A bridge between life and death
Ilive south of the river between Ozark and Cecil on the FFF Ranch. The “most beautifulest bridge in Arkansas,” according to Wesley Sigman, my brother’s childhood friend, connects my old life in north Franklin County to my new one, about nine miles southwest.
It is a beautiful bridge. Once after a trip to California when my son Harper was 3, he pointed as we crossed it and proclaimed, “There’s our Golden Gate Bridge!”
When I was a little girl I lived on top of Carter King Mountain. It was Mr. King’s empire; his heirs still own most of the land. My grandparents had a little farm on the pinnacle for which they traded their house in a nice neighborhood of Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s.
When it came time, they gave my parents land to build a house. That house became home to me: dark brown brick with white trim, holly bushes across the front, and on the side rather stubborn azaleas my mother tried to coax into vibrant prize-winning blooms. They never complied.
PaPa died when I was in first grade. The most vivid memories I have with him are of me riding the back of a mean Shetland pony who followed PaPa all over the pasture, and sitting in his lap while we watched “The Little Rascals.”
Years ago, I ordered the entire DVD collection of the original Little Rascals in order to relive those memories and share them with my children. The show was not as wonderful as I remember, and my kids were much less than impressed.
Another memory is being with him in the garden. My granny brought us iced tea in a pickle jar and cornbread with milk for lunch. We ate together and chatted with her while cooling off under a walnut tree. PaPa cut a watermelon off the vine and split it open with his pocket knife. The warm, sweet juice dribbled down my chin. He cut the biggest piece for me out of the heart. It was the best thing I ever tasted.
I can still see him at the top of a row of purple hull peas. He’s in overalls, with a straw hat shading his broad face, swinging the hoe in steady rhythm. Who knows what I was doing at the other end; probably playing in the dirt. He called me; I looked up and he gestured to come quietly. So I tiptoed up the row to where he leaned on his now-still hoe.
He bent down to show me the treasure he had uncovered: a nest of baby rabbits. They were snuggled together, four of them, sleeping. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter! I could see their tiny hearts beating, and wanted to touch them so badly my fingers twitched. But PaPa shook his head. “It would be bad for them. Their mother might reject them because of it.”
It’s weird the things that stick. But in that seemingly insignificant moment I learned lessons of a lifetime: there are things more important than what we want for ourselves, especially if the well-being of others is at stake. Also, the earth is not ours to plunder, but honor and protect. I missed PaPa terribly after he left. I’ve missed him my whole life since.
Luckily, I got to keep my granny much longer. My brother Jim and I would ride our Lime Limo—the name of the go-kart we got from a Sears catalog—through the pasture from our house to hers. If she ever caught us without our helmets it meant the loss of our Saturday dollars (we each got one as weekly allowance).
It would be difficult to overstate my granny’s influence on me. Other than my parents, she is the other adult from my childhood whose effect I feel in daily life. In all of my decisions. In how I think, talk, parent, teach, and write. In the kind of friend I am. How hard I work. Even the things I find interesting or funny. She’s there, like a butterfly on my shoulder.
I resemble her more, it seems, the longer I live. While my mother would never utter a curse word, taste a drop of liquor, or miss church, smidges of these things sprinkled into my life, like spices, because of Granny. One would never say she cussed like a sailor. But she did seem to have a knack on occasion for nailing a situation with the perfect expletive. Even Mama at times would admit there was no other word that fit.
In addition to her fitly spoken words, Granny believed in the healing power of whisky mixed with honey for a cough, and enjoyed a glass of wine on special occasions. She did not believe in church, at least not for herself in the time I knew her. Family lore establishes she tried going with my PaPa and mother—PaPa was known for his loud Amens which were a novelty in the First Baptist Church— when they moved to Arkansas. But after a few Sundays she grew weary of the gossip in her Sunday School class.
By the time I came along, she didn’t go to services either, but instead stayed home and cooked lunch. Every Sunday after church there was roast with homemade yeast rolls ready for us at Granny’s table.
She is also responsible for my passion for politics and its intersection with bettering the lives of everyday people. She was the director of social services for Franklin County for 25 years, and brought people home who had no other place to go. I was too little to understand when she worked on Dale Bumpers’ campaign, but now recognize many of my ideals align with his because they were also hers.
She was there for every significant event of my life except when I was pregnant with my first baby, when Granny was dying. She had ministrokes years before that took her by inches, but it was cancer that finished her off at age 82.
On June 16, 2000, I spent the night with her. She put her hands on my swollen belly to feel the baby move. I sang all of the verses of her favorite hymn, “In the Garden,” beside her bed, like a lullaby. She tried to stay— to wait—until my baby was born. But she died that night. Grace was born almost exactly one month later.
I had been on a kick of reading Pulitzer Prize-winning novels that summer, and the one I loved most was “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder. There’s a line from it I keep in my billfold. It reads: “there’s a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
It comforted me to think of the love we shared as a bridge between us even though I was bringing new life into the world just as she left it. Love is the bridge that connected these two people who would not meet each other on Earth, but are two of the most important in my life.
Last week a friend lost his brother to the same gruesome disease. Just before, with his brother on hospice, one of my friend’s children told him he was going to be a grandfather. So now my friend stands in that space where heaven touches Earth, on the bridge between those two worlds, as I was the summer my granny died.
It is a bewildering, sacred place. A time to stop all the clocks, as W. H. Auden wrote. Like me, I imagine he will stay there immobile for a time, then slowly make his way back to the land of the living. He will greet joys with the birth of his grandchild. There will be things to learn, life that goes on. He will always miss his brother.
What I have found in the 21 years my baby Grace has grown into a woman is when I feel sad, lonely, overwhelmed, or a longing for my granny—and all that was ever ours—I can go to the bridge and find her. She meets me there.
Like Joy Harjo suggests, the memory of love sometimes is just as powerful as the experience of it. All that was ever ours still is, and no one—not even death—can take that away. Leaf subsides to leaf, writes Robert Frost. Dawn goes down to day. But love— costly, golden love—stays.