I spent most of last Thursday crying. The thought of leaving my kids for three days and three nights and being either 4 or 7 hours away scared me. I've been away from the kids for that length of time before, but I've never been further than a short hour away and most of the time it's less than half an hour (most of the time it's less than 15 minutes, especially when it's overnight). The cause was worthy. My grandmother died and her viewing and funeral were in Rocky Mount, Virginia. My Mamma needed me there and I wanted to be there, but hauling four little kids on a trip to Va and trying to amuse them while emotional turmoil was happening just didn't seem like a good idea. So they got to stay home with Bob. It was a first for him too. He'd watched the girls in successive order while I was in the hospital having the next one. He's watched all four kids on occasion when I've had some time off. But never all four kids for three days and three nights in a row. The older girls knew what was going on. They knew great grandma had died and that Nanny needed Mommy to be with her. They knew I'd be far away, but that I'd be back on Sunday. Lorelei just knew that I was gone and she missed me. Liam missed me randomly, but it wasn't a fixed thing in his head. Still, I wasn't sure I was really going until I packed my things in my parents car, got in and Daddy drove down the driveway.
Mom and Dad and I talked a lot on the way down. We haven't had that sort of time together in a very long time (ever?). It was just the three of us in the car for four hours on the way down to Granny's. I had a lot to talk about. It's been a very rough couple of years around here. And the past three weeks have been nothing short of miraculous to me. They listened, asked questions, made comments. I was able to have the sort of conversation I've always wanted to have with them. Detailed, calm, rational, uninterrupted, complete... it was really nice. We had fun too. Stopping for dinner and having Dad pull out coupons and gift cards for Micky D's was amusing. And Mamma was amused/embarrassed when I sat on the sidewalk in front of the rest stop to take macro pictures of the flowers while they were using the restroom.
I love Virginia. We cross the state line and I instantly feel at peace. Like some tug at my heart is satisfied. I love the rolling hills and the tiny farms nestled in the valleys. I love the culture, the friendly, slow paced love of life, the appreciation for tradition and heritage, the ancestry that can be traced for generations that ties in to every history book about the beginning of our nation. I love the richness and depth of life in the south. I know I tend to see it through the golden memories of my childhood, but it affects me, nonetheless.
My Granny's house is a safe haven for me. It always has been. As a child and teenager, I'd spend weeks at their house over the summer, just hanging out, reading, writing, watching TV, talking, playing card games, eating my Granny's unparalleled food and creating all sorts of traditions. Every Saturday morning we'd get up and go to Carter's Hardware Store because they gave away free coffee and donuts. Grandpa would meander around the store and send us back and forth to get him donuts, not minding how many we snagged for ourselves in the process. Everyone there knew him and loved him and expected him to be there for four hours on a Saturday morning. He'd flirt with the cashier girls, introduce us to the teen boys and chat about life with the other men his age who came for the same reason. We'd drop Granny off on a Saturday morning too, to get her hair done at the salon. The salon was at the bottom of a Howard Johnson hotel that had a pool out in front. Grandpa loved to embarrass us by honking the horn to get the lifeguard's attention, right as we got out of the car. Their house, though, was the best place to be. It smelled like my granny, like Charlie, her perfume and like my Grandpa. He wore an aftershave that all of us loved. We used to steal his pillows because they smelled like him. He even put some on a pillow for my sister to take back home, she loved it so much. Their house was always still and quiet. Peaceful and restful and calm. I slept soundly and dreamlessly there. And I still do.
We spent Thursday night at Granny's house in Waynesboro. I slept in the basement, in the room I always sleep in when we go down there. I was painfully aware of the lack of my family. Liam usually sleeps in the crib in the walk-in closet in our room. Molly and Maggie are usually giggling and talking in the main room outside our door and Lorelei is usually peering out the curtains of the room down the hall. And I don't usually sleep alone. I have to admit, though, I was excited at the prospect of no responsibilities. It was a strange throwback feeling to being a teenager, except my parents weren't exactly in charge of me. My aunt, Cindy, had driven down from Virginia Beach to meet us at Granny's so after hanging out and looking at pictures and talking with my family, I headed down to bed to call Bob and sleep. Sleep is a lovely thing. Dreamless sleep is even better. I don't remember falling asleep or dreaming that night. I woke up on my own in the morning, peaceful and rested.
I had some time in the morning, after breakfast, before we had to leave. I'd brought my camera and new macro filters with me so I walked around Granny's house, taking pictures of the flowers and leaves with the morning's rain drops on them. It made me smile when I heard Mamma calling me in to leave. It was such a familiar sound, taking me far back into childhood.
The trip down to Rocky Mount was fun. My aunt Cindy is full of wit and sarcasm and fun stories about growing up. Listening to her and Mamma banter reminded me of Faith and I. It's nice to have siblings. Faith and I didn't always get along, but we're best of friends now. It's nice to know that, no matter what argument is going on, at the core of it all is love.
