Decoration This Weekend

Since Decoration generally kicks off summer for me, I thought I would blog about it and maybe try to actually keep you updated on all my summer adventures.

Here's a list of stuff we did:

1. On the drive to MS and back, Livy and I listened to Amelia Peabody books, while she worked on multiplication, read Dr. Seuss, and drew both imaginary scenes (for instance a dragon fighting a zombie T-Rex) or sketched things we found (like a big leaf and a dead butterfly).

2. My mom and I found the oldest grave in Egger Cemetery, a lady named Anne Egger, who was born in 1763. We talked to her great, great, great, great granddaughter, who told us that they probably came to Caledonia by way We also found a set of Kirkpatrick graves nearly that old and were excited by the name. Probably early Scots-Irish immigrants to the area. The name Caledonia certainly suggest Scotland.

3. We decorated all our people, and the graves looked lovely.

4. Livy and I went with my mom and Mimi to the little cemetery chapel service on Sunday morning, which I haven't done since I was a child. The piano was out of tune, just the way I remember it, and that made the singing even better. We sang old hymns that I knew well, and it wasn't so terribly hot as usual.

5. I got a great idea for a book. The first book I have ever really thought about writing.

6. On the way home, Livy and I drove highway 278 all the way across northern Alabama instead of taking the interstate.

7. We slammed on the brakes and turned into a road labeled Natural Bridge and ended up hiking around the longest natural bridge east of the Rockies. It was beautiful and we saw a snake. A motorcycle lady is supposed to facebook a picture to me for identification.

8. We found a monastary in Cullman, AL. We walked the Stations of the Cross, culminating at the abbey cemetery and a pretty little chapel with those brightly colored statues that Catholics seem to be fond of. Really cool find.

Now we are home. Livy has gone to her dad's house, and I am headed to Savannah this morning. More posts from there, I hope.

Yard Tour June 12, 2010

If you are not a member of my family, you may not know about the yard tour. It is a time honored Freeman tradition. When your car pulls into the driveway of one of our houses, you get out and walk immediately to the garden. No you may not take your suitcases in the house; they'll keep just fine where they are in the trunk. No, you may not rest a minute out of the heat. Yes, I guess if you have to go to the bathroom, go ahead, but for Pete's sake, hurry up. The very first most important thing you do is take a yard tour. (I am exaggerating a little, but not too much.)

Basically, the owner of the house walks with you through all the flower and vegetable gardens directing your attention to all his favorite plants (which means every single plant), and you hear the story of where the plant came from, it's growing history, how it is the best or worst it has ever been this year, and what the gardener plans to do with the plant in the future. If you are lucky, the gardener sees a plant that needs dividing and digs you some right then and there. No need to change clothes. Every Freeman worth his salt can dig up a daylily or two without any dirt getting on his pants.

Since most of you have never been to my house (and a few of you who have been to my house have not been subjected to this delightful ritual cause I know you don't care a lick about plants), I thought I'd give you a virtual yard tour. I did not photograph every plant because there is not an SD card in the universe that big. But I took pictures of the highlights, focusing mainly on my veggies cause I love them third only to Aaron and Livy, and you'll just have to visit to see the rest.

Before we start, if you want to see what everything looked like the last time I posted, here's the link. This was in the beginning of April. (Wow, I should really blog about my garden more regularly!)

So, first stop, back deck. This is one of my grape tomatoes. I've gotten to eat a handful so far. My larger tomatoes aren't much to look at yet. May need to fertilize those slackers!


Down in my back yard. These are my potatoes, which are looking straggly. That's okay, cause it's time to eat them. I dug one pot like this already. I didn't get a ton of potatoes, but I got enough to cut up and surround a roast chicken. I left these other pots a while longer, so hopefully I'll get more potatoes or at least larger.



Here's my bush beans. Fairly newly planted.


Red onions. Mature, but I am just leaving them in the ground until I need them. We ate a ton of them as spring onions, but now the greens are tough and falling over. The bulbs are big enough now to be real onions, but they do keep getting a little bigger.


Yellow onions too.


Here's a bag of herbs. Basil, thyme, and oregano. The oregano in particular has been going crazy.


Here's a close up of the lettuce mix I planted this spring. It's been prolific and good, very spicy and different flavored, but I am getting kind of sick of it. Soon, it may go into the compost. I'll have to plant another mix or maybe some mild single lettuces in the fall.


