Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Where I Live, Folks Know How to Act Right

[Originally published on October 7, 2009 at 4:53 am.]

Moody Cove

My walk up Moody Cove takes me past a wide swatch of what used to be a tobacco field; soon it’ll corral some horses and a barn, and that makes me happier than the development it had once threatened to become years ago. On my right is the fast rising ridge of a piney covered mountain that walls the holler like a fortress, making it night at the end of the cove before it goes dark anywhere else. After I pass the seven acre field, I come to Jerry’s. He’s my neighbor with the two pretty black horses. They are especially stunning against a snowy pasture. He also has about a half a dozen beagles, hunting dogs, out in their pens who howl as we approach, and stop when we go by, but the rounds of their barking echo up and down the cove for a long time after we’ve passed. Jerry and I always wave and often chat, sometimes about the weather, the prospects of the tobacco field, his horses, and my books. Jerry doesn’t know what kind of books I write, but somebody’d told him I was an author and so he always asks how many are ya up to?

Eugene's Barn

It’s another few acres of fields before I get to Eugene’s place. Eugene’s family has owned the land for generations, and Eugene lived here with his mama and granny till they both passed away, back to back, within weeks of each other. He lives there now with other family members and his girlfriend. I didn’t meet Eugene on the cove road, though, I met him at the Ingles grocery store where he’s been a bagger since he was in high school. We didn’t know we were neighbors until we realized that Eugene went to high school with my son Sam. When I learned he lived up the cove in the house whose barn I like to paint pictures of, I gave Eugene a painting of his barn. Once, he stopped his car in the middle of the road and talked to me for a long time while we waited for a stranger (unusual out here) to pass; I’d told Eugene that the shady looking fella had seemingly come out of nowhere and had been following me since I’d turned back toward home. Eugene stayed right there on the road till the fella was well out of sight and before I continued on my way home.

Snowball Mountain

I’ve lived where I live for over twenty years now. I have watched Snow Ball Mountain change every color of every season right before my very eyes as I swing on my porch.  I know which bunnies huddle in which part of the hedge that circles my yard. I know when a raccoon has been in my cherry tree. I know when Rodney’s goats are hungry, and when that crazy gal who sees dead people comes along the elbow of our road from the other neighborhood by the way Doug’s dogs start barking and won’t quit till she’s made her round with her tubby black Lab in tow. I know the different pitches of the coyote family that lives along the ridge above me, and I can hear the old couple all the way across the creek yell at each other on Saturday nights, and then go off to church every Sunday morning.   Where I live, I can tell you what time my neighbor Lyda goes to bed by which lights go off in her house. I know when Bryson, up the way, goes to milk his cows by the sound of his old truck squeaking and huffing by my house. I know every car that pulls up my lane because there’s no way out, and so if you’re not from around here, you’re either visiting or lost.

I try not to begrudge the newcomers to this low-lying valley the pleasure of her nature, her blue ridges and misty ranges. I am a girl from Jersey, after all, and like me twenty years before, folks are coming in from other places wanting to live where I live, and I can’t say as I blame them, it’s heaven. The only problem is, when people come from other places, they sometimes want to bring parts of that other place with them and fit it in here, and for those of us who didn’t think we were missing it in the first place, well, we get resentful. When you go into somebody else’s kitchen, you don’t start rearranging their cabinets, throwing out their condiments, lining up their vegetables, or telling them how to scrub their sinks, and if you do, and you aren’t related to them, well, they’ll be resentful, too.

Where I Live

It’s the same thing out here where I live. We don’t mind folks moving in, we wave, say hey, we’ll tell you where to get your “burn” permit or warn you about the snakes along the creek, we might even bring you a pie; as long as you act right and don’t start trying to rearrange our cabinets, we’re going to be good neighbors to you. But if you start getting into our business, pushing your ways on us, you’ll be sorry that first winter when your power goes out, your pipes freeze, and you can’t get out your slick driveway because this isn’t New Jersey, there are no salt trucks or plows, just the kindness of neighbors.

My neighbor Ed has been delivering my wood for as long as I’ve been here. He’s a big bald guy with a big blond goatee and big thick neck that matches his big beefy body. He drives a big red truck. Ed and I often meet on this road that connects our houses at two ends, and we visit. Ed built his house, the one that replaced his old trailer. He has a sweet wife and a little girl, a bunch of dogs, and a pig.  When Ed’s little girl is with him in the truck, Ed will stand her up at the driver’s side window and prompt her to sing both the country-western and the rock-star versions of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  When he stops on the road and he is alone, we mostly talk about the development that’s happening up our cove, the ridgeline that’s been scored for thirty houses, and all the Yankees moving in and ruining everything.

Ed told me that he was thinking of moving. He said that he’d built his house way out here to get away from people and their opinions, their rules, their laws, their zoning, and their own personal gripes, but with the latest sale of acreage up our valley, so-called civilization is creeping in and so Ed wanted out. It wasn’t so much that the population was growing, he could live with that, Ed told me, but it was the fact that these new people didn’t seem to know how to act right, and Ed couldn’t abide by that very well.

It started with the wife of the Yankee-lawyer who sent her husband over to threaten Ed with a lawsuit if he didn’t quit firing his gun on his own property; it was apparently inspiring asthma in their Pekinese, the lawyer said. Ed told the lawyer that he’d come over put the Peke out of its wheezing misery if the man didn’t get off his property.

Home

Then, after a long day of hunting, after all, venison and turkey are the meat on Ed’s table, and having strung up his bounty in his barn, Ed had gone to bed feeling like a good provider for his family. He awoke to a note left by the folks up the way, the ones from Connecticut who Ed stacks wood for and whose driveway he plows without question or compensation. In the note, they asked Ed to please remove the dead animals  from his barn as they could be seen by passing motorists and small children.

But it was the Italian, New Yorker who built the giant log-mansion on the pasture that butts Ed’s land who’d made the trek across the fields to meet Ed, who angered him the most.  The Yankee wanted to know if the pig Ed kept was “defecating” in the creek that separated their land. By the way the Italian sneered when he said defecating, Ed confided: Like he didn’t think I knew what that word meant.  Ed told the northerner: “No, she shits in her pen.”  The Yankee seemed both startled and satisfied, until Ed said “I shovel the shit into the creek. You got a problem with that?” The New Yorker did and threatened to have Ed’s pig removed. “People just don’t know how to act right around here anymore,” Ed lamented.

I’m not sure if it’s that they don’t know how to act right anymore, or these people just never learned how to act right to begin with, I told Ed.  For those of us who’ve been up this cove being good neighbors to each other most of our lives, well, we just have to keep being good neighbors and hope that these outside folks will follow our lead, do likewise, like I did when I got here, I said when Ed told me he was thinking of leaving.

My backyard

I love my home, my valley, my holler. I want my ashes sprinkled up this cove. I want to grow old on my porch swing watching great blue herons glide by and crows rush hawks away from nests. And so, I can only hope that newcomers will pay attention and notice that we don’t mow our lawns on summer Sundays, out here in the quiet where I live, and where, for the most part, folks still do know how to act right.

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