Back Home Again...

I was born a poor black child. No, wait, … that was Steve Martin in The Jerk.

I was born a middle class, suburban white child, but lately I’ve been pretending my roots are more Little House on the Prairie.

As a child of the suburbs, one of the few times I saw anything remotely rural was when we visited my cousins in the “country.” We played in the hayloft, chased the pigs in the barn and pelted each other with unripe peaches and persimmons yanked from the tree. I would then return home and say condescending things like, “I’m so glad I don’t live out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.” I was blithely unaware of the irony since the dead-end street we lived on wasn't exactly a hotbed of metropolitan culture.

My other rural experience as a child was our annual visit to my mother's relatives in Kentucky. It was painful. It was hot. It was boring. We spent a lot of time outside, sitting on scratchy, aluminum lawn chairs, when there was a perfectly good air-conditioned house we could have occupied. There were mass quantities of old people and all they did was sit around and talk about other old people I had never heard of, and hoped to never meet. Their television received only two channels, but it didn't matter because my elderly aunt and uncle acted as if they paid for reception by the minute, so they never turned it on. There was nothing to do, nothing to see and I vowed nightly to NEVER torture my children in such a manner.

Last week I took my 10 year old on a road trip to Indiana to visit my parents. They live on a farm waaayyy out past the city limits.

There is a chicken coop. With chickens.

There is a log cabin.

There is a hayfield and a garden and a barn and some old people. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

I'm as happy there as a pig in slop. (Even my metaphors become bucolic.)

I called my mom the day before we left to see if the garden had any ripe tomatoes. I dragged my son out into the hayfield so he could see the deer running into the woods. I made my mother drive me around so I could take pictures of cornfields and barns and Indiana summer skies. Honestly, I don't know what has happened to me, but I'm worried it has something to do with getting older.

Could it be that my parents really enjoyed visiting their ancient relatives on those long-ago death marches to Kentucky? Did they LIKE sitting around in 98% humidity, swatting mosquitoes and saying things like, "Well, I always knew he'd come to no good end..."?

My parents' house is beautifully decorated and icily air-conditioned, yet every evening we wound up outside on the patio by the barn. (Yeah...It's a high-class barn with its own patio.) Papaw would settle in the hammock, Grandma would sit in front of an old box fan plugged into the barn outlet, and I happily sat in a scratchy, aluminum lawn chair while we talked about who died, why the zucchini plants weren't thriving, and the crazy dove who built her nest in the artificial tree on the front porch.

(It's a real dove. In a fake tree. Seriously.)

I tore through the weekend, snapping pictures like crazy, as if I needed to embrace as much healthy, heartland Americana as possible.

I took pictures of cows.

How can you resist a leaning cow matching a leaning birdhouse?! I couldn't!

I took pictures of cornfields and hay fields.

Then I found the barns. I admit I got a little out of control at the barns, but the one lady was very nice and agreed not to press charges.

I gorged myself on homespun images as if I had been forcibly removed from Tara in my youth and was just now returning, even though when I’m at home in Georgia, I only venture outside on my way to the pool or my air-conditioned car.

I’m not quite sure why I suddenly seem to be channeling Green Acres. Maybe as I get older I’m just realizing that a simpler way of life has its attractions; tomatoes that aren’t square, afternoon naps in a hammock, and conversation about real people instead of celebrities.

Then I noticed my 10-year old casting longing glances at the house with its satellite TV and Popsicle laden freezer, and it all came clear.

I’m just trying to give him what I had as a child: an annual visit to his mother's relatives where it's painful, hot and boring, and mass quantities of old people talk about people he doesn't know and hopes to never meet.

He’s really going to thank me for it later.