BAT - grace grits and gardening

in His Heaven

May 19, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

Nana
Frances Johnson Creecy

I believe places have energy left behind from memories of a prior time. Good energy or weird energy, happy or toxic. When we make our annual trip back to Norfork Lake, we always visit the little cove where our dock is still hidden. We troll the holy water there, inspecting the gravel road leading down to the lake, studying the rocks we explored as kids and trying to make out our cabin through the overgrown vegetation. Regrettably, Papa Creecy sold the house and dock when Nana was sick in the early ’80s which made us sick too. The dock is still there, possibly abandoned, and although we don’t own it any more, it will always be ours.

It’s now barely afloat in our once perfectly secluded cove back before Buzzard’s Roost became so developed, when there were no loud jet skis to disturb the peacefulness. That dock was our home base each magical summer. We loaded up the boat in the mornings with John Deere coolers full of ice and cokes and hot dog fixins’, set out to Jordan Island in search of sand and sun and returned to end the day back on the dock sunburned and waterlogged. Sometimes we read books or napped there lulled by the rocking of the lake, and at night we looked for shooting stars, lying flat on our back on still damp beach towels. The stars are more brilliant over the dock.

Me and Staci on the dock.

As kids we explored every inch of that dock including underneath. We spent hours swimming between the floating barrels that supported it and fishing between each boat stall. Nana once fell asleep on a cheap orange plastic raft and floated away so far from the dock we had to pick her up in the boat. I can still hear her laughing. We shot bottle rockets and Roman candles on the 4th of July, listening to country music on our portable 8-track tape player. Our laughter and music echoed from one end of the cove to the other. It probably still does.

One summer we found a flat wooden board in the storage closet on the dock. A gift from the lake gods? It was simply a rough piece of plywood painted white with a faded red stripe and a scratchy rope that served as a makeshift handle. Splintery, hard, homemade, unsafe and fun as heck. We had no idea how it came to be in our storage closet, but we claimed it. Daddy pulled us on that board behind the boat driving way too fast, especially after a few Schlitz. We screamed, “faster, faster” holding on to dear life and our bathing suit bottoms. Clearly, Daddy’s goal was to drown us. It may have been his favorite thing about the lake. As we skidded over the wake almost passing the boat, the water skinned our legs like carpet burn as we eventually shot off head over heels into the lake. If we were lucky, we were still wearing our bikinis when we surfaced with sinuses full of lake water. Later we bought a real boogie board made of molded, curved plastic meant for riding the waves. It was boring.

Daddy
true farmer’s tan

The countdown has started. It’s almost time to visit our cove and recharge from the energy of the lake. A mere 57 sleeps!

talya

Musical Pairings:

“That’s the Way Love Goes”, Johnny Rodriquez
“Summertime”, Kenny Chesney

“God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the World.” Robert Browning

Our Painted House

May 15, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

laugh lines?

Until you paint every nook and cranny of a house, repairing cracks and spackling hundreds of nail holes in the most peculiar places, I don’t think you really get to know her. Standing on a rickety ladder looking at the top of the never-before-painted dusty door moldings or lying on the kitchen floor painting the floor trim underneath the built-in shelving, you become pretty cozy with one another. Until then, I’m not sure you can really claim her.

We’ve painted every square inch inside our Munger Place home. And because of this, we can confirm there are no square inches in this house. Her floors slope and creak and doors shift from time to time resulting in the reappearance of certain hairline cracks. Like wrinkles. After 102 years, she’s allowed.

Years ago, I worked with a strange girl who bought a 60’s ranch style home near Ft. Worth. Once she was settled into the home with her furniture and children arranged to her liking, only then did she paint around the furniture. The trim behind the couch was stained dark brown but on either side the trim was white. If a chair was slightly budged from position, the dark trim behind it would shine like a rotten spot. HOW did she sleep at night? I could barely even go inside, just knowing this.

When my mother turned 40, she decided to paint the outside of our home in Arkansas. After years and years of living in a boring white house, she thought it was high time for a color change – beige. Willing to tackle the project single-handedly, she explained her plan to Daddy who was completely against it. He felt sure she would get one side painted and quit. He feared her painting work ethic would be much like her cotton-chopping work ethic. The Tate girls weren’t his best cotton choppers.

She ignored his advice, didn’t mention it again, and patiently waited a few weeks until he started picking cotton. Now, if you weren’t raised on a cotton farm, you may not be aware of the delicate art of picking cotton. When the bolls burst open, there are only a few weeks to harvest before the yields begin to decline. So there’s no lollygagging around during this time. No sleeping or eating, no laughing or vacation days, no television watching or smiling. It’s an amazing race against Mother Nature, and not for the light-hearted. To keep things interesting, this all happens just at that time when vast tropical storms are lined up back to back in the Gulf of Mexico.

Daddy left the house before daylight and dragged home well after dark. And he worked 7 days a week until all the cotton was out. The first day he started picking, Momma started painting. High up on a ladder, she painted the eaves, the side, around the windows, all day every day. She cleaned up or hid all evidence before he lugged himself home late each night, dog-tired. She collapsed each night as exhausted as he, sore and achy. For a couple of weeks he unknowingly snored in a two-toned house. The next morning, she started back again right after he left. She too was in a race.

Tate Farm House
aka BAT cave

Perfectly timing the entire project, she was finishing her last day of painting on his last day of picking. And that’s the day he decided to come home for lunch. Driving into the driveway, he saw her atop a ladder painting the last section of the house. He must have been shocked. He must have laughed to himself. The entire house was a different color. And the shutters were brown. She washed her hands, made him a sandwich, and he never said a word about it. Ever.

While he was busy picking cotton, he had no idea what had been going on under his roof. Of course, he never really did.

talya

Musical Pairings

Johnny Cash, “I Never Picked Cotton”

Miranda Lambert, “The House that Built Me”

from a pew away…

May 13, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

At Brinkley Chapel we all wore roses pinned to our dresses on Mother’s Day Sunday – white if our mother had already passed away and pink or red if our mother was still alive. I really don’t know if this is a tradition everywhere or just at our little church in Arkansas. We had lots of unique traditions there.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Momma ordered a corsage for Nana from the flower shop in Osceola. It was always a white Gardenia, her favorite, the most fragrant of all flowers. I could smell it from a pew away.

Momma wore a red or pink rose corsage with a bit of baby’s breath, but Staci and I were too little to wear big, fancy, store-bought corsages. We ran outside on Sunday morning, getting our shoes wet in the grass, and clipped a tiny pink rose from the bush beside the driveway. Luckily the rosebush was always in full bloom on Mother’s Day, as if it understood the importance of its job.

Momma always told us to pick one of the buds not fully open. If we wore one of the pretty big roses already in full bloom, the petals fell apart before the invitational hymn leaving only a pin and a thorny stem on your dress. No telling what the significance of that might have been.