Here are my two bags of lettuce a little farther back.


Ace peppers. You can kind of only see 2, but there are 4 plants here. They are all covered with peppers. This may be my best pepper year ever. When I see the ginormous peppers, it is hard not to pick them right now and make them into stuffed peppers, but I really like them better when they turn red, so I am trying to be patient.


Now, on to the front yard, where there is a long flower bed next to the house. Here you see my orange coneflowers and my hollyhocks blooming in front of a large rosemary bush. The rosemary has a funny shape that looks pretty good when flowers are in front of it. But in winter, it looks like it belongs in the freak show for plants. It's my fault cause I hit it with the lawn mower all the time. :)



Here are some of my daylilies. I've had SO MANY blooms this year, tons every day. They finally really settled into this spot I think.


This is Aaron's favorite, purple phlox. I have another little patch of it further down the flowerbed, too.


So I hope you enjoyed this yard tour. I hope to be able to give you one in person someday, as well.

Fish Fry

Papaw was a serious fisherman. After he retired, he went fishing nearly every day except Sundays. When he died, Mama found calendars in his old WWII foot locker that had a count of every fish he caught every day for years. I remember him coming home from fishing with a long stringer of fish, mostly crappie with a few catfish mixed in. He would carry them to the backyard where he had set up an old table for cleaning fish. I would watch as he used his electric knife to fillet all the fish, and then we would bury the carcasses in a big hole far out near the back fence. Mimi would freeze the fish.

When the outside freezer was completely full of fish fillets, we would have a fish fry. My mom and dad and I would come over, along with other family and some friends from church. Papaw would set up a huge cauldron of oil on the backporch for frying the fish that Mimi breaded in cornmeal. He would sit by the fryer, smoking a cigar, talking with the other men. Inside, Mimi would make the hushpuppies. Full of onions, she would tell me; that was the secret. She would scoop the batter with a spoon and drop each one into boiling oil on the stove. When the hushpuppy was ready, it would pop brown and round to the top of the oil and float there. She scooped them out and let them drip on a plate with paper towels.

I am absolutely sure that Mimi served other food with the fish and hushpuppies, but try as I might, I cannot remember any of it. I cannot remember who all came or what they talked about. The fish and hushpuppies, the way they tasted and the way they were prepared, overshadowed everything else, and when I eat them now at a restaurant, I always think of Papaw and his cigar on the backporch and of Mimi fishing floating hushpuppies out of a saucepan.

Papaw the Paratrooper

When I was a little girl, maybe 8 years old, my grandfather (Papaw) decided that he wanted to grow more muscadine vines in the yard. He already had quite a few, and I remember lying under them in the summer, enjoying the cool shade and eating muscadines that grew on the underside of the vines. The expansion project was to be on a huge hill on the side of the yard, so we had to terrace the hill. It was very steep, probably about a 45 degree angle, and Papaw terraced it by hand. He was in his early 70s, I think. He used a shovel to cut flat terraces out of the hill, about 4 of them, 20 feet long. We were working there on the hill one day, digging, and he fell. I watched him roll down the hill and straight up onto his knees. I ran down the hill, terrified, shouting, "Papaw, are you okay?" He stood up, brushed off his pants, gave me a scathing look, and said, "I parachuted into the Pacific. I can roll down a hill." Then, properly chastened and never daring to think of him as feeble again, I followed him back up the hill and started work again.

This Year's Decoration

Every year my family goes to Egger Cemetery on the first Saturday in May and decorates our graves. We put flowers on our family graves, walk the cemetery, point out the place where Molly Halbert went fox hunting with Papaw and where the old homeplace was, have lunch at our same Mennonite bakery, and generally have a good time. I thought I'd write up how it went this year, which is the same as every year.

We leave Meridian mid-morning and set out for Columbus up Highway 45. This is the highway I drove up when I first left home for school, and we drive it every year to decoration. We stop in Brooksville, at the Mennonite bakery, eat taco pie, and argue over the check. Then we drive into Columbus. We go first to Friendship Cemetery and leave a live chrysanthemum on Alva's grave. Alva was my grandmother's sister; her husband buried her away from the rest of us. It is strange that she lies alone in an unfamiliar cemetery. We argue on the way to her grave about which turn to make; does she lie on Maple Dr. or Crepe Myrtle Dr.? We never get it right. It has only been two weeks, and I can't remember right now which one it is.

