grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Cruel Summer

By

Here we are again. Sitting smack dab in the middle of another sweltering summer. Another obscenely hot and cruel summer. Motionless and glaring. Water droplets from sprinklers evaporate before touching the parched grass. Mother Nature sends no rain for the crops.  Evidently she holds a grudge.

Yesterday I fried an egg in the backyard by the swimming pool. The pavement burned my feet and the skillet handle scalded my hand, as hot as the oven. The pool water is probably hot enough to poach an egg. Even the kitchen tap water is warm. 


Every night the super enthusiastic weathermen of Dallas try to inject a new twist into the forecast. Something to justify their time slot before sports. Before the Olympic news and Dallas Cowboys training camp. But there is nothing new. There won’t be anything different until that first cold snap on Halloween, if we are lucky. The high’s and lo’s are fancifully displayed and the heat index is thrown in for effect as the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex collectively gasps. As if there is a distinct difference between 110 and 112.

No matter how high the mercury soars each day this summer, the record high temperatures hold firmly in place. From 1980. Nothing compares to the summer of 1980. The summer I graduated from Rivercrest High School. The summer we did rain dances in the front yard in air that cloaked our bodies like gauze.  The summer daddy had a scorched crop yet forked over college tuition. The summer we nearly had to bury him on the banks of Little River.

In 1980, thousands of lives were lost and crop damage totaled in the billions. Beer sales in Texas were at an all time high.
Irrigation. Rice. Tate Farm.
Thank goodness we irrigate the crops now. 

Only 51 days until Autumn….

talya

Musical Pairings:

Long Hot Summer Days, Sara Watkins
Cruel Summer, Bananarama

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.” Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.

Field of Dreams

By

At home in Arkansas, I walked around the rice field each morning. Now that the field has been leveled and irrigated, we have our own private walking trail all the way to the drainage ditch at the South end. There were so many things to see in the early morning. Every day something new revealed itself.

Life is abundant. In addition to the rice and corn and wildflowers and vine covered trees, there were FrogsBeaversDucksDragonfliesButterfliesSnakes….
frog
Each morning I walked and sweated and explored, digging up rocks and shotgun shells and pieces of old rusty farm equipment. Daddy’s equipment?
Something shiny caught my eye. A small silver tip nearly hidden in the dirt. It was an aluminum baseball bat buried at the far back corner of the field near the beaver dam. An odd place to find a baseball bat. Field of Dreams?
My corner:)
My favorite part of the walk was the far Southeast corner which is shady and breezy in the morning. Almost cool. I spent extra time there studying the water and the ditch bank which concealed the occasional pearly white shell formed thousands of years ago when the Mississippi River covered the entire delta region.

Over the past week I slowly gathered all these little found objects and piled them in an old rusty hubcap I uncovered in the field. I placed the hubcap filled with treasures near the edge of the bank as an offering to the rain gods. I hope it works…

talya
Musical Pairings:
“With us, when you speak of “the river,” though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi.“

~ William Alexander Percy 

Home

By

Tate Farm (hwy 140) surrounded by rice
I recently spent two days home in Mississippi County driving around the farm, sleeping in my bed, visiting with my Aunts. I love to go home to feel the delta soil beneath my feet, smell the air, see the cotton growing. Arkansas is my place to recharge. There are no city noises to spoil the peace and quiet. It’s dark at night. There are stars. Every farmer waves at each driver on the road, and everyone says to me, “You look just like your momma” or “Thomas was a great farmer”. 
Home Place

Saturday morning I drove to the home place on the gravel road between Crews Lateral and the Coleman Farm. Nana and Papa Creecy started farming there in 1936 with a $75 loan from Keiser Supply Company. Momma grew up in the house and Uncle Rex lived there for a time. It’s where we celebrated Christmas Eve every year until they moved to Keiser in 1973.  It’s still the home place.

As kids we spent hot summer days playing on combines and pickers in the barn and planting watermelon seeds behind the storm shelter. Watermelon seeds that never sprouted. The huge concrete storm shelter in the center of the back yard was the catalyst for backyard games serving as our jungle gym, home base, picnic table. After a morning of playing in the dirt we ate lunch sitting on top of the shelter, sandwiches and melon and homemade vanilla ice cream, probably because Nana could easily hose us off there. Two minutes after Nana said – don’t drop a spoon down that storm shelter! – our cousin Lesa dropped her sterling silver spoon down into the hole on top… That spoon would be worth $200 today. The shelter was dark and abandoned and filled with trash and snakes, so no one dared go inside to hide from a tornado or to get the spoon, no matter its worth. The storm shelter is gone now. Most everything is gone. But the memories are still there.
I often wonder if anyone found that spoon.
A farm worker now lives in the house. His young wife was outside, so I immediately finagled an invitation inside. She was accommodating and I was THRILLED. Although I’ve driven by many times over the years, it was my first time back inside in 39 years. A place changes in 39 years. A girl changes in 39 years. 
The den (now)
Walking into the front room, I couldn’t breathe. The walls were still covered with knotty pine paneling once displaying Papa’s mounted deer heads and a wild boar shot in mid-charge. I immediately teared up.  I’m sure the young lady who now lives in the house thought I was a complete basket case. I still saw Papa Creecy sitting in his worn leather recliner surrounded by stacks of papers and farm magazines, his big desk in the corner and the television on the opposite wall where we always watched the Miss America pageants with Nana. We always cheered for Miss Arkansas but fell asleep before the pageant was over. Papa carried us to bed, my long legs dragging the floor. He smelled of Brut.
Papa Creecy (Reven Creecy)
I explained to the lady how the original bathroom ran along the back where her closet is now and how the current bathroom was once Uncle Rex’s bedroom. She had no idea who I was talking about, but I didn’t care. If she was going to live in this house, she needed to know its history. She needed to understand the importance of this place.
I stood inside our bedroom there, once my mother’s. Staci and I always played in the closet, hidden deep in the back, building forts. We had big imaginations… Our bedroom backed up to the dining room so we woke early on Sunday mornings to Nana’s kitchen sounds, the rattle of pots and pans and the smell of bacon frying. 
The little kitchen looked the same except her big stove was gone. And Nana was gone, but not really. As I looked out the kitchen window to the field beyond, I remembered she had a little poem on the wall beside the sill that I memorized as a child reading it over and over each time I visited. I don’t know who wrote it or what happened to it, but I remember it.
The world is wide and wonderful
Wherever you may roam.
But thoughts return to special things
Like friends and love and home.
A girl really doesn’t change in 39 years.
talya
Musical Pairings:
What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong
The House that Built Me, Miranda Lambert

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!