Good Fortune

Mayhayley Lancaster was not a romantic and by most accounts not much of a nice person.  She wore a glass eye that oozed and on the rare occasion she was seen out, a parade of dirt clod dogs following her as if she were a drum major in a parade.  She was a sort of drum major for southerners seeking answers for those things just out of reach. She was a fortuneteller, psychic, witch, and police informant, depending on who was telling the tale.  Her accuracy in readings drew visitors to her backwoods home in west Georgia all through the 1920's and 30's and beyond.  She had no connection to the news she conveyed, good or bad she reported truth in what she saw in her visions, whether it be the location of a dead body or news of a soldier's wellbeing on the front lines of war, or something as mundane as the location of a lost heirloom.  Mayhayley’s story is built into the folklore of the Deep South as solid as the mortar between the sand rock chimneys that still stand from long fallen houses that mark the rolling landscape.  But this story is not about Mayhayley Lancaster.

Dorothy went to visit Mayhayley one afternoon during the early part of the 1930’s, urged on by a co-worker who had heard Mayhayley was visiting her sister in Randolph County, Alabama.  Dorothy had no use for psychics and cursed what she saw as a wasted dollar and dime Mayhayley charged for her sessions.  Mayhayley examined her palm and quickly asked, “Who is Isaac?” Dorothy did not know an Isaac and told Mayhayley as much.  “You will marry a man named Isaac and you will be very close.  You will be together for a long time.”  She then told Dorothy that she too would live a long life and proceeded to scribble Bible verses on scraps of paper and instructed her to read them at various phases of her life for comfort and guidance.  Dorothy had recently graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute.  She had arrived at the school by way of her step grandmother’s boarding house in Birmingham where she had been previously working taking care of out of town guests between her school days.  It was the depression and her father was dead.  Her mother had remarried a drunk. She caught the attention of a professor and his wife staying at the boarding house and was hired to come to Auburn and care of the wife’s ailing mother.  The pay was room and board and tuition to the college each quarter.  Getting an education was worth everything to Dorothy.  It was the final instruction given to her by her father through his hospital window as he lay on his deathbed.  He was too sick for visitors but an adolescent Dorothy managed to shimmy her small body through the necessary brush, bars and concrete to find her father and say goodbye.   Her job with the Farmers Home Administration was a consequence of four years of pure hustle.  Dorothy had no room for mysticism or false promises and dismissed the entire experience with a toss of the scribbled papers once she was out of sight of her cohort to the adventure. 

Bill also worked at the Farmer’s Home Administration.  He and Dorothy knew one another from a distance at college.  They would often travel together to rural farms around East Alabama.  Dorothy would meet with the wives to discuss food preservation while my grandfather consulted the farmers over crops.  It was a new deal program brought in by Roosevelt to stave off the depression both of them had weathered as young people.  Their work relationship grew to a courtship but due to the rules of the day they had to be “on the sly” as Bill put it.  He loved to laugh about all the men who sought out Dorothy before and during their dating years and the rebuffs she gave them in favor of him.  He told stories of the two of them riding the back roads of Alabama, stopping at every bridge for a kiss.  When Bill was called to WWII, they decided to wait to marry until he returned.  In the meantime Dorothy moved to a better job testing ammunition.  She got to be Rosy the riveter and there were more suitors to rebuff.  They married in Arlington, VA where Bill was stationed after the war and according to Dorothy she would have stayed forever.  But Bill missed Alabama and so they returned to Chambers County. 

She thought little of it when he took her home to meet his family and she found out that his family referred to him by his middle name “Isaac”.  By that time her short encounter with Mayahyley was separated by years of long days working men’s jobs and a great war.  

Despite their sixty years together, my grandparents offered very little concrete advice on the subject of romantic relationships.  I know this because I spent the better part of my 20’s begging them to bestow some insight on how to know what was real; certain, as they seemed to be as they were well beyond a quarter century together by that time.  What I got were stories like these, of their love when it was new.   I heard about my Grandmother’s visit to Mayhayley on one Sunday afternoon while she lay resting on the sofa.  Granddaddy was sleeping in the bedroom. They were both in their eighties by now.  His legs were failing from neuropathy related to his diabetes and he could barely walk.  Grandmother had kept him on a strict diet eating the vegetables they grew; but other factors were starting to move in on his health and she was weary from bearing witness to his pain.  She told me she couldn’t pin point the moment when she realized Mayhayley had been right on the money.  Somebody somewhere certainly mentioned something about that crazy fortuneteller in West Georgia and the recollection came to her.  By then she was married with kids and no doubt her realization was interrupted by something one of them was in to.  It was what she thought to tell me that day as I begged her once again for a sign of certainty in love. After she spoke the clock on the mantle ticked between our silences, as we pondered our time left together and whether we would want to know anything beyond that moment.

