Though I didn’t always appreciate it, one of the nicest things about attending college in the same small town where you grew up and your parents still lived was whether it was a matter of convenience or of necessity, you could usually go home. At least that’s what I thought in March of 1972, when I spiked a fever over Spring Break, and went to the hospital in severe abdominal pain. Consequently, I ended up at my parents’ house in town, didn’t make it back to Screven County for Spring quarter, and the friends who’d been staying at the pond with me had to find another place to live. I had signed up for classes but by the middle of April, I had to withdraw.

This might be a good time to mention that in late August of 1971, four months before I moved out to Screven County, I’d joined a group of students between quarters on a college-sponsored tour known as “Art Studies in Europe.” Orchestrated by the department’s art history instructor, this two-week whirlwind overview of cultural sites and museums for fine arts majors began with an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and ended with a three-hour final exam that was taken on the flight home for which upon passage, we received full course credit.

The first seventy-two hours of the trip, my eyes never closed. After arriving in London, we visited local exhibit sites like the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the National Gallery during the day, and at night my room partner, Elizabeth, and I met as many locals and discovered as much night life between Piccadilly Square and London Bridge as physically possible. By day four’s Sunday visit to Westminster Abbey, and outing to Winchester, and Salisbury Cathedrals, and Winsor Castle and the town of Winsor on the Salisbury Plain, I was exhausted, in fact, once we finally got to Stonehenge, after wandering around in awe of the ancient circle, I lay down on the flattest horizonal stone I could find and fell fast asleep. When our instructor discovered me and excused me to go to the tour bus, the long rear seat at the back seemed the best place to continue my nap.

As the lumbering vehicle drove the Amesbury Expressway back toward London, a compact car carrying an elderly couple and their two grandchildren crossed the line and we plowed into them, head-on. I awoke as my head hit a large metal ashtray, then I dropped four feet onto the divider in the foot-well. The grandparents and one of the children, a small girl, died at the scene. A second child, a little boy, was taken in the same ambulance that transported me, the bus driver, and our art instructor to Salisbury Infirmary. I don’t recall ever knowing what became of the boy, or the bus driver, but our instructor, who’d been sitting up front was treated for minor cuts caused by shattered glass and released the following day. I was admitted with a hairline-fracture, a mild concussion, and sharp pains in my lower back and left side. Due to the concussion, they gave me nothing for pain. I was already sleep deprived and since my only relief was sleep, I slept so much the first two days they feared the concussion was causing it, and kept me for close observation. The other students, though badly shaken had escaped injury, so the tour continued on to Paris without me.

I was four days in a communal ward with a clear view of the gleaming spires of Salisbury Cathedral before I was up and walking around.  On day six, they determined me ‘well enough for release,’ and with help from the British consulate and a Londoner friend named Chris whom I’d met at the Wimpy hamburger shop located across from our motel, I was able to fly to Paris and rejoin the tour for its duration. Fully rested and youthfully resilient, I made it through France, Germany, Italy, and the exam on the way home without a problem. I had paced myself, but I was far from over it.

We arrived back in the States just as Fall Quarter was beginning, and life at school went on as anticipated until right before Christmas break when my parents announced they were ‘separating.’ As a young adult living across town, it came as no surprise, just a big disappointment, and in some ways, a relief—they’d been heading in that direction since the Spring of 1968, even before then, some say. But for my younger siblings—one, off at college in Athens, the other attending high school in North Georgia—this Christmas would be a double-dose of reality.

During my Freshman and Sophomore years at college, a staggered load of one-to-five-hour courses had often required me to be at school all day and many times, at night. At first I lived at home and commuted, but at the beginning of my Sophomore year, I was allowed to move into a dormitory located right next door to the fine arts building at my parents’ request. By my Junior year, I was able to transfer to the Honor’s Dorm. It was reserved for students with high-grade-point averages or unique schedules that called for late hour courses and rehearsals including visual and performing arts majors, and as close to being off-campus as the college would allow. But in the fall of 1971, I’d long qualified to reside off-campus, and was living five minutes away in a trailer park in a trailer that my mother had talked my daddy into purchasing. With three bedrooms and a bath and a half, it had been cheaper to share with two rent-paying roommates than to pay the cost of on-campus housing or off-campus boarding elsewhere, only now the situation was quickly escalating into “fruit basket turn over.” Come January, while Mama would remain at our home in town, Daddy would move into the trailer.

