Homestead

I’ve been trying to put together this entry for some days now, turning ideas for it over in my mind from time to time. But it didn’t really come together until today. It’s very late at night, but I feel I must write it now. Although I’ll probably feel the same way about it later this morning, it’s possible I might not, either. Besides, when you write often influences what you write.

I came across an article in a favorite magazine of mine a few days ago about someone’s weekend getaway house, circa 1902, deep in the piney woods of southern Mississippi. She and her husband restored a rustic old “dogtrot” house that once belonged to her grandfather. She writes movingly about the place, of how it sits on a hill overlooking a pasture and how, sometimes when she’s out there and darkness is coming on, “fog settles over the ‘bottoms’, and the only sounds are the songs of the night creatures and the creaking of the porch swing. That’s when I like to recall the many happy memories of Hosey Farm.” A “dogtrot” house is unique to the South, I think. I could be wrong. But it is one which has a porch across the front and an open hall down the center exposed to the elements. Often the living area is on one side and the bedrooms on the other. I like that arrangement and have seen a number of examples of this type of architecture during some of my backroads travels in the South.

Well, I really can appreciate this idea of people preserving homesteads from their family’s past, and with it the continuity of their links to the land and the people who have lived there before them. I know that area well, for it is in the general area of Hattiesburg where I lived for two years in the mid 1980s. I looked on a map and realized the community where she lives, and which must not be to far from where Hosey Farm is located, is one I’ve been through many times during my weekend rambles down country roads in that part of the state. This is truly splendid countryside. There are lots of farms, old houses set back from the roads, clear creeks with tea-colored water and white sandy bottoms, and, of course, the long stretches of pine woodlands which characterize the terrain there so well, and which really form its geographical identity.

As with so many memories of the past, my recollections of this place have two sides to them. I had some very baffling and unpleasant experiences with some of the people where I worked and taught, and which made me glad when I was through with classes and teaching and could head home at the end of the day, especially on Fridays. So much tension would build up due to these various personality clashes, or whatever the source of the conflicts were, that I’d love to get in the car and just drive, anywhere and in any direction. It is a curious thing, but when you are faced with adversity or in a difficult period in your life, those opportunities to get away into the fresh air of the countryside are all the more precious. I remember driving on those country roads sometimes for 50 or sixty miles on a Saturday afternoon and just feeling the anxiety ebb away. Something as simple as pastures and oak trees along a deserted back road had an enormously calming effect on me.

I’m looking at a picture of one of those roads now. It is, in fact, my favorite stretch of road in all of Mississippi. I drove it countless times on my way to Black Creek and would always stop by the road where Little Black Creek passed underneath. There, I’d get out of the car and listen to the stillness of the surrounding countryside and the waters of the creek flowing steadily toward the larger Black Creek a few miles away.

Thus, there is this interesting paradox. I don’t think my memories of that road and that countryside would be as sharp and deeply etched today, or as truly pleasurable to recall, if the overall circumstances of my life then had been more routine or normal. I counted off the days until I could leave the place I worked, but I endured and made the best of an unfortunate situation. Those little country roads made all the difference.

Now I can imagine that if I ever had that ideal homeplace, it would be like the dogtrot cabin in the piney woods of southern Mississippi, where the air is so fresh and the roads so peaceful and empty that they only lead you deeper into your imagination and your need for escape to better places.

(Written in November 1999)