A short essay by Tim Sturgill
My Grandparents’
Homeplace
By Tim Sturgill
My maternal grandparents’ home was a sanctuary for a preteen boy in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I escaped there from whatever it is a 10-year-old believes he needs to escape. The world seemed smaller beyond their gate and larger within it.
I climbed apple trees until the branches bowed beneath my weight, stained my fingers red with cherries, and chased chickens across the yard until the rooster decided enough was enough. No haint ever struck greater terror into a mountain boy’s heart than an angry rooster charging full tilt — wings beating the air, spurs flashing like knives, pure outrage blazing in his eyes.
My grandmother planted corn and beans together because that was the way her mother had done it. A horticulturist might explain the corn supports the climbing beans while the beans return nitrogen to the soil and shade out weeds. She might not have known the science, but she knew corn and beans, and sometimes that is the deeper education.
She taught me to dig potatoes with a spading fork instead of a shovel and to plant by the signs printed on the funeral home calendar hanging in the kitchen. “Don’t ever plant cucumbers on the dark of the moon,” she would say with the fervor of an Appalachian revival preacher.
Her garden never disappointed. Half-runner beans climbed their poles, tomatoes swelled heavy on the vine, sweet corn stood in orderly ranks, and potatoes hid beneath the earth waiting to surprise us. Around them bloomed patches of flowers that seemed to exist for no reason except beauty.
Many afternoons I settled beneath an apple tree with a salt shaker in one hand and a tomato, warm from the sun, in the other. I can still hear the crisp crack of its skin before the juice ran down my wrist.
Forty years later, standing in an orchard three states away, I bit into an apple that had never fallen from grace and touched the ground.
The years collapsed.
Suddenly I was 10 years old again beneath my grandmother’s shade tree. I turned to my wife and said, almost in disbelief, “Now I remember what a real apple tastes like.”
My grandmother showed me how to thread half-runner beans onto twine with a large needle and hang them in the smokehouse for winter. She sprinkled salt into pans of sliced June apples so they would stay bright while we strung them to dry. Together we filled rows of sterilized jars that would become Christmas casseroles and blackberry cobblers months after the fields had gone bare.
She never announced she was teaching me anything.
She simply lived.
I learned it was far better to find the whole worm in an apple than only half of one. I learned that cornsilk wrapped inside a square of brown paper made a poor man’s cigarette and that one puff was all the education I needed.
The only lesson I refused was dipping Bruton’s snuff. One taste left me coughing until my eyes watered while my grandfather chuckled nearby. I quietly returned the can to the corner table and never reached for it again.
One afternoon I stood beside my grandfather while he held a hen under one arm. With an almost imperceptible motion he shook the bird and dropped it into the yard. I watched, astonished, as the headless chicken sprinted in circles, refusing for a few impossible seconds to acknowledge reality.
It startled me.
The rooster still scared me more.
One of my favorite chores was pushing the old reel mower across the yard, especially through the patch of mint my grandmother had planted. The spinning blades released a fragrance so sweet and clean that the whole afternoon seemed to breathe.
When the mowing was finished, I would sit in the shade with a cold “Co-Cola” while that scent lingered in the air. My grandmother would ease herself into the chair beside me and tell stories about growing up deep in the Appalachians, where the forests seemed endless and every holler carried another family story.
Her favorite story was having to wait until May first to go barefooted, then running free until school called her back in the fall.
Years later my grandfather died and my grandmother moved into town closer to us. Strangers bought the old homeplace.
The house came down.
The carefully tended garden became a resting place for rusted cars and ragweed. The flowers disappeared. The apple trees were cut for firewood. Even the little patch of mint surrendered to time.
Standing there, you could almost believe nothing had ever happened in that place.
But memory has a longer root than any tree.
The homeplace survives in the sharp sweetness of an apple picked straight from the branch, in the smell of fresh-cut mint rising from summer grass, in salt shaken over a tomato still warm from the vine. It survives in habits so ordinary I no longer notice them until they carry me backward across half a century.
Time took the house.
It took the fences, the garden, the smokehouse, and the trees.
But it never touched the seeds my grandparents planted in a barefoot boy who thought he was only spending another summer at Grandma’s.
Raised in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia, Tim Sturgill retired from the U.S. Air Force after 28 years of active service. He holds graduate degrees in counseling and theology, including a Doctor of Ministry, and has volunteered with hospital and hospice organizations since retirement. He lives in Oak Ridge, North Carolina, with his wife of 45 years.
Comments