play by play: last part, the highlight reel
Here are the things that were good:
1.) Standing on top of Black Rock Mountain looking out over the valley, holding my old grandmother up beside me and remembering all the times I'd been there as a kid and how fun and magical that place had always been. It's just a big smear of volcanic rock on top of a mountain, but I always thought it was otherworldly.
2.) Walking through the tall stalks of okra with Margie, cutting off the ripe ones and throwing them in the basket she held.
3.) Eating the last of the blueberries off the bushes (carefully avoiding yellow jackets and hornets) with Margie while my Dad ploughed a place for Margie's patch of greens.
4.) Pickled corn.
5.) Kneeling down with my dad to clear the cut grass off my brother's headstone after my stepmother mowed through her family's portion of the cemetery. I blinked back tears the whole time and realized that, while I've only been to his grave a couple of times since he died in 2001, my dad has been tending it pretty regularly since then. I blinked back even more tears then because I know that's not the kind of relationship my dad planned on having with his son who should have been 24 now and still alive with his twin brother, still cracking jokes and being the family clown.
6.) Looking at old pictures and feeling nostalgic. I had a minor revelation as I turned page after page of an album and revealed pictures from so many different eras of me and my cousin Lacey. We are about the same age and were inseperable whenever I was down in Georgia visiting. There are pictures of us as toddlers in matching dresses (you can see how pissed I was about the dresses, I look like an angry cat in a bath), and pictures of us at every other age ending around thirteen, climbing trees together, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake together, picking up snails in the woods together. The pictures were great and I noticed, looking at them, that Lacey was part of what was missing from my experiences of Georgia. Lacey long ago went "wild" (according to my family): smoked a lot of pot, ran away from home, got pregnant at 17, then again and again. Now she's married to this cop and they live in Maryland and I haven't seen her since my brother died and I lived in Georgia for 3 months. I look through the album and see us as a little proto-couple: me in my butch t-shirts and jeans, her in her femmey little shorts and tops, me with my short hair, her with her long. She was like my first girlfriend and I realized how much I missed her presence there.
7.) The morning we left to go to the airport, my dad stopped at the end of the road at somebody else's pasture and said, "I want to show you something." My brother and I followed him out to the man's barn and climbed over the man's fence (while a bunch of curious cows watched and moo'ed lethargically at us) -- then we saw a goat with two tiny babies. Baby goats are pretty amazingly cute and these were especially so. That was a good way to leave.
1.) Standing on top of Black Rock Mountain looking out over the valley, holding my old grandmother up beside me and remembering all the times I'd been there as a kid and how fun and magical that place had always been. It's just a big smear of volcanic rock on top of a mountain, but I always thought it was otherworldly.
2.) Walking through the tall stalks of okra with Margie, cutting off the ripe ones and throwing them in the basket she held.
3.) Eating the last of the blueberries off the bushes (carefully avoiding yellow jackets and hornets) with Margie while my Dad ploughed a place for Margie's patch of greens.
4.) Pickled corn.
5.) Kneeling down with my dad to clear the cut grass off my brother's headstone after my stepmother mowed through her family's portion of the cemetery. I blinked back tears the whole time and realized that, while I've only been to his grave a couple of times since he died in 2001, my dad has been tending it pretty regularly since then. I blinked back even more tears then because I know that's not the kind of relationship my dad planned on having with his son who should have been 24 now and still alive with his twin brother, still cracking jokes and being the family clown.
6.) Looking at old pictures and feeling nostalgic. I had a minor revelation as I turned page after page of an album and revealed pictures from so many different eras of me and my cousin Lacey. We are about the same age and were inseperable whenever I was down in Georgia visiting. There are pictures of us as toddlers in matching dresses (you can see how pissed I was about the dresses, I look like an angry cat in a bath), and pictures of us at every other age ending around thirteen, climbing trees together, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake together, picking up snails in the woods together. The pictures were great and I noticed, looking at them, that Lacey was part of what was missing from my experiences of Georgia. Lacey long ago went "wild" (according to my family): smoked a lot of pot, ran away from home, got pregnant at 17, then again and again. Now she's married to this cop and they live in Maryland and I haven't seen her since my brother died and I lived in Georgia for 3 months. I look through the album and see us as a little proto-couple: me in my butch t-shirts and jeans, her in her femmey little shorts and tops, me with my short hair, her with her long. She was like my first girlfriend and I realized how much I missed her presence there.
7.) The morning we left to go to the airport, my dad stopped at the end of the road at somebody else's pasture and said, "I want to show you something." My brother and I followed him out to the man's barn and climbed over the man's fence (while a bunch of curious cows watched and moo'ed lethargically at us) -- then we saw a goat with two tiny babies. Baby goats are pretty amazingly cute and these were especially so. That was a good way to leave.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 9:01 AM
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