Southern comfort

And the people held them in high esteem... Acts 5:13

A comforting beauty, Emily calls it, not dramatic or fancy, but comforting like a big warm blanket. Just like the sky above. The only sound is the whir so the evenly balanced ceiling fan.  And Andrea, not the hurricane running up the east coast, is eating popcorn and reading a book about the South and understanding Southerners pulled off the shelves lining the walls. It's 122 steps down to the dock from the eleven-bedroom Lodge on the cliff, and we explored that too, and the homemade sweet pickles in the cupboard before heading over to the Marina for fried onion petals.

So this light and dark shackled green world has welcomed us into her bosom. Andrea and I sleep in the very bed where her great-grandmother and great, great-grandmother were birthed.  The stories are falling into place, like so many of Mama Gert's Scrabble squares, in Parke's neat lawyer script journals or by one more turn around the Belle Meade neighborhood in his now duct-taped windowed Lexus. Claire wrote a song about that, the duct tape; not a happy song, but a song of hope and it rings true. Life is not simple and there is almost a Forrest Gump quality to the scope of life suffered and celebrated. We wandered the halls of a plantation home that housed Union officers during the Battle of Nashville whose owner outlived three husbands and finessed her way through wartime blockades and sly wink wink politics with Scarlett's aplomb and dimples after traversing the downtown streets outside of the Country Music Awards, jostling with short shorts with cowboy boots and sloshing plastic cups of beer. We also swept up the big front steps of The Club through the big ballroom into the small dining room for an intimate evening with Uncle Bill with the raised eyebrows and a slightly squirming second cousin explaining a proposed "gap year."

There is a generous goodness apparent in this place, this foreign land of Southerness, tucked within the low-lying slave-stacked stone walls demarking the lines of who belongs and who does not, stirred into each glass of tea punch. And The Family Resemblance is deeper than the shape of our eyes or how the room is filled with tall women. Andrea says that I slide right into the cheerful strength that emanates from every embrace. Yet. Yet something sent Scotty far, far away to Wild West, something that is not understood. "I just thought y'all didn't have a television because you couldn't afford one." And all these childhood memories, particularly those perceived through the eyes of children sorting through it and trying to make sense of Life, point out the craziness of us all, how very fallible and clueless we humans are; we know not what we do.

And the conversation turned to mindfulness and living in the moment. And soaking it all in, the four cousins and two daughters, sitting on the river dock with our cans of Bud Light and bag of pita chips, not exploring the "what ifs" but the "what has been wroughts." And, yes, we did swim down four docks to the Reed Trickett landing, paddling the first leg of the "Ellen Williams' Labour Day Triathlon," but mostly it was talk of Mama Gert and Pappa who lived their life with bigger-than-life-vigor. Just as the sun was preparing to settle down over the very comfortable, very rolling farmlands, we made our pilgrimage to Camp Hy-Lake, their legacy first planted over eighty years ago with four or five army surplus tents by the Caney Fork. Laughing families were just unpacking Arnold's into the unchanged 1940's cabins, and so many things where just the same: the gym floor under a new soaring roof was the same old floor where we roller skated on rainy days, and the stage in front had staged ever-so-many productions, and although the familiar screen doors did not slam their familiar echoing scratchy slap, they were hanging up on the new dining room wall as a testnmony to eighty years of camping at Hy-lake where boys became men. Andrea marveled at how all of our cousin faces lit up with memories, and how the sweet couple there pay special attention to the hydrangeas planted by Mama Gert, just because they were hers.


And of course all of these tales lead to the question, What is a life well lived? And perhaps, sometimes, there are hints of Mama Gert's oft repeated axiom of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story, but what really matters is the story written on each life and how the next flip of a page continues. And the pen of Poppa and his slightly off-kilter bride has dug down deeply into hearts and souls, and the beat goes on.

May it be so.