The land, Scarlett, the land

I’m sitting on the porch, watching the sun rise over Lay Lake. Last night, it was a near-full moon reflecting on the water just beyond my back porch, and the sounds were those of frogs and the occasional squawk of a bird. It’s quiet, peaceful; I can see the stars and feel the breeze.

I’m in the country.

My mom grew up in the country - Powder Springs, Georgia, well before the time when Powder Springs joined the rest of North Georgia as part of the seemingly endless sprawl of suburb that Atlanta has become. It was rural, and she lived on a farm. My grandfather was a lumberman, but he apparently also raised crops and had a few animals; I don’t really know, because by the time I came along they’d left the farm and moved to East Point, back then a blue-collar town that was named because it was the eastern end of the Atlanta & West Point Rail Road (the western end being West Point, Ga.).

The way I remember the story (you know how family histories are) is that my mother couldn’t wait to leave the farm and move to the city and live a city lifestyle, whatever that meant to a girl in the 1930s. Honestly, I’m not sure of the timeline, but I know at some point my mother moved to Atlanta, got a job, went with a some of her girlfriends to attend the “Gone With The Wind” premier at the Lowe’s Theatre in Atlanta hoping to see Clark Gable.

Hers was always a desire to ‘better’ herself – to wear nicer clothes and eat in white-table cloth restaurants. I have a picture of her in my mind – the real one exists somewhere in a scrapbook – of her sitting at one of those restaurants, her long graceful fingers holding a cigarette, looking glamourous in a way she never would have if she’d stayed in Powder Springs.

She joined the Woman’s Auxiliary Volunteers in World War II, which was the women’s Navy (the WAVs). Her father was not happy about that, saying that was no place for a proper woman and he would disown her. Maybe “disowned’’ her is not accurate, but clearly my mom did not go in the direction he thought was appropriate.

She met my father, who was in the Navy (actually the Coast Guard), and both were stationed in Charleston, S.C. They married either within a few weeks or a few months, depending on which of my siblings tells the story. My father wanted to go back to the homestead in New Jersey where the Melicks had lived for over 200 years, but for all her desire for sophistication my mother was not going to leave the South (they’d lived, for a time, on Staten Island when my father was stationed there and apparently, she saw realized that a civilization without fried chicken, fried okra, grits and sweet tea was not a civilization she wanted to be part of).

And so, she spent the rest of her life living in the Atlanta area, working full time, putting up with her husband, and teaching her kids to read and dream and think and want a life beyond what we knew.

But when she got older, when she’d retired and all of the kids had left home, and she and my dad had spent a year in Liberia as missionaries and come back to find that her cancer had gotten worse, she often talked of wanting to go back to the farm.

There is that great line in “Gone with The Wind” when Scarlett O’Hara’s father, Gerald, admonishes her, saying “Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, that Tara, that land, doesn’t mean anything to you? Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.”

My mom loved that movie. Certainly because of Clark Gable, but maybe because she recognized Scarlett’s desire to get off the plantation and live a life of “more,” whatever that meant. But I think the line about “that land” resonated with her as well. As she got older, mom talked often of moving to a place in the country, of finding a place to get back to the land, as if she were trying to go back to the farm.

She never did.

My wife, bless her heart, knows how that speech about “land” in Gone with The Wind resonated with me. Every time we looked at buying a house, I was always drawn to the one with the biggest yard, the most space, with “land.”

I never lived on a farm. I am smart enough to know that the reality of owning several hundred acres of pasture and/or forests requires more work than I’m inclined to give it. If I could buy a nice house in the middle of somebody else’s plantation and let them care for it while I just enjoyed the view, that would be ideal.

Yet a few years ago, we bought a place on Lay Lake, with a Wilsonville address even though it’s not really in the town limits of Wilsonville. We’re on a point, and the views from three sides of this house is of water or trees; on one side I have a neighbor, but the house was designed so that is not part of the routine view.

It’s quiet. At night, if I go out the front door, I hear the chorus of hundreds or maybe even thousands of frogs from the inlet across the street. If I go out the back and sit on the porch, I can see the moon rising and reflecting in the water, and hear the occasional screech of a bird. We have bunnies and turtles and frogs and lizards and all kinds of great birds.

It’s quiet, except for the early mornings when there is a fishing tournament and the boats are racing to their favorite spots and my end of the lake resembles the start of a Sunday race at Talladega.

I never thought I’d own a place at the lake. I never thought I’d really want a place at the lake. I always thought of myself as a “city boy.” I don’t hunt or fish or do those outdoorsy things that most of the guys of my age do. I certainly don’t farm, although I did plant and care for two blueberry bushes that produced a nice ‘crop’ of blueberries; and I don’t garden, although I did manage to keep a pretty bougainvillea alive for almost two years, until a summer storm broke it in half.

But perhaps there is that part of my mom still in me, that longs to return to the land, because maybe, as Gerald O’Hara said, it’s the only thing that lasts.