Unpacking

For as much trouble as they can be to seed, plant and grow, the root of a tomato is surprisingly small.  At the end of the growing season, after enough tomato sandwiches to make me pee red, after the wet musty green has faded to rust and then brown and its time to clean the garden it is always to my dismay that the wilted vine tended and babied for months can be yanked from the ground anchored by a clod  no bigger than my fist.  As a perpetual renter I took serious the ownership of sizing up things I could create from thin air such as the width of a tomato plants stem or the arms length of a bunch of dried garlic. While in graduate school in Alabama, I spent an entire day behind a tiller outside the single wide trailer I called home and turned up enough copperheads to line a fence that could bring enough rain to float Noah.  My brother loaned me the tiller.  He showed up at 6 AM, cranked the rusted machine by pouring gasoline over the engine and hollered “don’t turn her off, if you do you’ll have to do this all over again” as he jumped in the cab of his truck, turned the key and drove off into the dawn leaving nothing but a white cloud of rusted muffler exhaust.  When I lived in California someone told me about the concept of manure tea so I brewed a batch in the corner of a plot I had while working and living on a field station for University of California Davis.  The only thing that got tended that summer  was me when I unexpectedly fell in love with a California boy from my yoga class.  I spent prime gardening hours lounging naked and skipping rocks along river banks up and down the sierras while eating tofu sandwiches on sprouted grain bread. I was not a west coast girl so when the seasons changed I moved.  It was a time when long distance relationship meant being tied to a landline phone or a computer lab for email.  Our relationship went the way of the manure tea left stagnant in the wake of my departure.  In Albuquerque, New Mexico I lined the edge of my backyard with butterbean seeds handed down by my grandmother and had them trellised and running just in time for my landlord/ roommate have her contractor to rip them out as part of her landscaping renovation, which included building a sustainable environmentally friendly straw bail fence.  I came home from my job to find the blooming vines with roots exposed curled in a pile of mud and hay remnants soon to be hauled off to make room for the pagoda.  I just told my grandmother her beans didn’t agree with the dry climate.  

I had the best luck in Decatur, Georgia in garden boxes my husband built shortly after we were married.  My heirloom tomatoes would have won the prize at the county fair if I had bothered to venture out in Atlanta traffic to try and find such an event.  I made a gazpacho one August from my garden bounty that was the best thing I ever put in my mouth.  Then 24 hours later morning sickness set in and I couldn’t eat, smell, or breathe the concept of a tomato until October.  That was my first baby. We eventually moved to the North Georgia Mountains and landed the most coveted rental in the county at the base of the southern Appalachian Mountains.  Our rent included a prime garden spot.  I was eager to open up the throttle on my gardening skills and start putting up food for the winter. By then I was a stay at home Mom and conditions were prime to tap into my inner Barbara Kingsolver.  Potatoes and strawberries were in by February and my dad and I seeded the tilled ground in April, the first time he and I gardened together since I was a child.  But by then the second baby was growing inside me and the first baby had grown legs and a desire to run away from me.  By May I was too exhausted and pregnant to do anything.  I watched a perfect garden season come and go as weeds overtook what little unfertilized plants came up in my coveted plot.  As my neighbors produced glorious food crops typical of the people of these mountains, I started to question where I truly belonged.  Perhaps I was less Barbara Kingsolver and more Gwinneth Paltrow on the spectrum of growing food.  As a tenant farmer, I remained stuck in a proverbial 1^st chakra of gardening, never moving beyond the groundwork required to see a full crop flourish year after year, a full cycle of compost move from shredded leaves to black gold. There were tenants who came after and cared for some for these spaces. Occasionally I would hear of some good soil from a notorious rental I once called my own.  Some lucky bastards in Decatur acquired a mini skyscraper of 50 lb. oak logs bearing shiitake mushrooms. Most of my work went back to seed.  Mostly I didn’t look back.

This past September we bought a house just up the road from my spectacular mountain garden failure.  We moved in just as the pears were ripening on the tree at the top of the hill.  My 2 1/2 year old son, Oliver was the only one to make use of them, regularly venturing to the hill for his snacks as his dad and I passed the baby back and forth between unloading boxes.  It’s now December and I finally got enough boxes broken down to cover the area I want to plant in the spring.  I layed out the flattened cardboard labelled with rooms from houses past.  My husband will begin to dump the mulched leaves on top and slowly we will build up fertile ground.  I picked this spot for my garden the first day we came to look at the house when it was still for sale.  I was standing not too far from there when I informed my husband that we would be buying this house.  It was the dog days of late June and I was ripe with child.  We had been waiting for 30 minutes for the realtor to arrive to let us in to see inside the actual house but Oliver was already muddy from the stream in the front yard.

The sun is perfect; the slope just right and there is a distant view of a mountain rising up over the yard behind us.  It’s fenced in so Oliver can run like Laura Ingalls Wilder up and down the acre and a quarter.  We can see the gorgeous valley out the front door, a hay field that someone else looks after.  I can try my hand once more at a decent garden and if it doesn’t make, well then there is next year and the next.  I plan to climb that hill until I am in need of a cane and then use my cane to climb.  My grown children can call me and tell me I need to get someone else to till that garden because I am too old and I can tell them to come do it for me if they are so concerned about their Mama getting old.  It might not be the garden of my dreams this first year.  It may take a while; but there are many seasons ahead of us.