Green … that was my first impression so many years ago as I stepped out of our family station wagon onto a plain so alien to me I may as well have landed two million light years away on a planet far, far away.

I seem to have so many recollections from my childhood framed in this way;  that time of my life was preciously encapsulated in beautiful droplets of memories and faces, sighs and embraces, life and light and … family.

The songs and styles of those ages were only icing edges of a cake far more intricate in design and nature than I ever anticipated. My life, tenure and stature was framed by my strong and hard working parents, traced by the even harder remnants of my Grandparents’ lives and accented here and there with a Pentecostal fervor shakedown and a ‘Jesus’ movement-moment (Kum-bay-yah-my-Lord) that meant a lot to me yet one that I never really needed because I knew Jesus well as a child and oh-so-well before I ever knew myself.

(I’m still not sure I know myself, but I feel I’m getting closer.)

As I get older I feel that life is closing in on me like some perfect circle. The things that once were, are now moreso because they never went away but were just hidden behind some façade we call life.

I walk up and down, and through these rows of corn and recall my Daddy saying “if you lie down in the corn you can hear it growing.”

Twice now in two weeks time I’ve driven up, down, up this odd and winding road; I’ve driven around it, parked on it and perched precariously on the edge feeling like a stone sinner in a pool of saint.  It’s like my toe has dipped into some archaic, almost angelic pool that I’d forgotten as a child.

Dirt roads.

My tires grounded on the sound as asphalt turned into roads paved only by strong hands and no man-made machine. My eyes and ears searched hard to place this; I’ve been here before! But the first time around I just walked in and out of it like the blind person I’ve become; I’m living in this concrete jungle I call home and I rarely connect with the girl behind the glass, nonetheless the roots of my existence.

I chew on things.

I took that saying from my Grandmother, and that’s what she said she was doing when she was thinking on things. She was small, tall, spry and mean as all get-out. I loved her, I hated her and I wanted to be like both of them from the first memory I’ve ever had of them. I recall she hated my Mother, but me and my mother both know it’s because my Momma is so much like her it would scare the pants right off of you if you didn’t know they were different people. . . but I digress. . .

Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re dirty!!!

I heard that so many times growing up I forgot who said it first but I know it was my Grandma Mary. She was so proud she’d spank you for standing sideways in a picture and I think I’m probably more like her than any of her daughters.

I think that because she was hard on me, and I always felt like she saw a lot of herself in my impudent face.

As a child I didn’t know what FRISCO meant, but I used to hear my Mother say the words like they were some horrid, swear word, the word the you CANNOT say, so horrid her mouth would twist with the very letters F R I S C O . Like a bitter herb makes your mouth pinch up my Mother would pinch up her lips when the words flinched across her lips like a smack on the mouth.

And as I left that North Nashville area today I realized what had resonated with me….why the dirt road in the middle of a city made my heart both ache and rejoice. I remembered her saying,

“All I heard as a girl, was OH YOU ARE THAT GIRL FROM FRISCO!”

and my mother’s mouth would twist and I could see the pain on her face, the rejection, the pain from being poor and having no control over it.

My parents worked themselves into the very grave so me and my siblings would have more, and so we did! We have!

We’ve lost something too.

Blackberry bushes in the spring. Bacon, eggs and biscuits in the morning, making jelly and wringing the clothes out to dry.

I got a taste of Frisco today, and I miss the wry!