In truth, my desire to finish what I feared might be a useless college degree was waning. After securing living arrangements for the upcoming Winter quarter, my trailer mates packed up and left for the holidays, but when I suggested I might drop out for a while—join the Peace Corps, apply for a job at Delta, or somewhere local,—and rent a place of my own, Daddy mentioned the pond house as a temporary solution. Bless his heart—he wasn’t about to let me quit school. While Screven County seemed worlds away, I loved the place, and decided to take him up on the offer. As long as I could keep my canary-yellow 1969 Ford Maverick running back and forth, I was up for it.

Thankfully, one of my fellow-students came to my rescue—my dearest hometown friend, Carolyn, offered to help me pack. Three days before Christmas, neither of us had money to spend on gifts, so we collected milk cartons, bought food coloring, vanilla extract, cloves, cinnamon, and a large box of paraffin, and gathered all the plain white tapers we could find, and after repurposing the wicks, we slaved the night away in the trailer’s kitchen making layered sand candles for each of the members of our families.

Christmas Day in 1971 was on a Saturday. My parents, my siblings, and I, ignoring the elephant in the room, opened presents together at our house in town. Everybody liked the candles. Later, we drove out to Screven County in separate cars. Daddy and my brother, Frank, picked up Daddy’s mother, “Gran,” and Mama, my sister, and I picked up Mama’s mother, “Grandma.” Grandma’s younger sister, our great Aunt Mary, who never wed, was an avowed follower of Herbert Armstrong. She lived with Grandma, but didn’t celebrate Christmas, and didn’t join the festivities.

Both Gran and my granddaddy had lived with the aunties in the Screven County farmhouse at different times as had my daddy in his youth. Born in the late eighteen-hundreds after the Civil War, originally, there were five sisters and one brother in that household. Now, with great-great Aunt Lottie ten years gone, only Granddaddy lived there with our great-great Aunt Mary, the youngest and last surviving of the sisters, along with her seventy-two-year-old nephew, Eugene.

As best I can remember, Cousin Eugene had always lived in the attic. A gentle soul who never married, reserved, and slight-of-build, he dressed as if he were always headed to town or to church. He didn’t talk much, and even after the aunties’ single downstairs bathroom was fitted with indoor plumbing and running water, he preferred to use the outhouse in the chicken yard. “That’s just his way,” great-great Aunt Lottie would say about her nephew. “Eugene keeps to himself.” It made good sense to me. I didn’t understand who he was—for a long time, I thought he was my great-great uncle, not my aunties’ nephew, like my granddaddy was, but it didn’t matter. Eugène was a walking enigma—not exactly a “Boo Radley,” just an unassuming eccentric, a smiling bee-charmer, content to share a slice of honeycomb with me at the farmhouse counter.

For many years, a deep well adjacent the farmhouse kitchen provided fresh water for washing and drinking, first by crank and bucket, then by a powered pump. As a child I remember thinking how even in summer, the handy faucet anchored above the porcelain sink yielded some of the coldest water I’d ever tasted. Enclosed by a window with folding panes, the well was perfect for storage, and over the years the shelves that lined its inner walls continued to keep food from spoiling when space in the electric refrigerator was limited. The well’s outer structure still braced the back steps leading up to the kitchen door.

The last time I saw Cousin Eugene was in October of 1974, three months after great-great Aunt Mary died. He was standing on those back steps looking much the way he’d always looked. He let me snap the above photo. As usual, I’d gathered with the family at the farmhouse that past December for Christmas dinner, but had moved to Atlanta in January, and was in Western New York State when the news came of great-great Aunt Mary’s death a few days into July. But arriving home that October—a new person, after a life-saving stop-over at Carolyn’s in Atlanta—I was seeing things with new eyes. When I learned that great-great Aunt Mary’s property had been placed on the market, I grabbed my camera, drove my favorite back road, East to Screven County, taking photographs of the Ogeechee and familiar landmarks of Cooperville along the way, and stopped by the farmhouse in route to the pond.

It was beyond strange, being there without great-great Aunt Mary. The last time I saw her was in early January before I left for Atlanta. Oddly enough, I was headed to the pond that evening, as I slowed in the twilight to make the right turn into the field, I spotted her on the left, standing at the end of her driveway near the cattle grate, just a ‘hollerin’. When I stopped the car, and went over to investigate, she told me she was worried about Granddaddy. He hadn’t shown up for supper, and it was getting late, in fact, she and Eugene had been searching for over an hour. We agreed he hadn’t gone far since his green Chevy Impala was parked under the big magnolia near the old garage, so I walked her to the house, gave her a hug, said I’d go looking for him.

