Mountain Spring

Winter in the mountains hangs on like a canker sore.  I have no problem in the dead of winter, when it is cold everywhere and we just have it a little worse than my people back home.  But this in-between time as I wait for spring to rise to our elevation makes me crazy. I see my girlfriends’ pictures on Facebook of sunny patios and shirtless children.  Our friends in Mississippi have reported that the hummingbirds have returned.  Meanwhile, our feeders sit filled with sugar water hanging in silence like they’ve been stood up for the prom.  I have a friend in Alabama who once interviewed for a job at Virginia Tech.  One of the interview questions was “what will you do when you wake up one morning and there’s 36 inches of snow on the ground?”  My friend’s reply “I’ll turn around, go back in the house and go back to bed.”  He did not get the job.  This sentiment towards cold weather rings pretty consistent throughout the Deep South and I am not exempt.  However, we are mountain people now and that requires that we toughen up. 

One winter Sunday a few months ago my husband and I were readying for the day.  I had to go do some work at our local community center and he was tasked with bundling up each kid, putting them in the stroller and walking them to a late afternoon birthday party just up the road. I could see the reluctance on his face, the sky outside was overcast and the grey on the mountains indicated there would be no sunbeams at the party.  Half way through my afternoon I looked out the window to see large clumps of snow falling.  I jumped in the car to drive to meet my family; convinced they would be stuck at home in this weather. Instead, I found them at the party.  Oliver’s bright red coat darting through a pack of bundled kids in the yard.  Isabel was on the porch in her daddy’s arms dressed in her baby snowsuit.  The stroller was parked under the awning covered with piles of blankets.  He had strolled the kids through the snow; we were in fact mountain people.  I watched the swarm of children screaming,  “Snow! Snow!” only to hear my son chanting, “Cotton! Cotton!”

We are mountain people but there’s more to the story.  My son jumped in a hopper full of cotton with his cousins long before he ran through his first snow. My story is not his story, but he has enough of me to recognize cotton before snow and I have enough of home to feel no shame in griping about the weather.  

My Red Couch

My red couch was the first “grown up” furniture purchase I ever made. I was browsing a flea market in Wetumpka, Alabama and saw it sitting there with a price tag of $400. "Layaway" my friend Ashley said when I began to buckle at the price. We haggled the lady down to $350, and three payments later, in the dead of winter, my dad and I were headed to North Georgia with the couch loaded on the back of his pick up truck. It fit perfectly in my first non-roommate inhabited rental house, which came with my job at North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega. The couch was my centerpiece for entertaining in my sparse beginnings as a single adult with a paycheck. I had parties, flirted with through-hikers and cried with girlfriends on that couch. I was sitting on that couch one Saturday afternoon when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was falling in love with a bass player from Buford, Georgia.

When my job took me to Atlanta the couch got loaded with everything else and it followed me to every overpriced apartment that I occupied ­­– including the house in Decatur I eventually moved into with that bass player. When we got married we rented a house with a fireplace and hardwood floors, the perfect setting for my couch. But on the way into the front door the back foot was broken off, so we had to prop it up with my new husband’s old web design books. When the economy tanked he pulled those books out and used something else to prop up the foot while I worked and he went back to school to study graphic design. A few years later we had our first baby, Oliver, and as soon as he could walk he started pulling the stuffing out of the loose velvet upholstery. “You should just get rid of that thing,” my husband growled as we chased our son around the house to pry dusty cotton strands from his tiny grip. I wouldn’t hear of it. We moved again, had another baby, Isabel. For the past few months the couch has been parked in the garage of the house we finally bought, back up in those mountains where we first fell in love.

That bass player made good and became a creative director for a web company, while I stayed at home with the kids (he’s not a bad photographer either, he took the picture). The couch is now a home to our cats and lord knows what other creatures that venture into our garage in the dark Georgia night. Once, I found a raccoon poised on its two hind legs as if it were arriving for tea. But I am keeping this couch. It’s my flagship heirloom, not passed down from my grandmother’s grandmother but a symbol of my debut into responsibility. I plan on getting it stuffed, recovered, and the broken leg fixed. I plan to have many important talks with my kids on this couch about hard work, holding on and the importance of sitting still while you let the beauty of life wash over you. I hope it also stands as a reminder that it’s OK to take a chance and buy something on layaway every once in a while.

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.

