What to tell you next? How David and I traveled south to
Alabama through a slow and dense fog
over the mountain from Sewanee on a cold,
rainy afternoon through the back roads into the strange beauty of a denuded
northern Alabama landscape with Victorian houses starkly rising like
Confederate apparitions from the middle of bare fields, not a soul in sight,
just the presence of these magnificent houses now quiet except for the imagined
families that once graced their rooms so full and alive now gone, gone, nowhere
to be seen the saintly grandmothers with the sweet smiles and thick waists in
their aprons and wide heeled house shoes, the fathers in their suspenders
holding a newspaper in one hand, looking out at us from the front porch as
though we were the long anticipated guests for a late Sunday dinner. And, of
course, somewhere in the background would be the middle-aged mother, a shawl
draping her narrow shoulders and a hand gathered at her throat as if to protect
herself from the chill of encroaching darkness.
We drove on through the rain until the fields turned to vast lakes and we zipped across long bridges to settle ourselves high on a hill in an old house with wide porches and a view of the water. It rained steadily as we met our innkeeper and were ushered to our room with its tall ceilings and quiet chill. The heat was turned up and we unpacked, placing our clothes and books in a way that warmed the room to us. I have always loved creating a space for us wherever we’ve found ourselves, no matter how grand or modest the rooms, how near or far our home of the moment, stepping into a strange room and making it ours, if only for a night.
The next morning, I took breakfast with the innkeeper. David had left the house hours before to meet with the men he’d come to see on business. When I awoke and sat upright, I stared into the mirror over the dresser opposite the bed. I had the disheveled look of a child suddenly aroused from a deep sleep and for a moment I stared blankly at this vision of myself as a child of certain age in her oversized silk pajamas, the top so large as to expose one shoulder, one bare shoulder as simple and spare as a child’s. Then I rose, slipped my bare feet into the dark flat shoes I wear with my night clothes, pulled on a long robe and made myself presentable before stepping into the wide center hall with the sound of rain, everywhere rain splintering the silence of this simple old house.
She was there, bustling in from the kitchen, pushing her hair away from her face with the back of one hand, while holding a cup and saucer in the other. She smiled and asked if I’d like some coffee. I said I would and she nodded toward the table set for two at the far end of the hall. As dutifully as a child, I went to the table and took my place.
When she asked if she might join me for breakfast, I said I’d welcome her company and the two of us sat , for the better part of the morning, talking about the house, her five children, now grown and gone, her childhood in North Dakota and her love of old buildings. It took a long time before she mentioned the dissolution of her marriage and the quiet discrimination she’d felt when branded by the local elite as a woman on her own.
Later, I would shower and dress, pack up our belongings and then strip the bed, folding the sheets carefully before placing them in the old wicker clothesbasket in one corner of our bathroom. By the time David returned, it was early afternoon and we bade our farewells with hugs and promises of return. Then, like some anonymous presence, some quiet and simple force, we retreated, into the rain, over the bridge, past the lakes, absorbed, absorbed into our lives beyond this place.
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