At home and at peace with the ghost of Miz Kelly (my long DU goodbye)

Fly by night

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Tue Nov-15-11 01:05 PM
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At home and at peace with the ghost of Miz Kelly (my long DU goodbye)

Edited on Tue Nov-15-11 01:13 PM by Fly by night

“When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the Garden.”

Minnie Aumonier
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When I was still a teenager (a junior at Vanderbilt in 1969), I first met Miz Bet Kelly, the gentle guiding spirit of the land that I am now a part of. Several of my professors had gone together and bought an isolated weekend retreat in northwest Maury county that fall (27 acres and a house, for $3,000), and the only way to reach their land was to drive through the rest of Kelly Holler. On their first trip to the farm that late fall, the professors had invited a dozen undergrad and grad students (including me) to help them christen their new land and I was very happy to accept.

My girlfriend and I came out late and, after leaving the paved road and fording seven creeks (none with bridges), we had arrived (we dearly hoped) in Kelly Holler. Sitting on her front porch, Miz Kelly waved at us and so I stopped to make sure we were still on the right path. This granny woman, then 85, was sitting in her rocker while her husband Bud (the only male child of Bullhead Kelly and the youngest of twelve when he had been born 90 years earlier in that same cabin) sat on a small bench, whittling a hammer handle from heartwood hickory. My girlfriend and I were unaware that we were just the latest in a continuous microbus convoy of long-haired collegians to ask Miz Kelly for directions that day. Even so, she seemed genuinely happy to meet us, we young’uns from “Vandy-vilt” who had come into her quiet holler that day from another world that was only thirty miles north but at least a century away from her reality.

Unlike all of the professors and most of the students there that cold late November day in 1969, I did not yet smoke pot. So while everyone else sat on the porch playing music and passing joints, I asked if there was any work that needed doing before dinner and got about the business of slowly, steadily clearing the cabin’s side yard with a sling-blade until it was time to eat. For that small favor, I kept being invited back by the professors, back into Miz Kelly’s deep holler world.

With the professors and their wives, I visited Miz Kelly later that winter, admiring a quilt she was stitching in front of her Warm Morning wood-stove, using the light that came in through her east-facing window to guide her gnarly but nimble hands. When someone asked whether she ever sold her quilts, Miz Kelly chuckled and said ”Why, honey, that’s why I sew ‘em. Between my quilts and Bud’s handles, we get by.” She motioned us to another room and to a rough shoulder-high cedar chest there. There were at least 40 bright, beautiful, handmade quilts in that chest; and that day I went home with seven of them, for family and friends and for me, sold to me (over my protests) for $10 apiece. “I set my price a while back, and I’m still satisfied with it” was all Miz Kelly would say. (We were later able to talk her into taking $25 for her quilts, but never any more.) I still sleep under the Dresden Plate quilt I bought that day, made with cloth scraps Miz Kelly’s daughter had collected for her from a now-shuttered Columbia shirt factory.

As my first spring unfolded in Miz Kelly’s holler (taking increasingly frequent weekend breaks from school for the sanctuary that this cradled land was becoming for me), I had the chance to do some small errands and favors for Miz Kelly, expanding the daffodil carpet around her cabin, hauling drinking water for her and Bud from their spring, helping her rotate the quilting frame whenever she rang a school-bell that we rigged for that purpose on her front porch. Those little favors earned me some of Miz Kelly’s warmest smiles, and secured a place for me at her dinner table and on her front porch any time I could be still long enough to enjoy a visit with her.

Bud was mostly silent – he was almost completely deaf by then from his lifetime as a logger – but Miz Kelly was always happy to visit with me, to answer my questions about her land and her families’ links to it, about the lives they had been allowed to live there. Miz Kelly’s people – the Stanfills – had lived at the south end of the mile-long holler and so her married life had involved simply moving two cabins deeper into that same holler. She and Bud raised eight children and several sets of grand-kids in their cabin, one set (three young girls and a boy, none yet nine years old) who were there that first spring to help me plant Bud and Bet’s garden, and then my own. As she became my other grandmother, I came to learn that Miz Kelly’s motherly instincts had always included others like me, others besides her own blood-kin. (For most of her life, Miz Kelly had been the area’s most trusted midwife, birthing almost 500 babies, losing only one.)