Just past the middle of the field, my Maverick’s headlights fell upon a figure crawling around on all fours. Good Lord. It was Granddaddy, and had I been paying less attention, I’d have run him over. I slammed on the brakes, and threw the car in park. With blurry eyes, he looked up, squinted in my direction, and slurring the words, cried, “I can’t find my glasses,” and reaching around to pat the grass, he mumbled, something.

I jumped out to join the search, and after finding them in a rut nearby, I helped him into the car, but as I began backing out toward the highway he tapped the wheel. “Where’re you going?” he asked. “To take you home,” I replied. He shook his head, and frowned. I knew he must be lonesome with a lot on his mind, so I took him with me to the pond house, called great-great Aunt Mary to let her know he was okay, made us a strong pot of coffee, and before I dropped him off at her house on the way back to town that night, had a truly sobering, but totally memorable visit with this gentle, reticent, and somewhat bedeviled old man that was my grandfather. Worried about my daddy’s health, and troubled about the divorce, he wished that my parents had worked things out, though he and my Gran never did. That’s why she lived in an apartment in town, and he lived out of his car. He still referred to Sweetie as mine, though he was the one who’d taken care of him after I left, but lately, instead of sleeping at the pond or in the woods, he’d been spending his nights up at the farmhouse. Evidently, the land didn’t feel as welcoming to him as once it had. I felt bad for him, but given the situation and the choices he’d made, I knew he was resigned to stay.

Nine months later, the old homestead was quiet, and in the stillness of fallen oak and pecan leaves under the blue October sky, an eerie solemnity had settled over the place—as if frozen in time, but about to change forever. Grandaddy, Eugene, and the feral kitties were there. The house, the barn, the chicken yard, the scuppernong vines … all looked the same. The lightning-stricken, unrooted and tilted pecan tree I used to climb still stretched to the smoke house. The only thing missing, besides great-great Aunt Mary, was the huge live oak that had faithfully shaded the west side of the yard. Granddaddy said it had also been struck by lightning, and had to be taken down, then he told me that Sweetie had been missing for a month, that he’d searched for days and feared he might have been snakebit. A second dog was also missing, a stray black female that had showed up at the pond whom Granddaddy had adopted and called “Lover.” Knowing how much I regretted having to leave ‘our’ dog with him, he shook his head and smiled. “That Sweetie Pie had a happy life, Cyndi. He missed you, but you don’t pen-up a good dog once he’s been running free, and that dog was about as free as any good dog could be.”

This time, Grandaddy didn’t ask to ride to the pond with me. He gave me a hug, waved goodbye, and went back to picking up pecans. I’d spend the next six months back in Western New York State, and see him when I got home the following Spring, but not Eugene. Eugene went to live in an ‘old folks’ home after the farmhouse sold and died on October 28th, 1981. As I drove across the cattle gate that day for the last time with a glance over my shoulder and a camera roll of photos, it wasn’t with a heavy heart, just a sense that an era was ending. The harvest was almost in. A door to the past had closed.

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But looking back on that Christmas Day in 1971, despite the news of my parents’ pending separation and ultimate divorce, the gathering at that farmhouse was as merry and bright as ever. The old kitchen now sported an electric oven, but its original vented wood stove continued to function as a backup which meant you pretty much smelled what was cooking as soon as you arrived. The cousins from Jesup were already there. Others from Dover and Cooperville would be stopping in to exchange season’s greetings. Some would stay for dinner. Except for Sundays, holidays, and special occasions, the formal rooms of the house were normally closed off during the winter, but now they were open with oil furnaces burning. A cedar wreath with red holly berries graced the entryway and mistletoe hung in the central hall, but there were never any electric lights on the tree in the living room. Usually a cedar or pine, sometimes a holly, it was decorated only with colorful glass ornaments and silver strands of garland.

