Buck

I think about my great-grandmother, Ethel Russell, just about every day. Most people--even around here, where multiple generations of family live in the same community--can't say they knew or even remember their great-grandparents. But I had her for 31 years, which meant her influence was imprinted on me in a powerful way. I hear her voice most often, it seems, when I'm with my children. I think maybe that's one of the ways God speaks to us. I can't tell you for sure what she says. It's more like a gentle whisper, a nudge, a conviction, a reminder to remember what's important. Those tiny hands wrapped around PlayDough. Imaginations that turn the teeth of a hair clip into those of a T-Rex. The magic of a piece of rainbow on the living room wall. Mashed potatoes morphing into a volcano. And as my children grow, I want them to take pleasure--as I did--in the very simple things of life, those things I cherished on her farm. I want them to love the musty smell of an old barn carpeted in straw, hear rusty voices from sepia pictures, climb a gnarled apple tree and fill their bellies full of June apples, know the bark of a birch tree, smell the aroma of Russian tea boiling on a stove and know that it's Christmas. These are the things they'll carry with them in life...these are the things that will be home to them when no place else can be. She was home to so many of us, just as her daughter and granddaughter are home to us now. But when we are all together, she moves around and through us as if she were still alive And that is what I'm striving to be for my children: home.
I wrote about her last year in the online literary journal, Still, and I'm grateful to Jason Howard, Still's nonfiction editor, for giving me that opportunity. You can find the essay here.

Ground Zero

A simple, chain-link fence speaks for the gaping crater in the middle of Manhattan.

It serves as both a makeshift museum of the remains of the World Trade Center buildings and protector of the rebuilding process. Black and white photographs situated along the fence chronicle New York’s history, the history of the World Trade Center, the terrorist attack, and plans to rebuild.

A few homemade memorials testify to what happened here, and the fence contains an honor roll of those who died. Just inside, two rusted support beams are fused in the shape of a cross and adorned with an American flag. Nearby buildings cast the site in looming shadows, their damaged hulls draped in mournful black veils while they await their own reconstruction.

Standing on the sidewalk, an elderly man plays “Amazing Grace” on his flute while a small group of spectators gathers around him. When he stops, a few seconds of uncomfortable silence settles down upon the group. “Play on, brother,” one man says.

Two years later, survivors are still resisting labels. I am walking down Houston Street where I meet a group of NYC firefighters having lunch in a shaded area. The names of their fallen comrades are listed on the door of the fire truck. A couple stops to ask if they can pose with the men, who cheerily oblige.

Someone refers to them as having become celebrities. Their smiles quickly fade into solemnity. “We’re not celebrities,” one of them says firmly.

Back at the site, a sign posted on the chain-link fence asks visitors to refrain from leaving flowers and letters here, but because people need a way to grieve they create a memorial from the fence itself.

“God Bless America, from the UK” is scrawled across the metal surface along with thousands of other messages written on poles, beams and walls, all dated. One such message quips, “Hey, Pat, we miss you. Yo, let us know if they have beer in heaven!”

But this is also a breeding ground for opportunists, who inevitably will capitalize on tragedy. Though the fence clearly asks vendors to stay away, a literal flea market of booths covered in cheap trinkets and books that scream “Tragedy!” lines the avenue, while surrounding shopkeepers still struggle with the economic effects of the towers’ collapse.

Ironically, a hatred of capitalism is one of the attitudes that brought the towers down, yet capitalism—like grass springing through cracks in pavement—will grow from anything.

Two years later, hope is the background of the rebuilding process. Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for a 1776-foot tower was selected as the model for reconstruction. The new structure will be the tallest in the world. The model calls for leaving the base of the old WTC exposed, while including a garden at the top to symbolize life.

According to his design, each year on September 11^th light passing through the building’s entrance will cast no shadows between the hours of 8:46 a.m. when the attack began, and 10:28 a.m. when the second tower fell.

Some of my traveling companions question why I visited Ground Zero. I tell them it is because I want to create my own reality of a place where nearly 3,000 people died, of an event that touched even those of us safely nestled in the mountains. What I see is too much sky in a city full of skyscrapers, but a hole that now looks more manageable and more civilized than the smoke and rubble we remember.

On my way into Manhattan, I took a phone call from a friend stationed in Kuwait and preparing to mobilize to Baghdad. He is hoping to come home in the next few months, but isn’t sure. What happened here is one of the reasons for his being there, yet the fence can’t offer optimism about when he’ll be home, or an explanation of why those who orchestrated this atrocity haven’t been found.

Years later, NYC is still rebuilding, but ours is a country still suspended in the question of when it will finally be over.

No Mercy for Child Killers

Before today, I was opposed to the death penalty. I believed it to be a faulty cog in a flawed justice system meant to dispose of human beings like the garbage no one wants.

Then someone did that very same thing to a little girl in North Carolina named Shaniya Davis. Someone kidnapped her, killed her and threw her little body in the woods. What happened in the middle is--mercifully for those of us who grieve this child--still a mystery, though police are speculating that she was sold for prostitution. I didn't know her or her family and she is one of hundreds of children whose faces appear in news sources every week after having been abused or killed. Yet my heart breaks as if she had been one of my own family and there's no mercy to be found there for her mother or the killer to whom she sold her five year-old baby.

I used to be someone who looked for the reasons behind behavior, maybe to help people understand that sometimes it's not entirely their fault. We live in a cruel, unequal world that doesn't make sense. But we also live in a world with evil people with no sense of humanity and animalistic intentions who don't deserve to live among us. Those who abuse and kill children are those people.

