Johnson Family - grace grits and gardening

Mystery of the Old Story

June 18, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

Bud, RM & Barbara

In the back of my mind a story percolates. This tale is old, told at a family reunion by my cousins, RM and Bud Johnson, natural storytellers. Stringing words together they can spin a yarn, entertaining a crowd for hours, silencing a group of Johnson cousins who cling to each word. And Johnsons are rarely a quiet bunch.

Johnson boys are/were blessed with the story-teller gene, passed-down from Grandpa Johnson who inherited this talent from his father who fought for the Confederacy at age 13. I bet he had some stories…

Each time I spread out paperwork, family notes, research, pictures, and begin to write a few sentences, something happens to distract me, an act of God or a near neighborhood shootout – a typical Dallas day.

The first interruption – an incredible hail storm that pounded our house and car, taking me away from this story for the rest of the night. The next afternoon at nearly the same time, the next-door neighbor’s house alarm interrupted the stillness like a tornado siren. Initially, I ignored it, engrossed in 1920 with the Johnson ancestors. But I remembered my neighbors were out of town. It probably wasn’t a false alarm. And it was LOUD.

Trained in the 1970s by Nancy Drew, I abandoned my story and chose to investigate. Circling the house, I studied the front porch for unusual activity and walked up the side drive around to the backyard. I scanned for anything atypical, but only a day after the hellacious hail storm, nothing really seemed normal. The alarm continued to trumpet as Lucy and Annabelle howled next door. The gate leading to the alley was wide open – muddy footprints? A clue. And, there was an open window in back of the house – completely open while the air conditioning ran. Another clue. Peeping inside I felt the cold air rushing out from the kitchen, mixing with the hot muggy backyard air. I considered calling out to the intruder hidden inside, to let him know I was onto him, hot on his trail. What would Nancy do?

Nancy Drew, wearing a smart cardigan with matching pocketbook, solved secrets of the old clock and clues in the hidden staircase, NOT the mystery of the murderous meth heads…. So I did what any modern-day sleuth would do, I dailed 911. I called for backup.

Six police officers surrounded the house with guns drawn. A very young officer with Hardy Boy-ish good looks immediately took over my case, directing me to step away from the property ma’am, clearly unaware of the summer hours I spent training in River Heights as a teenager. After nearly an hour, Joe Hardy reported the thief had fled, likely due to the alarm noise or perhaps my skillful detective work. Regardless, another night was spent not writing the story I intended to write.

Roswell Mallory Johnson

So here I sit again, staring at a photo of Roswell Mallory Johnson, ready to work on this story. If there is an earthquake or a plague of locusts sent to disrupt me, I will take it as a sign from above, a message that I don’t quite have the facts of this particular Johnson story right, that I’m heading down the wrong path. But maybe those Johnsons could at least give me a chance to finish a first draft…

talya

Musical Pairings:

In Color, Jamey Johnson

“Again time elapsed.”
― Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock

Home

June 13, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

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

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.