The long hardwood dining-room table was dressed in fine white linen, its candled centerpiece sported crimson camellia japonica blossoms and green magnolia leaves that were shined with watered-down buttermilk. A sideboard cornucopia of traditional southern fare included a roasted turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing, country ham from the smokehouse, red-eye gravy, mashed Irish potatoes, sweet potato soufflé, steamed yellow squash, baked macaroni casserole, butterbeans, fried okra, field peas, hot biscuits, fresh-churned butter, scuppernong jelly, and bee-tree honey. Beyond the main course, there were side-porch delights such as pecan, coconut custard, and lemon meringue pies, banana pudding, chocolate or traditional pound-cake, and fresh-fruit ambrosia. After the table was cleared and the leftovers covered, the furnaces were lowered, the rooms in the front of the house and the hallway were closed off again, and the dirty dishes were washed in the residual warmth of the kitchen. While the spryer men went hunting, everybody else retired to the sitting room at the rear of the house to watch TV, play Chinese checkers, or nap by the fire. In my younger days I might be searching the pages of great-great Aunt Lottie’s December McCall’s magazine for the Betsy McCall paper dolls, or scouring for cut-outs that I’d overlooked in previous issues. By the way, though the farm folks liked my candles, I don’t think they ever lit them. Granddaddy said they smelled too good to burn.

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Those last few days of December 1971, I spend in town at the trailer to finish packing, and on the evening of the thirtieth, my candle-making friend Carolyn accompanied me to Screven County. It was misting rain and chilly as we hauled my belongings across the threshold. We didn’t stick around. As described above, I celebrated Christmas with family, as did she, but New Year’s weekend found us partying in town with friends. After I took the last load of boxes out to the pond myself on Sunday, January second, I settled in and started unpacking. The day of Winter quarter registration, I ran into a couple still looking for off-campus housing. Daddy agreed it was a good idea since I’d be twelve miles out in the woods, and they moved in that night… Not long after, I was given a three-month-old Labrador-shepherd puppy who soon grew into a super watchdog as smart as he was friendly. Daddy and Granddaddy were always dropping by to check on us—Daddy had left his loaded rifle over the fireplace and made sure the extra shells were where I could find them.

As the quarter progressed, we adjusted to life in the woods. Each of us had managed to schedule afternoon and evening classes which made the time and distance more manageable, (even with late nights by the fire). The idea that we may have attracted a few ‘supernatural oddities’ along the way only added to the venue’s mystical appeal. Just when it seemed that everything favored our rural endeavor, some of the masked injuries I’d apparently sustained during the bus accident in the U.K. suddenly began to surface, and a flock of debilitating symptoms sent me to the Emergency Room over Spring break.

Initially, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis, prescribed antibiotics, put on a restricted diet, ordered to bed—Mama insisted that I come home with her. Spring Quarter had already begun, and after a week of bedrest, I tried to attend class, but I was in and out of the doctor’s office unable to keep any schedule, and had to drop out. So much for returning to life in Screven County anytime soon. I hoped to be well enough to attend summer-school to make up for lost time, and was resigned to continue the current situation of recuperation ,  … but even that was about to change.

Toward the end of April, my parents decided to sell the house in town to go their separate ways. They wanted to be out of it by the Fourth of July. The new plan was for my sister, Carole, to continue at college in Athens that summer, my younger brother, Frank, soon to be home from private boarding school, would stay with Daddy at the trailer, and Mama would move out to the pond house. I was welcome there, too, but all I wanted was to remain in town and get well enough for school in June, … a notion I had to abandon. Two weeks after enrolling I relapsed and had to withdraw, again. Luckily, I rebounded, but school still had to wait.

By the time my parents’ house went on the market that July, Gran had offered me the sofa hide-a-bed at her new apartment until I could make other arrangements. With school out of the question, I thought maybe I could at least manage a part-time job, so I’d applied for a serving job at the local Holiday Inn just a block away from Gran’s place. A week later, however, I collapsed in the kitchen of the restaurant—all of the symptoms were back with a vengeance, accompanied by fever, cramps, nausea, muscle weakness, and a strangely increasing tingling and ‘pulling’ sensation in my right arm and right leg. The doctor didn’t even mention colitis, but said he suspected that a large uterine cyst might have ruptured and caused a serious low-grade infection. That didn’t explain the nerve-related issues, nor did anyone seek to address them. I left the hospital with more antibiotics, and went back to the hide-a-bed at Gran’s.

That weekend, I was still feeling awful, when another friend, a fellow music-major and Sigma Alpha Iota fraternity sister named Susan who’d recently graduated, found out where I was staying and stopped by for a visit. She took one look at me and said she was packing my bag and taking me home with her, to see—of all people—her chiropractor, whose office happened to be next door to the apartment she was renting fifty miles away in Vidalia, Georgia. I’d seen a local practitioner in the past for headaches and ‘pinched nerves,’ but her “doctor of chiropractic,” a nutrition-centric graduate of Palmer College, turned out to be a miracle-worker. Like my friend, Susan, he was also a committed Christian.