We stopped at the funeral home first. Rocky Mount is a small town where everybody knows everybody else. Mamma and Aunt Cindy knew most of the people who worked at the funeral home 'cause they'd grown up with most of them. It was nice, though, for them - to feel like their mamma was being taken care of by people who loved her and them. After the business side of things was taken care of, we stopped in the viewing room to see Grandma.
I've never really understood wanting to see someone dead, lying in their casket. It seems morbid to me. They never look like themselves. They don't even look like they're sleeping. There's no movement at all. It's quite obvious that they're dead and I think it's creepy. I know it bring closure for some people, but I could do without. I took pictures of the flowers while Mamma and Aunt Cindy arranged pictures. I asked Mamma if she wanted me to take pictures of Grandma and she said yes. I took some. It wasn't an easy thing to do. It was all I could do not to cry. In typical me form, I distracted myself by taking more macro pictures of the flowers until it was time to go. I'd said goodbye to Grandma before she died. I knew it was the last time I'd see her alive. But I said goodbye to her at the funeral home too, right before I walked out the door.
We had to visit the pastor next. He'd never met my grandma or my mom and aunt, so they had to go over the service and give him things to be read and tell him about Grandma. Aunt Cindy had written him an email and given him names of Grandma's friends who were still in the church. Mamma had all kinds of poems that Grandma had clipped out of papers and magazines. I'd sent him a copy of my memories blog (that I edited, mostly because of the Harlequin sex scene part). We spent a long time there, talking, picking out songs, going over the order of the service. Dad and I played with his dogs. He had beautiful greyhounds, one that was big and one that was tiny.
After the pastor's, we went to cousin Phyllis's house, where we'd be staying for the night. Her house sits on a hill in the middle of land that used to belong to my great uncle, Paul and now belongs to his son, Jim. It's way out in the country with cattle fields all around it. Those fields used to grow tobacco and there are still old tobacco sheds and smoke houses, falling apart among them. She has beautiful flower beds all around and two big dogs that greet you when you get out of the car. It's quiet. All you hear are the crickets and the wind in the trees and the sounds of the cows, walking through the fields and mooing at each other. After saying hello, we showered and ate and left again to go to Grandma's viewing.
The atmosphere at the funeral parlor was altogether different than it had been just a few hours before. It was somber and reverent. It hadn't been irreverent earlier, but the mood was lighter and the atmosphere more casual. Now came people to pay their respects. Old friends of Grandma - her best friend, Doris, who is six months older than Grandma and still drives a car. Children of grandma's friends, ones that were older than my mother, but younger than Grandma because Grandma was already 40 by the time she had my mother. My mother's friends, one's she'd grown up with from when she was little. By the time the last group showed up, the atmosphere was lighter again. At one point my mamma, her two best friends from high school and her old boyfriends were laughing, not so quietly, reminiscing about old times. It was nice to know that even in the midst of sad occasions, happiness remains. My grandma lived a long, full life and by the time her viewing was happening, she was already healthy and healed and laughing in Heaven, so why shouldn't we on earth?
The viewing was still hard for me. I was tired by that point in the day, I had a headache from stress and being in the room with my grandmother in her casket in the corner wasn't pleasant. I got to talk to a lot of people, though, and show them pictures of my kids with grandma and hear them all say how much they loved her and missed her and admired her. My grandma had taught Sunday School for over 40 years and knew her Bible better than most pastors. :)
After everyone had left, the family - I, my parents, my aunt, Jim and Christine and Phyllis - went to Applebees for a late dinner. Bob and I had taken my grandmother and Molly to that Applebees once when we were down for a visit. We all sat crowded around one table and talked about the stupid law that had been passed that allowed concealed firearms in places that served alcohol and had conversations that could only be had in the south. I laughed so hard I felt faint. It was a nice way to unwind after being so tense. After we got home, everyone changed into comfy clothes and sat around drinking homemade apple brandy and cream cheese pound cake and looked at pictures and played with the dogs and knitted and talked until the wee hours. I fell asleep on the sofa and Aunt Cindy slept on a recliner beside me and when I woke up at three in the morning because my poison ivy was itching, my mamma and Phyllis were still talking in Phyllis's bedroom down the hall. It was nice to have Mamma asking me if I was ok through the bathroom door. She and Phyllis thought I was getting sick off the apple brandy. :)
The next morning I woke up relatively early and showered and dressed before everyone else. We all sat down to a wonderful breakfast: egg omelet with peppers and cheese, ham biscuits, hash browns and cantaloupe and green tea. While everyone else was getting ready to go, I took my camera out to Phyllis's gardens. There were hummingbirds drinking nectar from the day lilies and bumblebees collecting pollen from the Rose of Sharon. Honeybees were swarming the sunflowers and in the fields, the cows were munching grass. I was able to get a really good picture of a hummingbird (a very lucky shot) and a few of the bees and cows and flowers before it was time to go.