Mountain Mama

I had my first child in the city, one of the trendier family friendly neighborhoods of Atlanta. Translation: I was a mom in the capitol of competitive mothering of the south. Playgroups were all about organic, but is it homemade organic or store-bought organic? Is it locally grown organic or the shit organic from the produce aisle at Publix? Don’t get me started on plastic. As our adorable baby grew to a toddler and needed discipline, my husband and I regularly garnered looks from fellow breeders and childless hipsters that had us expecting a knock on the door from child protective services any day. One day at the YMCA toddler class I got caught up in pre-school talk with a group of parents. One dad was boasting about getting his kid into a daycare program that would automatically funnel his kid to the attached pre-school. “Do you have Oliver on any lists yet?” someone asked. He was a year and a half at the time. It turns out if your kid isn’t on the waiting list by this age you might as well send them to head start. I was informed there still might be time but I needed to act fast. I did and we moved to the mountains within the month.

Fast-forward a year later and now we have a second baby. Despite our rural relocation I still fret over mothering. Am I being too lax when I say nothing to the mothers smoking 10 feet away from the pack of kids at the playground? Should I spank my toddler? Should I spank my toddler in the parking lot of the post office in full view of my peers? Would it be worth the 40 minute drive to take my soon to be preschooler to the only Montessori school in the area? These questions alone warrant countless comments from readers scrutinizing my own style as a mother. Writing about mothering is as scary as being a mother. Not only am I putting out openly in black and white my thoughts and anxieties on this complex time to be read and reviewed by my kids one day as evidence of why they are so screwed up; but I am opening myself up to the scrutiny of a vast arena of mothers, mommy bloggers, mommy coaches, and mommy wanna be’s who all opine on how and why one should or should not feel a certain way about mothering. My dear friend from home and fellow mom sent me a great blog post yesterday on why we are not failing as mothers. http://www.pregnantchicken.com/pregnant-chicken-blog/2012/11/9/why-youre-never-failing-as-a-mother. The day before she sent me a picture of her 2 year old’s self portrait made with yarn, feathers, and buttons. I sent her a picture of my son sitting on the sofa watching “All About Helicopters” for the 50th time that day. Proof that I get lax on myself sometimes and perhaps the isolation of living in the country is really insulation against the criticism I fear. I still don’t know where I fall on the spectrum of motherhood. I have never left my child in the grocery cart or coffee shop by accident. But I regularly forget that I have 2 of them now and rush to make sure the toddler has not fallen into the creek or the baby is still in the bouncy chair in between folding laundry. Forget about Etsy or Pinterest. My creative self is in hibernation for the next 24 months.

Inspired by my friend and her artist son, I took Oliver on a nature walk yesterday where we gathered a bunch of stuff and then laid it out on his little table to identify- fern, bark, pine cone, etc. We were going to do an art project but gathering and naming seemed to be such an accomplishment I decided to quit while we were ahead and before the baby woke up. As I write he is outside sitting in the family car pretending to go visit his friends JoJo, Gavin, and Dexter. My husband found him in the driver’s seat with chewing gum in his mouth that he found in the console. Oliver said “yummy yummy” as his dad made him spit it out and left the toddler and his imaginary play inside a motor vehicle to come inside and tell me how funny our son is. The parking break is on.

Planting Peas

the soil turns easy
still wet from winter rain
hands on wood
sifting red
over black
over red
she sits on a pile of leaf compost
at the end of the row
and reads

lukewarm breeze
picks up raven hair
her words carry over me
the stroke of a lover
the rhythm of the soil

I stop to look up
feel the air thick
as it carries
her voice
away

heels buried in clay
I go back to work
excavate bones
long turned to nitrogen
seep into my pores
this unusually warm February afternoon

Rat Snake

The total measure when you added it all together was a little over a half ton of man that made up Beth's father and uncle propped against the tailgate of the pickup truck in the front yard, most of it going toward the uncle. He was a colonel of a man with a round pot belly, suspenders and a constant smell of bourbon.  The sort of man other men deferred to on matters involving who to vote for or allow to come your dove shoot on a baited field. Her father was the exact opposite, rail thin in work boots and dark blue pants good for camouflaging the stains of a hard day’s work. Her father held himself against the truck as he did in all things; hands clasped around a can of Miller beer, his torso a permanent forward lean that made his spine look like the stave of a bow built only to shoot toy arrows. The collective courage of the both of them in the face of a woman amounted to little more than the spot of oil left behind in the driveway by the truck they leaned against. Beth glimpsed the scene through the poured glass windowpane of the farmhouse living room, it was the only one not cracked. She sought out their faces as respite from the tenant’s voice that had been following her from room to room spilling out the endless list of repairs needed to the house. They were not looking her way.