There are several reasons why this case hits me particularly hard. The first is the haunting image of little Shaniya--the last of her alive--on a hotel surveillance camera being carried by her kidnapper, one of her arms naively holding to his neck. She is still breathing, still unaware. You want to reach in and snatch her back into safety, hold her close, rock her and tell her that she'll never be left alone again.

Then there's the fact that I'm a mother to a 19 month-old and due to have another baby in April. I probably speak for most parents when I say that I would kill anyone who tried to hurt my children in such a way.

If there's a flaw here, it's that my gut reaction is so powerful when it comes to this story; the mother in me--no, the human being in me-- sees no use in finding reasons to save those who threw away a beautiful little girl's life. I used to be among those who touted rehabilitation as an answer but I don't believe evil can be rehabilitated. And those who run child prostitution rings are evil, possessed by drug addiction or money. I don't care what motivates them, to be honest. What I care about it is swift and certain justice that suits their crimes.

Headaches

I suffered from a migraine for almost week before it subsided. It was a storm that raged in waves and lightning and thunder again and again just behind my left eye before slowly pulling away. It was a debilitating kind of pain that meant I could only go through the motions of living and working for five days, communicating from within a black fog of a mood that everyone around me could surely sense. It left me feeling bitter about being unproductive, depressed that I didn't have the energy to teach the way I wanted or to play with my toddler, sad that all I could do was lie down every spare minute as my husband became a single parent for two days.

I waited. Then there it was: the sweet, blessed release, the way a quiet shower will settle in after a storm, washing away pieces of shattered glass.

Headaches make me thankful. They make me think about people who live with pain daily, who may have no hope for release, who simply find ways to survive and maybe even thrive in spite of it.

I wonder if I could.

Family Reunion

On Sunday, my people gathered on a mountaintop called Ramsey Ridge, a place that is truly God's country.

The road to the top is long and winding, peppered with an occasional trailer or farm. It's a place so remote the dogs nap in the road and a man sitting on his porch will straighten up and stare to see a row of cars wagon-training by. Mostly, the mountain is untouched, edenic, with thick, lush woods that finally give way to wide, smooth pastures and a tiny family cemetery where our ancestors are buried.

The Four Sisters: Emma, Ethel, Grace, and Eva lived the longest of all the Stanley siblings and grew old together, telling stories, cooking, sewing, writing letters to tell of the weather and new grandchildren. Their children brought them together as often as they could until one by one they left for a place they had prepared their whole lives to see.

My great-grandmother, Ethel, told me a hundred stories about her life on Ramsey Ridge, where she and her sisters forged a romantic suicide pact to jump off the Raven Cliffs (they backed out), where her father hid moonshine stills that he confiscated as the county revenuer, where her mother was almost stabbed to death by Aunt Pop, where she met my great-grandfather on the croquet grounds her father built. It was a place where, she said, they "had it all," a plot of such unspoiled beauty I thought her memory must be romanticizing it until I went there for the first time and saw a flock of wild turkeys in the fields. On the horizon above those fields are mountaintops, first green then blue in the distance and reaching for miles and miles, the only sound is the wind that sweeps the air clean and turns the scarecrow to wave.

The old barn still stands under a grandfatherly tree that spreads his branches wide and deep. My great-great grandparents, uncles, aunts, babies who succombed to turn-of-the century sicknesses rest in the shaded cemetery beside the Raven Cliffs. Their spirits walk among us when we gather, still plowing the land, still tending the garden, still strolling to the one-room school where Mamaw's brother Roley was the teacher.

Sunday was a cusp-of-autumn day, too chilly for shade and too warm for full sun, but perfect for walking down dappled roads to the Caney Fork church where food was laid out the length of the building. We feasted on fried chicken, cowboy beans, potato salad, cornbread, blackberry cobbler and German chocolate pie. Behind the church, just beyond two outhouses with indoor carpet, is another cemetery with the most famous grave of all.

Rainwater Ramsey (my great-great-great grandfather) bought and settled that ridge during a Civil War that he tried his best to avoid. "Look for the Yankees," he told his son as he worked in the fields. "They're dressed in all blue." Lore holds that he is part Cherokee and though that's never been proven, oral history is stronger than oak to those who believe it.

On Discovering Something New Every Day

Author Silas House issued a challenge to writers: live James Still's advice to discover something new every day and write about it. So here I am.

My 16 month-old son is teaching me how to discover the newness of little things. He has the perfect vantage point, no further than a few feet from the ground where so much is taken for granted by those of us who have long forgotten that place except when we drop our keys or are told to watch our step. Our walk from the car to the library's door was especially slow today because he discovered so much along the way: the perfection of a poplar leaf dressed in autumn red, the glint of a silver cap bottle, a tiny green spider rappelling from the safety bar beside the steps. Every few feet he stopped, twisted his tiny hand from my grip, and squatted to inspect his treasure. "Ahh," he gasps, pointing, and I give him the word as I settled down alongside him because he's truly onto something here.

He notices what he can't reach and demands to be lifted so he can inspect it. The glittering crystals on a chandelier that dissect sunshine into a kaleidoscope of patterns on distant walls. The pull chain that magically puts a ceiling fan into motion. The smooth, cool sensation of a door knob. And a light switch, the most amazing discovery of all. He puts his thumb on the switch and turns expectantly toward the light before he pushes, waits with bated breath, then gasps in delight when light blooms. His smile outshines those lights because he's discovered how to make magic in one small move. Every time he flips the switch, it's as if a chorus of angels erupt in praise.