Suburban Goddess

Every time I come home, I have to make some time to see my grandmother. I’m pretty lucky that Alex has had the chance to meet her great-grandmother; I have a few photographs of them together that I cherish.

My grandmother was a victim of Katrina in the worst sense – the tiny town of Pearlington, MS took on a 12 foot storm surge, obliterating everything in it’s path. Since Katrina, over 300 of it’s elderly residents have died, and there really weren’t that many residents to start with. It’s always surreal to drive through there; the only remenants of my life growing up there are a few bricks and an occasional tree.

Since Dad’s illness has been diagnosed, family history has become very important to me, so I decided that on this trip, I would take a picture of what was left of our old front porch… it’s stone half-cicle stairs and cinder-block base are all that remains. Our house sat right next to an identical one owed by an old lady named Ms. Juanita. Our old driveway had washed away, so I was forced to park beneath the old oak tree that stretched over hers. The fate of her old house was the same as ours; only bricks of the front porch remain.

As I stepped out of the car, the first thing that struck me was the distance between the houses, and the distance from the house to the front fence. As a kid, I felt like our yard was HUGE… standing there at the moment, I was amazed at how small it really was. Next to the old oak, there used to be a huge magnolia tree, but all that was left of it was a dead trunk… I think of that tree every time I even hear the word magnolia, and now it’s gone.

As I stepped around the rubble, my mom called out, “Yeah, they buried Ms. Juanita and her mother under that oak tree.”

I looked at the short distance from where I was standing to the tree, and immeditely stepped back, looking for a marker.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. That’s where they wanted to be buried.”

“I thought there were laws about that kind of stuff!”

“Yeah, well, it’s Mississippi….”

Indeed, it was. And now, everytime I pass that property, instead of thinking in a melancholy way that my old home is gone, the only thing I will be able to think is:

There a dead lady under that tree.

And it will make me smile, because somehow, life goes on.

This entry was posted on August 24, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.