Half an hour earlier the three of them had stood on the porch together. The plan agreed upon by Beth and her uncle, the house’s current owner, would be to explain that the house would be sold to Beth and not the tenant who had been there for ten years. But when the dark haired woman came to the door her uncle had simply introduced the two women, referring to Beth as “the fly in the ointment” and the two men retreated to their current perch while Beth entered the foyer alone. “You are ruining my life I hope you know” were the first words the tenant spoke. She was tall and thin, made thinner by her stringy black hair that flowed over her shoulders and the cigarette in her hand. The house reeked of pot and stale tobacco, the living room with the stone fireplace had been converted to another bedroom which contained a man passed out on a stripped mattress. It was 11 AM and Beth surveyed the scene with a fair amount of sympathy. The woman was not much older than she and Beth recognized this portrait of a life as not a far walk from her own. She imagined the guy on the mattress sold pills to augment the tenant’s pay as a waitress and still she knew it was a struggle for them to make the $250 a month rent. It had only been a few years ago Beth and her own pothead boyfriend shared a trailer in the middle of some woods not far from here. When Beth realized she would not be able to begin her first job out of school until a bench warrant was cleared up on a speeding ticket, it had been the pothead boyfriend who suggested they hunt mushrooms in the adjacent cow pasture and sell them to pay the fine. Beth went for the idea and as a result was able to go to work as a teacher for the Department of Corrections the following month out west, where the pay was better. She could have gone to any of the landed gentry in her family to fix the problem but she knew it would only feed their view of her as a fuck up. So now she stood face to face with what could easily be a reflection of herself had she not reached outside the family land to find a fissure of independence.  Beth’s hair was washed and blown and her clothes a reflection of a woman with her own checking account.  The modest nest egg she had built up during her years out west had her in a position to buy her first house. Western money was good but southern property was better and Beth had decided to move home six months ago after the harshness of the west had her craving the green canopy of home. She decided to move back after her brother came to visit in his new Dodge flatbed pick up. It was a couple of months after her Grandmother had died and he let it slip that all the grandkids got money but her. She after all had thought she could do better away from the land so there she had stood with $40 in her bank account in a job that wouldn’t allow glass picture frames in her office, watching her brother pull away on a Grand Canyon vacation. As it turned out the money was nothing big, only enough for a down payment. Apparently, they all used their inheritance as down payments on something and now, five years later her uncle was in trouble and the farmhouse would have to be sold. She heard about that from her brother too and remembered the whitewashed carved wood that curved around the corners of the wide front porch. Embellishment such as that would easilly add another hundred thousand to a house like that out west, not to mention the 3 acres that came with it. The house was in a donut hole that was surrounded by her dad’s property, a right of way would have to be granted and she may one day get road frontage if she worked her way back into the inheritance pool. She wasn’t sure what that would cost but she knew for now hr nest egg wasn't enough to land something this nice on the inflated housing market. Besides, she needed to lay down roots somewhere and for the past few years these fields and woods surrounding the house were the places that always came to her in late night dreams.  The dreams always began with a realization that her grandfather had never died but was alive again.  He would emerge through some homemade barb wire opening in the fence or out of the logging road that went to the creek.  The recurring story was that he would appear and inform everyone present that he had never died but just retreated to those woods in his old age and lived there, letting the woods heal him from the series of strokes that had deemed him blind and speechless.  He would tell her things in her dreams, that he had watched her grow up running around those woods barefooted, that he was proud of her.  She would wake up in whatever foreign place she was in and nestle back on her pillow for a few moments still trying to feel the sagebrush around her head.  It never lasted longer than a few seconds and she would be forced to open her eyes to some place faraway from that scene, some place she would be trying to settle into as home but it never did stick.  A few times she tried to explain the dream to whatever man lay beside her at the time but for the most part she kept the dreams to herself.

