My Grandfather's House

It's been on my mind for a few weeks to write about my geographic roots. I am a first generation Texan, my mother was born and raised in Louisiana, and her father was raised in Arkansas and her mother in Mississippi. My father also has roots in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. I pretty much identify Texas as my homeland since I've never lived anywhere else, and haven't visited Louisiana very much since my grandparents either died or moved away by the time I was in my early 20's, about 20 years ago. I have very fond childhood memories of Christmas especially, which my grandfather loved to host in their spacious, to me at the time, home in Lake Providence which is in northern Louisiana, right by the Mississippi River levee, close to Vicksburg. My brothers and I would share the pull-out sofa bed in the den which used to be a porch, while cousins, aunts and uncles bunked in my uncle's old brown room with the trundle bed, or my aunts' old blue room with the tall double bed with the white bumpy bedspread, or the double twin yellowish brown room which shared a bathroom with the blue room.

In the dining room there were always carmels in a candy dish on the old buffet, miniature wooden camels from a trip my grandparents took to India on the sideboard, and a sign by the swinging kitchen door that said, "Bless the cook and stay in line". My grandfather loved to cook, Justin Wilson reminds me of him, but substitute a soft southern, almost Georgian accent for his Cajun. Those Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were the best I've ever known. I usually sat with cousins in the kitchen while my aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents sat in the dining room. We had traditional turkey, giblet dressing, gravy, homemade rolls, but my grandmother's creamed corn meant nowhere else but their house.

The white carpeted formal living room was where my grandmother hosted her bridge games, where we played cards, where the Christmas tree with it's huge mound of presents was, and where the organ that I used to spend a lot of time playing around on, occupied a corner . The back green painted concrete porch was the staging area for harvesting my grandfather's hefty garden yeild, as well as where homemade ice cream was occasionally cranked. The porch door was where the black lady came in and out who helped with laundry and such. There was a mysterious shed out back that we cousins used to venture into every now and then. It and the closet of the blue bedroom was where our parents' old toys, including scary dolls were kept.

There was a plaque somewhere that ended up with my mother that said, "When I works, I works hard, when I sits, I sits loose, and when I thinks, I falls asleep." My grandfather had that sort of sense of humor about himself, but he was a very respected humanitarian, active member in the Methodist church, and a city planner who sold insurance and real estate. People in need frequently came in and out of his office door - the one in my uncle's old brown room, where the rock tumbler and shiny rock collection, the 60's era adding machine with a small roll of white paper which displayed the totals, and the roll of stamps in the plastic container were. This room was at the end of the hall on the left with the second bathroom at the very end of the hall, and my grandparents bedroom was on the right. One night in the fall of 1981, when he was 76 years old, a couple of young men broke into that office and hearing them, my grandfather, protecting my grandmother and his property, got out of bed, got his shotgun, and seeing them in the darkness, shot and killed one of them. The other ran away. My grandfather was devastated that he had killed another man. He talked of nothing else for weeks, then shortly after, he had a stroke and died in the hospital.

I believe walls can talk, and though that house has been sold, those walls still talk to me.