grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Arkansas Girl

By

Home
I don’t know no town,
like the old town
Even when the miles are many,
I feel like I’m still around….

The road I travel always brings me home. To the history inside me. Just a girl from Arkansas.

Where people are not perfect, but real. These people who shaped me and call me one of their own. We speak as if in mid-conversation, even though it’s been years.

These do-anything-for you-no-matter-what people.

The junior high sits empty but the memories remain. Takes me back to those autumn nights. Hometown bleachers packed real tight…

The town seems small, the trees huge, grown up around the stories imprinted on our hearts. Memories of first grade, first kiss, first everything. 
The place I’m reminded of what’s important and good, unnoticed at the time, lost and forgotten by the wider world.

Brinkley Chapel

Those who never left may not understand. Or maybe they knew all along.

I breathe it in, hold it inside and take it with me.

I usually take one last pass through town
Stop the car and touch the ground….
Somethin’ fore I go.

Turning Home – David Nail

In memory everything seems to happen to music.~ Tennessee Williams

Time in a Bottle

By

removing curtains and rods
There is no free lunch at the Bat Cave. In five days I shortened curtains, removed huge cornice boards and curtain rods, vacuumed the bugs between the windows on the sill, changed two light figures, decluttered and rearranged 4 rooms, made several trips to the grocery store, Walmart & the post office, cooked dinner, and removed and replaced the trim around the laundry room door so the new dryer could be moved inside. I returned to Dallas exhausted.
I got 30 minutes for lunch.
One of my projects was cleaning out drawers in my bedroom. Every drawer was stuffed with cards and letters and papers and report cards. And pictures. School pictures of everyone I ever went to school with from 1st grade through high school graduation.

I opened the top drawer and there was Charles Mobley staring at me. Charles Mobley, my 8th grade boyfriend, in his football uniform. Vinnie Barbarino-y. Handsome as ever. And pictures of Anita and Becky and Judy and Jackie and Trina and Craig and Graham and Vic and Doug and Carrie and Mary and Bryan and Robert and TimH and TimA and TimS. Pictures of everyone I ever knew. From every year. A time capsule.

Does everyone open random drawers and find elementary school photos of classmates from the 1970s? Or does this only happen in my family? To hoarders? To people who live in the same spot on Earth for eternity? I hope NO ONE has any pictures of me in their junk drawer. Frightening thought.

I straightened and organized the photographs, disposing of only a handful – those with giant fingers blocking the entire picture and the Polaroids with totally bleached away images.

If anyone reading this needs an old photo of anyone from Keiser or Rivercrest, let me know. I bet I can find it. I have a few Osceola folks too.
talya
P.S. Gary H….I found a picture of you too.

Musical Pairings:


Lisa: Someday when I’m a grownup, maybe I’ll go back and look fondly at our house.
Bart: Well stop in and say hi to me because I’ll still be there chilling in my basement bachelor pad.
Homer: Make sure to water my backyard grave.
Bart: As long as I can dig you up and stick you on the front porch every Halloween.
Homer: Just don’t dress me up as a woman.
Bart: We’ll see.
(The Simpson’s)

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 

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!