that happened when you chose to be poor and uneducated when someone else made sure you stayed poor and uneducated. Summer sleeping porches, public swimming pools, intact screen doors, trucks that sprayed DDT at night to keep the mosquitos at bay, wicker lawn chairs in the shade, ice cubes in your fridge, bare feet as a matter of choice, folks packing up and heading to the mountain air in summer; these heat-avoiding things were train tracks on a map, dividing the haves and oh hell no you won’t haves.

Family matters, money, genetics had their own isotherm lines, and they were white hot, like the way cast iron gets just before it smokes. There was no dirty laundry blowing on the clothes line even when it was just us, unless it was somebody else’s problems. Those tidbits were kept chilled, ready for resurrection, for hauling out and swirling in the glass with the sweet tea. Gossip has always been the cold storage of the south.

I sleep with the windows open, all year. Even in winter, especially in winter; and yes, during this year’s iceaggedon when the sills froze shut, and even on nights when the rain soughs and sops the curtains. I might mention the window just behind the bed pillows, and how the nights when the Great Horned is calling from the next door cottonwoods I pull the curtain aside and look into a dark world upside down. It seems fine that way, maybe because what I see is sky and not suburbia. Those nights, sinking into an ebbing tide of owl sound, I get the best sleep ever.

It could be from all the years sleeping outside, my sleeping bag on a pad on the sand or rolled out across the cooler on my boat. An art, choosing which boat to row: the produce cooler will tend toward exactly what produce packed on melting ice for fourteen days will smell like, the “extra ice cooler” aka, guide beer cooler, tending toward rustling and clanking late into the night. I chose dairy: dry ice, minimal melt, because everything (except the cheese) was frozen hard before packing.

Deep in the inner gorge of the canyon the schist and granite are a thermal sponge, absorbing the hundred degree days then letting the heat loose throughout the night. I’d dip my cotton tee-shirt into the river, gasp it back on, and the evaporation would keep me cool. In the morning my tee would be bone dry.

In a game my son loved to play on long car rides, the game where one person asks a simple question that points to the answerer’s preference, the questions increasingly ludicrous—for example, Captain Crunch or collard greens for breakfast? bee sting on nose or jalapeno juice in your eye?—he’d laugh himself silly when his dad would pose to me, sleep indoors wearing jammies in a nice comfy bed or outdoors with the scorpions in the hot sand?

If he only knew. In my grandmother’s time there’s a good chance I’d have been the mom sent to Chattahoochee. Maybe an open window at night is my meltdown failsafe.

It is April and our weather has taken one of those turns the early-bird gardeners, the ones without hooped rows or greenhouse, rue. I, however, am sucking up every glorious bit of cold. It’s coming to an end: on the radio someone said each year will be the last coolest one each of us ever has in our lifetime. The concept of last is something we don’t quite get, until we’ve busted our ass on the way over the threshold to WTF just happened, when the How It Just Is rug gets yanked from under us.

I swathed myself in woolen hat and winter puffy to be out in it early in my neighborhood: seeing my breath a delight, blue sky meted in widening patches beyond the lifting fog. I saw something lying in the street just by the curb. I swerved a sort of sidestep, did a double take and stopped. Should I even look? Small, furry-ish (or what used to be fur), matted but obviously once loved, and no doubt missed.

I tried to imagine the loss; kicked off to free a long winter-imprisoned foot, a sibling’s teasing tug-of-war and chucked out the window, removed to get rid of a stone or to check a bunion and carelessly placed on the roof of a car. Wedged in the bus doors as they squeezed shut?

What does one do with a lone and slightly squished Ugg? I couldn’t just leave it there to die a lonely Ugg death. Solution: I propped it against the neighbor’s fence thinking maybe the Ugg-less owner would pass by and notice.

A few hours later, I’m back home gently herding thawed earthworms off the sidewalk. At this stage the neighbors don’t even ask. A man riding down the street and there, stuffed behind his bike seat something small, furry-ish, and oh! the sad Ugg now a happy Ugg, and once sad Ugg-less man now one Ugg richer.

But no. Small furry-ish and with two beady black eyes, and yapped at me with a smug (smugg) bark as they passed. Moral of the story: one gal's Ugg is another man's pug. Or pomeranian, still not quite sure.

Today I am hobbled to the sofa, one less trusty and dependable knee for the time being, staring out at the rhododendron full of bumblebees, the ones with the orange butts, the bitty ones shiny as green slivers of glass. Yesterday I could walk, quite fine thank you very much, hiking every morning to see the sun before coming back down through the grove of old growth firs. An older woman I once met on the trail told me the trees are the Grandmothers. I’ve taken their photos, say hello as I pass. One looks like she has a long snout, mining the duff beneath her knobby rooted knees. Another has eyelashes of fringed twigs. I touch them and tell them I’m sorry.

There’s no way to know how it went down, one day my grandmother stirring grits and frying ham on the stove, just some normal morning and out of the blue over the edge into the void of a family’s dark secret she hurtled.

I try to imagine goodbyes, sorrow, loneliness. I’m not afraid of those things, but I wonder if it’s my fear of having nothing to mourn that is keeping my feet on the ground.