My Southern Journey (18 page)

I have never struck an armadillo, and I hope I never do. I have never placed a bumper sticker on my car, though I think if an “I BRAKE FOR ARMADILLOS” one is out there, somewhere, I would consider it. It seems to me, with all the good the armadillo has done mankind, right here in the South, it should not be considered an invasive species at all. Maybe we could bump off one of our indigenous species, to make room for it. I would be willing to give up the chigger.

DIXIE SNOW

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: January 2014

T
he yellowed photograph, the size of a playing card, is tacked to the wall in my mother’s house, right above my desk. It shows a tiny frame house blanketed in white. An old woman, my grandmother, stands in the open door. You need a magnifying glass to read Ava Bundrum’s expression, but on her face appears to be a look that is part fascination, part suspicion, as if she is trying to decide whether to step off into this alien stuff or duck back inside and wait it out till the thaw.

No one here seems to remember how that picture came to be, but I fixed it to the wall because I like looking at it, because it makes me smile. It is proof of the Southerner’s never-ending wonderment with snow.

Ava never went north of Lookout Mountain. She lived her life in the low hills along the Alabama-Georgia line, and seldom saw deep snow. Though, one year, a late snowfall did all but cover the buttercups she had planted inside an old tire at the edge of the driveway. And because it was so rare, it was always wonderful and, in a way, maybe even a little frightening.

She had sayings for the weather. If thunder shook the house and a big rain turned the air around her to gray, she would mumble: “Ole devil’s beatin’ his wife.” But she had nothing for snow. It was too infrequent. She would merely stand and look at
it, through the thick glass of her spectacles.

When enough of it had fallen onto the cars and trucks in the yard, she would wrap a shawl around her head and slog through it, a dishpan in one hand and a spatula in the other. She would scoop a gallon or so of the snow into the pan, then hurry inside. Working fast, she would mix in sweetened condensed milk and a little sugar, and maybe some vanilla flavoring. Then she would portion it out to us boys, her grandsons, and announce to us: “Snow cream.” And it was good.

The Yankees say we don’t know how to drive in it, how to walk on it, or even stand. They may be right. But if they had not come down here to live among us, abandoning the tundra of home, they would not be here to know.

I like that people here are not used to it. I have walked hip-deep through the dirty gray snow of New York and Boston, and have seen whole cars disappear under grimy snowplowed ice, along with my fascination.

I still feel it, some, when I see children rush into a snowfall that could not cover pea gravel. I see them using spatulas and spoons to scrape up enough snow to make the saddest snowmen you have ever seen, more red mud that anything else. They last a day, or a morning, and then become forlorn lumps. I have seen children make snow angels in what, mostly, seemed to be slick gravel. But I love to see them try.

Ava never went to a place where such things were mundane. The snow was always exotic, and if the Yankees had any sense they would recognize that she was exotic, too, a kind of hothouse flower, surviving in this one special, humid place. I miss her all the time, but more when the ground turns white.

MERRY AND BRIGHT

Southern Living
, Southern Journal; December 2014

S
ome things we cannot duplicate here; we will never celebrate Christmas inside a picture postcard. We have no winter wonderland, though once, inspired by a snowfall seen on the black-and-white television, I did scrape a handful of ice from the inside of the freezer to throw at my brother. By the time I got to him, all I had to fling was a handful of rain.

What we do have is electricity. As long as the Tennessee Valley Authority can light up the Southern night with strands of color, shining from every mansion and mobile home, twinkling ’round the baby Jesus, they can have their white Christmas. I have seen lights encircling hay bales, hung on rusty tractors, and wrapped around mailbox posts. In the country, you need a whole lot of drop cord to electrify a mailbox.

I have seen them strung across the grilles of Peterbilts. My mother never takes down her lights, strung on a cedar beam in the living room, though she does unplug them eventually. The rich folks have switched to white lights, a lot of them, to be elegant, I suppose. But it will always be lights of color, shining through a night that smells of cut pine and woodsmoke, that mean Christmas to me.

I have written that I find it hard, as the years tumble by, not to live in the past, especially in a time of year when I would do
anything to see the world again like a child. It is why I fill the refrigerator every December with chocolate-covered cherries and buy my brother fruitcakes at the day-old bakery outlet—fruitcake is impervious to time—and watch, for the hundredth time, those oddly animated, 50-year-old Christmas specials about Kris Kringle and the evil Burgermeister and the elf who wanted to be a dentist and the Island of Misfit Toys.

