By Kay Cole, November 29, 2017 — As the plane’s engines growled the announcement of its final descent, I peered anxiously out my tiny window at the miles and miles of orderly green stripes, interrupted only by winding ribbons of bayous stretched out across the lush countryside like snakes in the midday sun. The sudden blinding reflection of light off the still, dark waters caused me to close my eyes as the aircraft slowly rolled to a jerky stop. The portable stairs rolling across the tarmac toward the doorway reminded me of my first airplane ride to Atlanta for the job that took me away from this place.
“Oh, no you’re not!” my mother reacted when I told her I wanted to become a stewardess after graduating from college in June. Fixed hands rigidly positioned on her hips and lips tightly pressed together into a pencil-thin red line conveyed her determination to maintain control over her only daughter. Unfortunately, stewardesses had developed the reputation as wild, loose women. The reality was that by the time we endured hours of smiling at all the grumpy, demanding people on the plane, the last thing we wanted to do was offer our bodies to one of them.
The morning dawned with the same clarity as to the reality of what I was doing. I was about to board a plane for the first time in my life, fly away to a city I had only heard of, in search of a job requiring me not only to fly all day every day but to serve meals as well. I didn’t even know how to boil water, for heaven’s sake! What if I hated flying? What if I got airsick? What if somebody else got airsick? What if the plane was hijacked? What if I really did have to offer my body to the men on the plane? But by the time I retired that evening, I was a new person with a new future.
I suppose it happens for a million different reasons. The need to leave behind our familiar surroundings for a new life. For me, some unnamed event triggered such a crystal view of my world that it caused a pain in my head and a scream to rise up from somewhere deep inside. I left home. Both fear and excitement became my constant companions as I maneuvered my way along this new course. Then later, much later, years later, an unexplored, unrecognized emptiness reached up and touched my heart. Its message was clear: it was time to return.
Home. Louisiana. Land of Dixie. The flat almost sunken land carpeted with cypress trees draped in mossy gray beards moving imperceptibly in the hot summer morning. The cicada buzz and mosquito whine slowly building to a crescendo as the days’s heat rises and the still, heavy air makes just moving difficult. Small pretty towns of remembered folks boasting an easy smile and fanciful talk of ancestors in antebellum homes with oak-lined drives and mint juleps on the veranda, southern gentlemen in white linen suits with syrupy manners hiding the shared secret of a smoldering rage toward those Damn Yankees, of fair-skinned women oozing charm and sweetness that belie a steely determination and grit.
The once simple two-lane road, now a busy highway, led me in my rented car toward town. Slowly approaching the local college’s entrance gate, I turned onto campus in search of the school’s historic theatre, named for my grandmother. The Emma Nicholson Fine Arts Center returned me to the building’s dedication program when my aging, diminutive Meme received a standing ovation and spoke to an adoring crowding of her determination in the face of adversity. She was a woman born before her time, a woman who had earned a degree from Vanderbilt, a woman whose name endures today in scholarships for similarly driven female students pursuing the arts, a woman determined that her granddaughter follow in her footsteps. I smiled at memories of that shy teenage girl, a nervous bundle of braces, eyeglasses, and gangly arms and legs, standing tall and proud under her grandmother’s tutelage, nervously reciting “The White Cliffs of Dover” at numerous historical programs.
Traveling along the flowered boulevards of Forsythe Avenue, I turned into the circular drive of Neville High School and got out of the car. The four-story, brick colonial building had aged well, immaculately groomed gardens of pruned roses and flowing quince skirting her foundation in graceful adornment. The undulating buzz of voices flowing from classrooms soothed me as I strolled down the cool wide corridor. The sunshine spilling through the distant door looked like a light of freedom at the end of a long dark tunnel.
Back in the car I passed the public park’s hedge of oleander, awash with vibrant red splashes against its dark green summer leaves, and the magnificent row of stately magnolia trees that lined the levee as far as I could see. The thick sweet aroma of the enormous white blossoms swept me into a poignant memory of a June day long ago when I had carried a similar blossom in my arms as I walked down a church aisle dressed in white.
I stopped at the corner of Myrtle and Milton Streets and saw my old home, now a stranger’s house. It boasted a new coat of color, and an unfamiliar car sat in the drive, my dog, Tilly, no longer asleep in the flower bed under the cape jasmine bush. The backyard looked bare and lonely without my beloved swing set. It looked the same and yet so different. I recalled an old picture, now hanging in my Baltimore home, of a baby girl, wearing a sundress and lacy bonnet, clutching the trunk of a tiny Live Oak tree in an effort to stand. Even in the still of the photograph, the tree’s apparent struggle to support the baby and the numerous rolls of fat on her sturdy arms and legs created an instant empathy. Sweet Tilly, my adored mangy mutt who bore the constant scent of her favorite garbage cans along her daily path through the alleys of the sleepy neighborhood, sat nearby with head cocked and ears perked up for this momentous event.
That tree now stood tall and proud in front of the house, rising fifty feet or more above the roof, its canopy of thick green leaves creating a welcome escape from the glare of the hot sun in the cloudless sky. My father’s camellia bushes, awash in an array of pink and white, had thrived under the stranger’s care. The red and purple bicycles scattered in hurried fashion across the lawn conveyed the energy and vitality of this new family. I liked what I saw.
The car seemed to lead me to my final stop. I had postponed this portion of my journey until the end. The cemetery was located far away from town as if in the mistaken belief that distance would ease away the memories of the dead. I drove along the winding narrow road to the spot I remembered from other occasions. The straight row of tombstones stood standing like proud soldiers in a grand parade. They waited here for me: Momma, Daddy, Meme, and the rest. The granite markers starkly reminded me of the part each person had played in my life. I studied names and dates etched in the worn stones and wondered aloud how a person’s life could be reduced to such simplicity. In the quiet solitude I shared my life with them and hoped I had made them proud.