As I said earlier I thought of my Grandmother's house as HUGE. It is not. It is very small. Two bedrooms, one bath, a parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen. There is a basement/garage but all things deadly and crawly lived there. I didn't go to the basement often. There is an attic but I have no idea how you got there. I remember no access door or panel anywhere.
Porches are everywhere in the south. Grandmother's house has, (it still stands), a large front porch complete with swing. There was a side porch, my favorite, but it has since been torn down. It was big, wooden floored room, half walls and half windows. In the winter the storm widows were up. In the summer the screens and awnings were used. It was a great place to play jacks. It was the best place to sleep. Cool breezes off the river, windows open on three sides and comfortable old iron framed beds. Home made quilts and soft, soft, sheets. In the summer fire flies glowed like earth bound stars. They were everywhere. You could hear the barge traffic on the river. An occasional fog horn or some warning sound from one vessel to another. It was as close to how I imagined Mayberry could ever be.
There were annoying night time sounds too. There was the mantel clock which chimed every quarter hour. And there was my Grand dad who apparently invented snoring. But on the side porch you could close the door and window that were common to the house and just marvel at the peace.
There was another porch behind my Grandparent's bedroom. It was long and very narrow. It had a bed and a small dresser. The back porch had the same half walls, half windows as the side porch. The windows on the house side had my Grandparents bed on the other side. This is where my mother grew up. She didn't have a bedroom. She had a porch. The only other bedroom was occupied by my Great Grandmother Leachman. I never met her. She apparently was not quite as much fun as a toothache. Mom and dad always occupied this room.
My brother loved to torment me at home in the summers when we had to share the bedroom with the best cross breeze while the parents hogged the window unit. He would wake me up and tell me about the murderer with the knife just outside the window. He would tell me he could hear zombies and monsters and huge spiders and all kinds of big brother torture. Not in Calhoun. We both slept on the side porch. Completely quiet. Maybe he loved the quiet as much as I did. I don't remember ever having a night mare there. I was plagued with them as a child. Very vivid imagination. No Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock for me. My parents knew that was a week of not wanting to go to bed. When we had termites, I pictured them as spiders with almond shell backs. I could see them eating through the floor and eating the posts of my bed before they killed me. Calhoun was heaven when I was little, nothing scary. Nothing threatening.
Morning was signaled by the smell of bacon and the farm report on the kitchen radio. I still have this radio. It doesn't work but it is my Gramps to me. He listened every morning for information on soy beans and sorghum, tobacco, pork bellies. He was a farmer at heart. He had a huge garden but he missed his farm. Grand dad always listened and talked with his head back and his eyes closed. I sometimes wondered if his words weren't on his eyelids. He constantly chewed a cigar. Chew and spit. After meals he went to one of the porches to smoke a cigar and then back to the one he was chewing. He scared me a bit in my younger years. The thing I loved about him was that he always smelled like Old Spice. To this day I love that smell. It's the smell of Grand dad's closet.
I would get up immediately to not miss a moment of Forrest Glenn's time. She was awesome in the kitchen. I got under her feet and skin from time to time. This is when she would give me a salt shaker. The purpose? To catch a bird. "If you can salt it's tail, you can catch it". That amazed me. Really? How does salt prevent a bird from flying? WOW. I had to do this. I wanted a cardinal. My mother would cheer me on. This had apparently been a trick for a long time. I can now see mom as a little girl trying to salt a bird's tail. Oh, if you don't know, salt has nothing to do with anything. It just gets you out of the kitchen.
Too soon it seemed we would be packing and getting back in the old 56 Chevy and heading across the Bridge. Through Rumsey and a million tiny towns. Heading back to Texas. More service stations, dinners, cows and Holiday Inns. Mom and I would both cry for at least an hour. I imagined Forrest Glenn was crying too. Probably she did a lot of smiling and loving the quiet before she cried.
These trips were wonderful for many years. Then they were OK. Then they were the most boring things on earth after the initial greetings. I have some great memories of Miss Mary Francis across the street. She let me play with their taxidermied pheasants. I have great memories of playing and laughing and putting on my little shows on the front porch. I have terrible memories of the 6 of us crammed in a car to go see relatives I didn't know. In Indiana. LONG trip. I have memories of arguing loudly with my mother about how I was indeed going to wear my hair. Forrest Glenn was appalled. She had a poem she used to recite at me. Not to me:
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good
She was very, very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid
Soon I figured out that other people went places on vacation that had nothing to do with Grandparents. They went camping and to Disneyland and the OCEAN. What? I could not believe that there was something else to do. DISNEYLAND. Oh yeah, let's go there. Calhoun, boring. DISNEYLAND, heaven.
I started a campaign. I wanted to see Disneyland. Before long I would be in California. WOW, this is it!
No, it wasn't.
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