Miz Kelly was an old deep holler granny woman when we met, a wise old woman who could recognize things that the rest of us could not yet see (mostly in ourselves), who welcomed and molded the parts of me that belonged in that holler also, not just as a weekend dalliance but as a lifelong love affair. She did not rush her teachings nor ration them or her affections for me. However, she did continually mangle my proper name until she could replace it with her own nickname for me, “Tent Boy”, to reflect the summer I camped out in an old canvas tent underneath a massive black walnut tree close by her cabin, near the intersection of three farm creeks, beside the gourd spring. That is how Miz Kelly introduced me to others from that summer forward, calling me over one day to her front porch when three other country midwives had come to visit her, smiling at me as she said “This here is Tent Boy. He’s good people.”

Miz Kelly lived to be two weeks shy of 99 years old, and all but her last two years were spent living in her deep holler. Her final years were spent with me pursuing grad school and a series of challenging jobs around the country, but Miz Kelly knew (much better than me) where my home really was. So she waited, happy to see me on my occasional fly-by visits to the holler, always asking when I was coming home - to stay. That happened in 1981, when I moved back into the professors’ abandoned cabin (which by then I co-owned) after a stint in the Carter administration and at Stanford, calmly encouraging the squatters I was surprised to find there to relocate.

Miz Kelly and I had one more spring together in the holler that year, when I was 30 and she was 97, one more spring of gardens and daffodils and water hauled from her spring. As summer came that year, I believe that Miz Kelly became convinced that I was finally home to stay. So, without saying a word, she handed off the reins (and, with them, the responsibility and the rewards) of appreciating her home -- her land -- to me. Then she left the holler to me with her blessings and she moved in with her oldest daughter into a house closer to town, a house with running water, an indoor toilet and electric heat – with enough room for her quilting frame to be re-hung near a different east-facing window, where her work could be illuminated again by the same old sun.

Ever since we lost her in 1983, the spirit of Miz Kelly and the life-lessons she still shares with me in my sleep are allowing me to grow old here in our holler too. Miz Kelly opened her heart and her middle Tennessee deep holler home to me and for that I remain grateful each and every day. By the random and senseless grace of our shared Goddess, Miz Kelly became my granny woman and I became her tent boy. Miz Kelly was the best of people and those of us who were raised by her are better people ourselves for the seen and unseen gifts from her rightful place that she shared with those of us who passed through back then and had the good sense to stay a while.

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Postscript: Good mid-November rainy mid-day, all y’all. It has been several months since my last DU confession, and there are several reasons for that fact. My internet service provider (AT&T) has stopped servicing their local dial-up modem that has allowed me to connect with you for the past seven years. Consequently, I have cancelled their (miserable) service with few regrets, other than the regret of being unable to access (and afford) better internet service here at home from another provider and the more important loss that an inability to communicate with all y’all is. For the past two months, internet access for me has come only through once-weekly visits to a local library, more than an hour’s round-trip from my isolated farm. That is fine with me, because it has given me at least three more hours of free time each day that I previously spent connected online, disconnected from the real world that has always been waiting for me, just outside my old cabin’s north-facing window.

With that freed-up time, I have gotten more farmwork done, preparing my blueberry patch for side-shoot transplants that will be dug up from around their mother plants and replanted once the ground is frozen. I have cut and split over one-third of my winter firewood already, helped by a long-time neighbor and friend who can see how crippled I now am with two bad hips and a bad back. I have canned tomatoes, have made blueberry jam and blackberry syrup from berries frozen for that purpose in the dead heat of summer, and have roasted green chiles harvested from the eight foot tall pepper plants that grew so tall and handsome in my Garden. In short, I have regained the good sense to be here now, at home and at peace with the ghost of Miz Kelly.

I have missed all y’all and will keep missing you until the day when I can access (and afford) decent internet service again. But, to be frank, my hopes for real change in our body politic have suffered too many rude awakenings in the past two years for me to continue to expect anything better anytime soon, regardless of what we try to do to make it so. So it is perhaps easier for me to say goodbye to DU now, a most-beloved community populated by the many friends that many of you are, people who are also small “d” democrats to the core. I hope that all y'all enjoyed the story of how I ended up in my Tennessee deep holler home, a home that many of you helped rescue from the clutches of the soulless drug worriers who (sadly) still control our White House, who still want to keep illegal at least some of our sharable smiles.

Just like Miz Kelly, many of you are the best of people too. I’m mighty proud to have known you, even if I still cannot place many of your faces with your avatars, here or elsewhere. Maybe some day, I will be fortunate enough to be able to do that, some day when we can finally count our votes as they are cast in this country or, failing that, when we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the soon-to-come trenches when it becomes our turn (our responsibility) to fight to save our democracy from the farces of evil.

Take care. Peace out. Y’all come.