I got an e-mail this morning from an old friend with whom I'd grown up in Starhill, the little community just south of St. Francisville. Her husband is a businessman, and they've lived away from there for many years. They came back not long ago and built a house, but as her husband has risen in the company, they've had to move. They now live in Houston, and yesterday sold their house in Starhill. My friend was feeling sentimental about it this morning, and dropped me an e-mail to say how much it did her heart good to know that our parents, all retired now, are rediscovering the pleasure of each other's company. L.'s husband had been the night before down at her mom and dad's camp by Thompson's Creek, with her folks and mine, and the other moms and dads we'd all grown up with, eating and drinking and talking late into the night. We really come from a special place, don't we? my friend said.
I responded:
It's so easy to romanticize where we come from, as you know. You and I have gone so far from there (you the farther, having lived in Singapore!), but there is an impulse -- a good one, I think -- that always drives us back. I'm not sure what it is. There's nothing to do at home, really, and certainly nothing I could do to support myself and my family. There are a hundred reasons you and I could come up with in about five minutes why we wouldn't want to live there. And yet .... there it is.I wonder if the overriding reason we think about it so much is not for what it is, but because it's ours. It's the smells that get to me most. I can't pass a sweet olive tree -- which you rarely find in north Texas -- without stopping in my tracks, flooded with memories of Starhill. There's another smell too: the aroma of y'all's camp, which started out, of course, as my Great Aunt R.'s antique shop (side note: I always that Aunt R. was kind of a snob, and that's true, but Daddy told me not too long ago that she was a wild woman back in the Forties, and that made me laugh hard; it's so easy to forget that all these old people were once young like us, and human). R.s shop had such a particular smell -- I guess it was the wood her husband used to build it, and the varnish. I really don't know. But I know that no place smelled like that, and that it was a deeply comforting smell to me for a reason I can't imagine. And that it was one of the earliest smells I recall, inasmuch as I got dragged over there by Mama as a very small boy. So when I caught the aroma at that party y'all had at the shop two or three winters ago, when we were visiting, it almost made me cry. Strange, and wonderful.
About 15 years ago, I was visiting home from Washington, where I then lived, and stepped out of Mama and Daddy's house -- I think they were all finishing up Thanksgiving dinner -- to walk across the yard and into the brambles up where Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda's old cabin was. This was before that land had been sold and developed. The old ladies' orchard, or what was left of it (it was all overgrown) was still there, and their house was falling down, but still substantially intact. I made my way through the brush, and got in through a back window. It was spooky to be in there. The [side of the family that got the house after the old ladies died] had stripped the house of everything, of course, except for a plain wooden carving of a housecat that sat on the wall above Loisie's closet. I grabbed it as soon as I got into the house, as a souvenir.I was scared, a little, to be in there, but I made a quick tour just for old time's sake. I was shocked by how tiny the house was. It loomed so large in my imagination as a small boy (by the way, I remember Nana's [her grandmother's] house had a particular smell too; I associate that house with her Creole Gumbo collage thing, and that smell -- that, and the "ding ding ding" sound her Cadillac made when you opened the door; I thought that only the most rarefied people in the world had houses that smelled so deliciously, and cars that said "ding ding ding" when you opened the door). Anyway, there I was in this husk of a house, and I just didn't know what to think. I looked out the front window, down the pea-gravel lane that I used to scamper up nearly every day as a little boy, and I couldn't see past the end of the porch, for all the vines and bushes. Loisie was an accomplished amateur horticulturist, and cared so intensely for her japonicas and camellias and everything in her garden. But she died in 1977, and that was the end of that. It was all gone now.
I climbed out of the back window and made my way with no small difficulty back through the grown-up orchard, towards Mama and Daddy's house. I emerged from the woods on the edge of the gravel road that runs past my sister's house today. It was a warm, sunny Thanksgiving day, and I could hear Mama and everybody across the way laughing and celebrating. I was suddenly struck, and struck hard, by the realization that everything I was looking at and listening to in the little brick house across the way would one day be as lost to history as the house I'd just emerged from. All we would have is our memories, and when we died, few of those would survive if our kids didn't grow up there (and even then, only fragments can remain). It was a melancholy thought, but that's life, and there's no escaping it.
Like you, I take much comfort when I hear stories from my folks that they'd gotten together with your folks and other Starhill people. I used to worry a lot when I'd go home in the Nineties, when I'd see that my mom and dad spent so much time at night watching satellite TV, with those friendships that had been so carefully nurtured simply by virtue of raising kids together fell by the wayside. It's a great thing that they've all rediscovered each other. It means the world to my parents that your dad stops by every morning for coffee. How lucky we all are that they're all still alive. I usually call Daddy and Mama on the drive to work in the morning and ask first thing, "Y'all dead yet?"
"Naw, not yet," they always say. We laugh and then talk about whatever. But I know that the days are drawing down for our little community, and I dread getting that phone call one day that one of my parents, or one of the Starhill moms or dads that I grew up with, has died. You know, through Julie, I really grasp how special what we had, and still have, is. She grew up in suburban Dallas, and said there just was nothing like that in her life. And she loves it. I sometimes wonder what I'm depriving my kids of by not living there, but it's also a melancholy truth that what we had doesn't really exist there anymore. Does it?
All the best, Rod.
For more on Starhill, read this thing I posted about what happened when my brother-in-law got his orders to ship out to Iraq, and this I posted when he came home.
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I grew up in a suburb of Boston. It was not "ET". We had a community, formed by the neighborhood (which was fairly isolated from the rest of town), by common experiences. Dads traveled for business some, moms were home. There was a huge field in which kids gathered for "Capture the Flag" and other games at twilight in the summer. Every mom had a way to summon her own -- mine had a dinner bell, my friend's mother called "Mair--ee-Yeeellin". Parents played bridge together. If anyone had grandparents nearby, I didn't know it.
Now I live in the same town. My kids' community comes from the parish church. Their friends are not next door, but walking distance, and their friends' parents are my friends. Our parents are not in town, although they are (except for mine) close enough to visit on holidays.
Sights and sounds and ways through town are different for my kids, but similar to the way I grew up. It's a safe place for them to learn their way around, and the excitement of the city is within reach for teens.
People knock suburban life all the time. Not me.
The project of "modernity" and of "Enlightenment" will be complete when there is no one left in the world who has ever felt the way that Rod describes feeling in this post.
Whether that will represent "progress" or not, is a question we all ought to ask more often than we do.
I'm told that one reason that smells are so evocative is that they're harder to specifically recall than any other sensations. We can remember our impressions of them well enough - the richness of the kitchen at Thanksgiving, etc - but it's difficult to actually recreate them in our heads. When we do encounter them after an absence, it opens a floodgate of memories.
I have a question.
There's a hill south of St. Francisville?
But thanks for the heart-warming piece.
Rod, you always make references to your inability to support your family should you return to your childhood home. But are people not supporting families there now? How in the world does this happen?
What you evidently mean is that you can't support your family in rural Louisiana by doing what you currently do. And given the projections for the newspaper industry -- and particularly newspapers the size of the DMN -- odds are you're going to have to eventually re-think your career, even in Dallas.
Not trying to be a smart alec. Just pointing you outside the box. My guess is that, like me, you really do like your present job and some "citified" conveniences better than your idealized hometown. But in truly hard times, going home may very well be your best option.
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