At the chapel, Phyllis told me stories about all the people coming in to Grandma's service. We all went into a little room off the chapel while they closed the casket and everyone else sat down. I'm glad we didn't have to watch that. The only thing I remember from my Grandpa's funeral is when they closed the casket while we were watching. It was my father's father and my Daddy sobbed, right next to me, when it happened. We held hands and the pastor prayed and then we all filed in for the service.
It was nice. The pastor did a good job. He read quotes from grandma's friends, he read the clippings mom had given him and my journal entry (which made people chuckle). We sang "Blessed Assurance" and he read Psalm 121, my grandma's favorite verses. Then we all filed out to our cars to make the trip up to the cemetery.
The day was gorgeous. Everyone had been afraid that it was going to be hot and unbearably humid, but a bad storm that morning broke the humidity and it was sunny and cool and breezy. The internment was only a few minutes long. While people stood around and talked, I took pictures of the roses and the casket, the small groups of people talking, the statue near the cemetery plots and the view from the hill where they're buried. After a while, everyone went back to the church for lunch.
Mamma had asked me to take pictures of people, so after I ate (there was so much food, even a little spoonful of everything filled a whole plate) I walked around, taking picture and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Phyllis took me up to the sanctuary and told me about the building and more history about the land and the people. I hadn't been in that church since I was a little girl.
Saturday afternoon was lovely. We all went back to Phyllis's house and I went on a walk. Phyllis took me down to Uncle Paul and Aunt Ruby's house so I could see the old house and barn and then, at the bottom of her driveway, we parted ways and I went off on my own. I walked a mile up the road, to the top of a hill and into a field to drink in the view, around curves and down valleys, through bunches of Queen Anne's lace, pine trees, round bales of hay and history. I walked back down the road and a mile in the other direction, past fields of cows, over creeks and sandy banks under canopies of trees with the sunlight filtering down through the leaves. I took pictures of a big, black Angus bull, whom I startled and who startled me. I took pictures of an old, dead pine tree amidst a row of live ones. I took pictures of little moments in scenery - the part of the creek that ran over rocks between two trees and the little plants growing on top of an old tobacco shed. I drank in the peace and quiet and aloneness. And then I headed back to family and friends and a place that felt like home.
We left Phyllis's house in time for me to take pictures of my grandparent's grave site with natural light. The marker for my grandparents is one, with their names next to each other and to the right of my grandmother is my Uncle Jimmy's marker. He died when he was 12, my mother was 5 and my aunt was 3. My grandfather owned a corn mill and one August afternoon my uncle was helping grandpa in the mill while corn was being poured into the chute. No one knows what happened, but the corn stopped and grandpa went to see what was wrong and found Jimmy, in the chute, suffocated. He gave him CPR, but it was too late. I'm not sure my grandparents ever really got over Jimmy's death, though they seemed to move on and enjoy their later years. My grandmother always cried when she talked about Jimmy. I don't think I ever heard my grandfather talk about him.
With the sun setting behind us, we drove back to Granny's. We listened to A Prairie Home Companion on the way and I hung my camera out the open windows, taking pictures of the setting sun and the rolling hills, golden in the sunlight. Back in town, we took a quick detour around the Hershey Plant in Stuart's Draft and then stopped at the local Cracker Barrel for another late dinner. I ordered chicken fried chicken, in honor of my friend Carrie, who died a month before Molly was born.
That night at Granny's I called Bob and put my phone on speaker phone on the toilet while I soaked in a hot bath for an hour. Then I slept another sound, dreamless sleep until ten o'clock Sunday morning.
We didn't leave for home until almost two Sunday afternoon. I changed the sheets on the bed and packed my things. Granny showed me the clothes she's been making for the girls. I showed her all the pictures I'd taken over the weekend. I went back out to my Aunt Debi's garden and took pictures there too. She has gorgeous, big sunflowers and the sky was so blue that morning. The contrast was beautiful.
At first I took pictures out the windows but then I slept most of the trip home. I lay lengthwise in the back seat with the center strap around my middle, my sleeping back under me and my pillow under my head. My dad called Bob when we were about an hour away and he had dinner waiting for us when we arrived.
The kids were happy to see me, Lorelei most of all. She sat on my lap and kept touching my face saying, "You're beautiful, Mommy!" It was nice to put them all to bed, to kiss their little mouths and sing to them. It was nice to be home, though I had a good weekend away, despite the circumstances.
And now we all know that it can be done. The kids do fine without me. Bob does fine without me. I do fine without them, though most of the time, I'd rather not be without them. When he and I go down to Virginia Beach for our tenth wedding anniversary next May, maybe the anxiety will be a little less. In any case, I'll have my camera to distract me. :)
