In some ways, I owe this blog to the little girl with wilted pigtails who sass talked me at my last yard sale.
You see, I was sitting in a lawn chair surrounded by our belongings in the driveway, nursing a three-month-old under an antique quilt when this woman and her little girl came up looking for a deal. The woman picked up each item, turned it in her hands a few times then set it back down on the table. Her daughter, who was maybe 8-years-old, followed, mimicking her mom’s routine down to the disapproving Hmmmph sounds.
While the mom sifted through a box of books, the girl stood in front of me with her hands on her hips.
“What’s under that quilt?” she asked, squinting.
“My baby.” I said.
“Why?”
“He’s eating,” I said.
“Gross.”
I shrugged. “Kids gotta’ eat,” I said.
She looked up at the house behind me and then at the two next to us. “I live on a farm,” she said.
“Cool, do you have a horse?”
“Horses are dumb. Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“I reckon you could.”
“What’s it like living in a house that looks exactly like your neighbor’s house?”
And then Ada, our very sassy preschooler put her hands on her hips and said in her frazzled momma’s defense, “That’s rude! Our house isn’t the same! It’s yellow and that one is blue!”
The suburban-sprawl; I think that’s the phrase the former editor of Southern Living used in a column to describe neighborhoods like ours that are, in his opinion, choking out the spirit of the South. And I guess it’s true that my house, with its aluminum siding and unimaginative floor plan doesn’t have the same gentility as those on Main Street, but what it lacks in architectural beauty, it makes up for in heart.
You see, this might not be a house with a history but my goodness, are there stories here. We’ve even got some characters that are straight out of a Faulkner novel.
No, we might not have deep enough pockets to live on a horse farm, but our backyard overlooks one and when we eat dinner on the deck, we do so watching Thoroughbreds run. And sure, I’d love to keep working my way further South until I have a white house with blue shutters on the coast but until then, we’re happy living on the banks of the Elkhorn, which Walt Whitman described in “Songs of Myself”, writing that he was a…
A Southerner soon as a Northerner,
a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade,
my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings…
On the outside, this house might look like every other house in the neighborhood. Maybe it looks like your house, too! But friend, let’s look past the ordinary to bring out the extraordinary. Let’s stand on our identical rooftops, sounding our barbaric YAWPS and live boldly! Let’s make these boring-beige walls talk.
