The Gulf

There's that moment, on the long drive from our home to the Gulf of Mexico, when we step out of the car at a rest stop and it smells like the South. Something recessive in my DNA comes forward. My ancestors were Swedish, Irish, English, German, but the heritage that lies dormant in my cells is Southern. As we pass 50-foot pine trees, magnolias and crepe myrtle . . . As the dirt lanes turn to peach, then burnt orange, then rusty red . . . As the houses become one-story brick homes, tucked into pine groves dripping with Spanish moss . . . A forgotten part of me wakes up, and I am at home in a way that comes directly from the history of my senses. By the time the road ends at the Gulf, I have no age and no identity other than The One Who Belongs to This Place.

They first lowered me into this water when I was two months old. I was potty trained on this beach (TMI?). When our family has come together here over the decades, there is always the same white sand, the same ever-changing water, the same sea oats and graceful grasses, the same soft, salty breeze. So when my feet squeak through the powdery sand or a butterfly shell tries to bury itself in my palm or a dark storm buffets our cabin on stilts, I don't know if I am eight or 18 or 40. I just am.

There are just the elements here: sand, water, wind, the fire of the sun. And family. Dozens of family members coming and going to swim or fish or walk or eat or exchange stories. Our matriarch turned 90 this month, and she's still here fixing us slaw and blackberry cobbler (and if we do all the chopping we can talk her into gumbo). Last night we had grits, fried slices of sweet potato, eggs, and homemade biscuits with tomato gravy or cane syrup or jam. Later we moved the table out of the way, and my cousin tried to teach us all how to swing dance.

There is ease here. There is a melting of boundaries. Anyone who walks through the door is family.

This is a poem I wrote a few years ago, processing some family history that was still very vivid to me. It's the sense-memory of a child--not meant to be historically accurate. But it's one of the memories that roots me to this place.

~ Mobile, Alabama, 1979

We played near the patio,
          critters trapped outside the cage.
Family room window low and wide,
          we paced, pressed, clowned, coerced.
Forced to one side of the fence,
          who cares if your grass is greener?
Aunts inside took turns acknowledging antics,
          consoling through the pane.

We had the soup du jour
          of the Southern air,
the glossy old magnolia,
          sweepy piles of pine needles.
We had the greenhouse, sealed and moonlike,
          with its zippiddy lizards and happy toads.
We had the Slip 'n Slide, the tree swing,
          the jump ropes and each other--
                    enough for a summer month.
But inside they had what everyone wants:
                                                                      a secret.

The mute play went on before us . . .

Grandma, the protagonist, the pastor's wife,
with the focused patience of an inmate for life,
gets the last one weaned and schooled and wedded
then removes the bars she's severed with a nail file.
She is packed and papered, has X'ed his line to sign.
It's the particulars that require a room of brooding offspring--
a Eugene O'Neill curtain closing on a Tennessee Williams romance.

The splitables are split,
the indivisibles dispersed wholly
like emergency amputations
with shock as the anesthetic.
Grandma gets half the house
and the truth,
Grandpa gets half the house
and their friends.
Then someone opens the door for the children.