My mom and dad lived in a small house in Harpersville Alabama when I was born. I can remember snippets- the sharp edge of the concrete porch, the carpeted living room opening up the kitchen, a woman with red hair. She must be my mom. There’s no sense of motion or narrative, just snapshots.
We moved up the road a ways, around the time I really started recording memories. That neighborhood made a loop and we lived at the minus pi over two position, while my mom’s parents lived at the pi over two position.
When I was little, we’d walk around the block to see them, Pop and Nina. People smoked indoors back then; it swirled in the air over every bowl of blueberries I had next to the screen door in their dimly lit kitchen. I’d sit across from Pop as he’d eat cornbread soaking in buttermilk. She had a long silver Cadillac in the carport, my grandmother, and a little dog named Rambo. She kept holly bushes in front of her windows that would poke my fingers if I touched the tips, and her backyard, which at the time seemed huge to me, was surrounded on three sides by a chain link fence. Figs, apples, and her vegetable garden sat waiting at the bottom of the squeaky wooden staircase through the kitchen screen door. Nina’s brothers and sisters all had the same wispy golden brown hair that stood in wide curls and their noses all were round at the tip. They’d slap down cards loudly onto the table and cackle through the cigarette smoke rising through the light.
The whole family went to the new house a few years later- Nina too, natch. Her backdoor now opened up into our yard, where she’d float about in the pool. She’d quit smoking and survived breast cancer by this time, though she bummed one or two off of me many years later. Back then when her Cadillac was still in our driveway, late Clinton, early Bush II years, she could still run upstairs at the drop of a hat to cook a meal or talk with mom. She’d watch Judge Judy downstairs all day doing laundry, and I’d get home to a basket of my clothes, folded, pressed, ready to go into my dresser waiting in my bedroom. One rainy night, I couldn’t have been older than 12, she called the phone upstairs and asked if I wanted to play poker. A bowl of raisin brain, a deck of cards, and probably three dollars in coins waited on the breakfast table in the corner of her apartment waiting for us to play. The coins exchanged hands four or five times, and I lost count of bowls of Raisin Bran over the next few hours. Pop had been known to gamble, and I guess that night she had felt his spirit in the air.
No smoke hung over the breakfast table, and her hands were too frail to slap down cards like she used to. She moved to hospice after some time, and I packed up all her things and moved to the basement, but every time I stood in that corner the yellow light, the cornbread in buttermilk, the messy rolodex and stack of papers on their old coffee table all would come haunting in.
Stuff Cam Wrote 