It is important that some things stay the same, that, at some point this season, someone will say, “We’re goin’ to look at Christmas lights. Wanna come?”

I go sometimes and sometimes just say no; it is enough to know someone is going. I have a fine memory stashed away of the lights; I do not want it to grow less than it was by heaping a Walmart’s worth of new lights on it.

I remember it was first grade, and the big, ramshackle house we lived in, just for that winter, was haunted; but it’s really the people who are, I suppose. I was afraid of that house at night. It creaked, and the wind hissed around the eaves. One cold evening, my aunts came by to take us for a ride in an old Chevrolet, rescuing us.

As we drove through the foothills, my face pressed against the window, I saw that the very dark had been conquered, chased away by miles of light, tracing the outlines of ragged trailers and leaning frame houses. Now and then, one of my aunts would mutter, “Their light bill’s gonna be high,” over the Christmas songs on the radio, and I went to sleep that way. Later, someone carried me inside. I remember I was embarrassed by that; I was a big boy. But the women in my family are strong.

I wish you a merry Christmas, and a very hefty light bill.

SHOPPING

I
knew, the day I saw my first pair of skinny jeans
on a man,
that I no longer have any place in this world, and should probably just go live by myself in a hole in the ground.

I am immune to fashion.

I am loathe to shop.

If I cannot find a hole to crawl in, give me a shovel and I will create one. Just, please, Oh, Lord, do not make me wander one more day in the wilderness of the Belks or the Dillards or the Abercrombie and whatever the heck it is, there amid the endless racks of shirts sized for jockeys and gymnasts and the chicken-chested who actually like their shirts to fit
tight.
Do not abandon me to tunnel through mountains of pants designed for short, fat men and 7-foot-tall anorexic ones, only to find that the one normal-size pair, the single, lonely pair that will fit me, comes only in Kelly green.

I do not love clothes, and you cannot make me. I do not believe, as a Southern man, that I am supposed to like them. The pictures of my ancestors all show men in worn-through overalls and battered fedoras and work khakis, in threadbare jeans and canvas shirts that look like they have been mutilated a million times in a Sears & Roebuck wringer washing machine, or beaten on a rock. But they by God look comfortable, like something a man could live in.

New clothes are not comfortable.

New clothes make me uneasy, the same way that snooty cocktail parties do. You know what I mean. Oh, the people there may look fine across the room, but when they get right up on you they make you itch.

New shoes feel like you are shuffling around in a box of saltine crackers. They even sound wrong. They squeak, and squeal. Shoes should not be heard. You should be able to sneak out of a cocktail party unheard, in the right kind of shoes. New shirts feel like somebody left the hanger and cardboard in them, and have too many sharp edges. Cloth, by its very nature, should not have too many straight lines. You can hear a new shirt, too. Think about it.

New pants? I do not really know you well enough to explain why I am terrified of new pants. Let us just say that, on some of my pants purchases, the best thing I can say is there was no lasting injury.

So, I have decided not to shop for clothes again, ever. I have examined the number of clothes in my closet and tried to calculate the amount of wear and tear they can absorb over the next decade or so, and have come to the mathematical conclusion that I can be dead and naked at about the same time.

It is not just that I detest new clothes, but I detest going to get them. I do not love to shop, the way some men do, and no matter how many flyers you stuff in my mailbox or how many e-mails you fling at me or how much societal pressure you bring to bear through your endless loop of television ads, you cannot make me go to your store unless I
have
to go. I will go when I stare into my sock drawer and see only one lonely tube sock looking back at me, or when the posterior of my favorite jeans gets worn so thin that an elderly woman behind me sucks in her breath and shudders an “Oh, my!”

I know what you are thinking. Few men do love shopping for clothes. I hear women say that all the time. “Scooter would just go naked if he had to buy his clothes.” I think that might have been true, back when all men could change their own tires and did not think an adventure was cheating on their golf score. Sneak a peek in their closet and tell me what man needs 47 pastel Polo shirts? What man needs 132 pairs of khaki pants … Dockers. With something called a forgiving waistband. You see men wandering the outlet malls of the Deep South loaded down with shopping bags from Eddie Bauer, arms straining under loads of Old Navy,
and you know they ain’t never been nowhere near a battleship.