After decorating Alva's grave, we drive through the bad part of Columbus. The houses are all shiny new. There was a tornado and some federal disaster relief, so lots of people have new and tidy houses instead of the shacks that were here before. We notice the roses. They are called "Seven Sisters" because there are seven little flowers clustered together to make each bloom. They are always in full bloom the first weekend in May, and we always say,"That's why decoration is this weekend. They could use the roses that grow in everyone's yard to decorate. That was before florist shops." Decoration has a script, and we follow it like a liturgy. The words themselves are traditions passed down from our dead. I heard the words as a child, learned the legends of my people as children always have, through hearing them repeated. Livy hears them now.

We drive from Columbus to Caledonia, where Mimi (my grandmother) was born. As we drive through the town, she points out every location of note, following the script: Mullins Well where Uncle Charlie killed himself, the church where the minister ran off with a lady from the choir, the field where Wiley Henderson died working and got dragged home by the mule, the road to our oil well (the proceeds of which total about $100 a year, divided among 5 children), and the sign pointing the way to Flint Hill, where Papaw went to singing school.

Our cemetery is outside Caledonia on Wolfe Rd. We pause as we pass through the gate; Mimi points out her daddy's name, Clarence Smith, written right on the gatepost. He gave half the land; an Egger gave the rest. She tells us that he was a supervisor in Caledonia. The house where she was born used to sit on the top of a hill separated from the cemetery by a stand of trees. I can vaguely remember what they old homeplace looked like, but now it has been torn down. There is a new red brick house there now, and horses graze without leads on the unfenced yard.

We drive into the cemetery and get down to business. There are artificial flowers to be put on all the main graves: Mimi's parents (the Smiths), my dad, Aunt Lovie and Uncle Harvey and their infant twins, Papaw, and Ray (Mimi and Papaw's 4th child). These are all right next to the little chapel, except for my dad, and so they have to look just right. There will be a service on Sunday, and people will see them and think of us and say, "My, those look just lovely. Those Freemans always do a good job." My dad is buried in a newer section of the cemetery. We decorate him next. He is near Aunt Willie Lou and the Hendersons, so we visit them while we are over that way.

The next part is my favorite. We walk out into the oldest part of the cemetery. Usually my mom and I go without Mimi because she has seen 48 people she hasn't seen since last year and is deep in conversation. Mama and I start with the Freemans, Papaw's people. We decorate his daddy and his granddaddy and his great-granddaddy and all the wives and mothers and infant children. All these Freemans get artificial flowers on long stems stuck into the ground next to their tombstones. We always stop at James Freeman's grave, under the cedar tree, and count up all the greats. He is my three greats grandfather and Livy's four greats. He came home from the Civil War in a wagon. We stop to look at Margaret Idella, who my mother is named for. Her grave got run over by an old lady who accidentally put her car in reverse, and so her stone is very new and an easy way to find our row. We remember to count up the babies that died from yellow fever, one after the other, and we always say how glad we are to have modern medicine. Then we go visit Aunt Molly and Uncle Jim, who lived with Mimi's family when she was a child. Mimi thought Aunt Molly was mean as a snake when she was little, but now she imagines what it must have been like for a childless aunt to live in the middle of that hullabaloo and she is more understanding.

The last grave is the only one we decorate who isn't a relative. We start from James Freeman and walk 27 paces diagonal toward the far corner. A tiny grave lies there, worn down to almost nothing and practically unreadable. We always trace the letters with our fingers since they are hard to see: Goudelock. This is the Goudelock (pronounced Gadlock) baby. We tell the story again, of course. There was a minister at the little Caledonia Methodist Church who had a tiny baby that died while they were here. Methodist ministers have to move on, and the mother couldn't stand to leave the baby without anybody to see to the grave, so Julius Freeman, Papaw's daddy, promised to always decorate the grave. And still, we always decorate the baby, just like it was our own people, and we think of the minister's wife. It gives me chills now, writing this, when I think of my mother and I honoring a promise made by my great-grandfather. The decorating of this grave, more than any other we do, makes me feel continuity as if it were a concrete thing.

All this time, Livy has been running wild through the graves, like I did as a child, getting muddy and stepping in fire ant hills. We have done the work of decoration (the digging and the cleaning), and we have done the remembering and the repeating. We are tired, and Mississippi is hot in May. We clean our hands, pack up the trash to take home, and drive back into the present.