Homesick

 

                                  My great grandmother Della Stewart and my father as a boy.

There's an old hymn called Beulah Land with a line that always tugs at my heart.  "I'm kind of homesick for a country...To which, I've never been before..."  Well lately, I've been feeling homesick.  I was shaken to the core the other day when I realized the extent of my deep homesickness.

I am homesick for much, not the least of which is my spirit's feeling of longing for, 'a country, to which I've never been before.'  More and more these days, as John listens to his news clips and political debates, I feel disenchanted and weary of this world in which we live, where the limits of how vile things can be is constantly being proven an ever-moving line to still more vileness.  

Part of my spiritual homesickness has to do with church as it is today and church as I knew it as a child.  It was brought home to me the other day as were driving along the old federal highway on our way to the mountain.  We passed by an old Primitive Baptist Church.  It is a plain and simple building to go with a plain and simple faith.  

That is the denomination church I grew up in.  I said it was plain and simple and it was.  For 32 years of my life, it was the only church I knew.  The churches I've attended over the past few years bear no resemblance to that church of my childhood.  The messages are the same, thank God.  But the peace of an old church, and of old people who have also attended that church since childhood is palatable.   The very walls are saturated with generations of prayers.  That's what I miss.  That feeling of abiding and consistent faithfulness.  

I'm homesick for places I knew once upon a time.  For the mountains we traveled so often when I was a child.  The majesty of looking out across the valleys from the heights of real honest to goodness mountains, the indefinable spicy aroma of wet leaves and water streaming and pouring down hillsides.

I'm homesick for Big Mama's airy, but plain home, especially in summer.  Somehow there was always a nice little breeze stirring through her home. Her bare floors and walls banked with windows, the way her front and back door lined up all created the loveliest cross currents.  I don't recall there ever being a fan, but I do recall windows and doors standing wide open.

Big Mama had only a few pieces of furniture and they remained the same pieces all through my life, arranged in the very same way, until she passed away.  It was the same furniture that was in her home when Granny was growing up.

And Granny's house was consistently the same through all the years, with rare and few changes in all that time.  The peace of her home, that saturation of peace that came from a contented woman in a home that was her own.  

It was a modest home, just two bedrooms and one bath, a kitchen/dining/laundry area and a living room but it was so much the same over all my life that even now I can walk through the front door in my mind and know exactly where every piece of furniture, and picture and decoration is.  The only rearrangement that was made occurred in her bedroom.  For all my childhood she had her bed on the outer western wall of the room but at some point, far into my adult life, she'd moved the bed against the living room wall instead.  I suspect it had to do with warmth in the winter.

I'm homesick for the farmlands I used to walk, both at Big Mama's place and here.  I remember wandering through a tall field of Sedge grass when I was at Big Mama's, following an animal trail into the wood and down a hill to a creek that flowed clear over amber colored rocks.  The deep quiet of the land sunk into my soul.

And the land here where we wandered and played, when it was all fields and not thick growth and woods.  Homesick for the place in the trees where we used to play most often.  Homesick for the many walks Granny and I made over the land, checking fences, or picking blackberries and wild plums, or counting cows, or just walking and talking to ease aching hearts. 

I am homesick for the aromas of my childhood.  Mama was an RN.  She smelled so clean when in uniform.  I remember the crisply starched whiteness of it and the light aroma of rubbing alcohol.  And of hairspray, the only scented item she wore besides her hand cream.  

And the smell of chicken frying on Sunday in Granny's kitchen on church Sundays.  In my early childhood we sometimes spent the night before church Sunday with Granny and we woke to the aroma of Sunday chicken frying, as she prepared food for dinner on the grounds. Our breakfasts on those mornings always were the same.  We'd have chicken wings, the liver and gizzards fried crisp and golden, the crusts cut from the pimento and cheese sandwiches, extra eggs boiled as she made deviled eggs and potato salad.  Later in our life, we went to Granny's home on the third Sunday of the month and ate dinner before the afternoon service.  The aroma of chicken frying greeted us as we stepped from the car.

Grandmother's kitchen always smelled of a mix of Ajax and Bleach.  Grandmother believed in the use of bleach, but she didn't overdo it.  She was very careful to mix it with water as instructed.  She used the mixture to wash walls and floors and her enameled cast iron sink and counter were spotlessly white.  And ever so lightly on top of the smell of cleanliness was a mixture of her Cashmere Bouquet powder and menthol cigarette smoke.  Her home never smelled smoky.  It was just a light whiff of something mixed with all the rest of the aromas, a perfume that was unique to her home and hers alone.

I am homesick for the people of my childhood.  The old women who attended church and who applauded me as I went through school, graduated, went to work, married, had children.  

And family.  I grew up with such a wealth of family!  Grandparents on both sides, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts and uncles, more cousins.  It was a vast family on both Mama and Daddy's side and all those people were part of my growing years.  They greeted me with love and fondness, and I never felt I was a bother.   They seemed genuinely glad to see me, to know me, to embrace me as part and parcel of who they were.  And now they are all dead.  Gone on to that country I haven't yet visited...How I miss them all!

There is no cure for the homesickness I feel. I am caught in an odd place, of being nostalgic for the things long gone and with much ahead of me to enjoy yet. Perhaps I shall live long enough to be homesick for these days as well.