She fought back the urge to commiserate or apologize to the tenant for her presence in a space that was clearly not her own but instead quietly walked from room to room, there to claim her version of a birthright she had been on the other end of for so long.  The entire house needed to be rewired and the hot water heater needed to be replaced, the chimney had never been swept and the well regularly needed to be primed in order to take a shower. These were the problems the tenant listed while Beth could spot a whole host of other problems from her vantage point. The kitchen would have to be gutted as well as the bathroom and the whole place repainted. But it was all encased in a beautiful endoskeleton of three inch thick heart pine floors and ceilings. The original stained glass light fixture still hung in the foyer and in the bedroom holes were drilled in the massive ceiling where a quilt frame once hung.  Dogs ran across the scraped floors around Beth’s feet but it was clear the wood was as sound as it had been when those dogs' great great grandparents were puppies being birthed out likely on that same floor. The tenant wasn’t giving Beth a second to admire the details and continued to rattle off problems as if she were begging for her life on the hangman’s platform. She spotted the attic door and remembered there were built in stairs, "stairs to nowhere" her uncle had described. She moved to turn the wooden latch to find escape in the darkness above her. “The stairs need to be replaced and are steep enough you’ll break your neck if you’re not careful” the tenant barked.  No movement of Beth’s was wasted as opportunity to point out another liability. Beth found the top step through a few cobwebs and a climb up a narrow entry built of plywood. Old newspaper from the seventies lined the tunnel meant to hide those details inferior to the rest of the house.  The cobwebs clearly had not been crossed since the Carter administration.  She found a joist to sit on and rested her feet below her on the stairs.  Her intention was to inspect the insulation and take a breath from the chatter below as well as that which was bouncing around the inside of her head making her doubt the whole deal.

The house originally sat on some land over by the railroad tracks.  Beth used to visit it with her parents when she was a child. The vacant old house had been placed perfectly under an oak grove surrounded by kudzu eaten land that her parents fantasized could be worked for profit. They would ride the ungated acreage on Sunday afternoons.  Beth perched between them on the bench seat of the old Chevy captivated by the volley of these young people’s dreams back and forth over her head. The original owner never sold until Beth’s grandfather was able to talk him into selling just the house. Beth's parents were well past Sunday drives when they got to watch as their Oak shadowed dream creep down the county road on two flatbed trailers and come to rest atop a hill bald of all growth except a few pines and underbrush. The house became a rental immediately and weathered many tenant renovations.  Simple add ons really that amounted to nothing more than excuses to not pay rent. The house outlasted her parents’ marriage and eventually passed on to her father’s brother who did nothing to elevate its condition; until today when he deposited his only niece at the front door.  Slips of light from the day were stealing in through the clapboard siding and broken attic vents. Beth wearily pointed the flashlight over the attic floor to survey the damage but surprisingly found nothing more than dry fluffy insulation throughout. There were no boards down for storage, no light, no perks but no leaks or moldy smells either. Beth knew buying from her family was a deal with the devil. Her mother would warn her not to do it. She knew what they were capable of, dirty land surveys, pay offs to inspectors and judges all in the name of family land. The history poured over her like a cold shower. Her grandfather loved this house but never gave it to her father, the offspring who spent his life watching it deteriorate like a burned out lighthouse looking over a sea of neglect. Beth ran the flashlight over the scene once more looking for rat nests. Out of the corner of her eye she caught movement but too smooth to be a rat. At first it looked like an electrical cord twisted through one of the attic beams but the smooth quiet motion revealed otherwise. The snake startled her at first, her years in the city still close to the surface. But the shock of her proximity to the reptile hit  her deep enough that she was able to regain herself in time for her nerves to smooth out before her body reacted to the initial adrenaline surge.  Fight or flight.  She remained still and watched through narrow light the black snake glide through the attic beam as smoothly as her grandfather had once driven the fields in his old chevy surveying the fields; knowing all the potholes by heart but in no hurry to get by them. Its length indicated it had lived in this quietness for decades, the stillness of the attic its domain. Beth had been taught as a child that to kill this type of snake was sacrilege to your home and hearth, opening the door to a plague of rats and vermin to a barn, crawlspace, or well house. To know this was a sign of belonging to this place. She remembered her grandmother cursing tenants who moved into their houses from the university only to kill the rat snake under the porch simply because it was there. As a result, money would then have to be spent on someone to spray or set traps. Beth had been taught the nuances of the serpent, a pointed head, a brown diamond pattern, and of course the rattles of a death warning.  All instincts of survival and all meant to be fear’s calling card. The rat snake had none of these, only a tongue and eyes meant to frighten the weak. Beth sat in the darkness as the snake passed like a quiet freight train at midnight. She would buy this house. She would get an honest survey, hire a lawyer and she would fix what was broken and make it her’s. The roof was free of leaks and the crawlspace dry, everything else could be built to be made strong again.