A thorough review of my x-rays was shocking! Even the images of my upper spine were nothing like what I recalled from the x-rays taken by my local practitioner three years earlier. The new images revealed that from the atlas and axis vertebrae through the lower lumbar regions of my spine, the alignment had been dramatically altered—crimped toward the top, bent in the middle, and generally and overall, shifted to the right. When I mentioned the bus accident and how I was thrown forward and dropped onto the floor-well, Susan’s doctor said I was blessed to still be walking.

My treatment began with two adjustments a day. By day four, it was one. The following week, I was completely out of pain. I kept up with the exercises prescribed to strengthen the corrections, and by the middle of end of July, my spine was straight, I was maintaining a healthy diet including a supplement for GI support, and the debilitating symptoms were gone and never returned. My friend, Carolyn, was also greatly helped by this same chiropractor that summer. For the sake of convenience, we both stayed at Susan’s apartment to undergo treatment, and by the end of July, I was well enough to rent an upstairs room at Miss Irby Franklin’s old house on South Main Street back in town (without my tie-dyed curtains,… but that’s another story). In September, I resumed classes for what would finally be my last year of college, and though I still carried some emotional baggage, my health had been restored.

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In retrospect, Mama didn’t stay at the pond house long. She rented an apartment in town—the same apartment Gran had vacated to move into her new one. It belonged to a lady with whom she regularly played Canasta. While I was off getting well in Vidalia, my daddy and Frank continued to live at the trailer park until Frank went back to school. My sister, Carole, had an apartment in Athens and stayed away that summer. After our former happy home sold, Daddy spent most of his spare time at the pond implementing a plan to finally add a screened porch to the front of the house. Again, Bill Williams helped.

The Christmas get-together at the farmhouse was a ritual feast for which all the usual suspects gathered, minus Mama and her side of the family. That’s when it finally hit me how quickly things can go sideways in slow motion, but I wasn’t looking to assign blame or pass judgement. I was well, again, and thankful for it, and as I drove back into town to see Mama, I was determined to cope and move on. New Year’s Eve found my friend, Carolyn, and I enjoying acoustic music with the locals at our friends Benji and Sally’s rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Afterward, I drove home to Miss Irby’s alone.

From January on, I concentrated on finishing my degree. I’d almost accumulated enough credits to graduate in music. My friend, Susan, had graduated in music education and was now a high-school choral instructor. But I couldn’t picture myself as a teacher, and as there didn’t seem much for a theory major to do but to perform or write music professionally, I finished that June with a bachelor’s degree in fine (studio) arts and a minor in music. During those long winter evenings on the final stretch, I set my easel up in my room at Miss Irby’s, and when I wasn’t busy at school, working on the third floors of the Foy Fine Arts Building, I’d steal downstairs to one of the music department practice rooms to bare my soul on the piano. I saw my family—maybe, once a week. Some weekends, rather than stick around, I drove to Atlanta, which is where I might have been by Friday night, February 9th, had not my Maverick slid down an icy embankment into a ditch the evening before. It was the week of the Great Southeastern Snowstorm of 1973. Classes had been cancelled that Thursday, and I’d just left the Foy Building, where enough white stuff had accumulated on the roof of the forth-floor ‘walk-out’ for a bunch of gleeful students to be pitching snowballs down at passers-by below. Snow was a rarity, but I should have known better than to drive to that same rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town much less to tarry there until it was almost dark. After a long cold trudge back through the slush to make a phone call, I ended up spending the weekend waiting for the wrecker to show. “Good thing, you weren’t stuck in Atlanta,” everybody said.

Meanwhile, Daddy had the trailer relocated to a different lot at the trailer park, and he and Frank continued living there. At one point, Frank also stayed with Mama before completing high school in town. Come Spring, however, Daddy moved to the pond house, and the trailer moved with him. He had it set up just yards away from the house, perpendicularly facing the water. Frank stayed in it that summer along with his best friend J.D., and enjoyed a month of swimming, waterskiing, and general carousing before he left for Athens that fall to join my sister, Carole, at the University of Georgia. Carole had an apartment in Athens. Again, she didn’t come home…

After I graduated from college that June, I was as anxious to “get out of Dodge” as anybody has ever been. I was definitely “twenty-four and so much more,”  and Dark Side of the Moon wasn’t just another Pink Floyd album.. … Time was definitely slipping away. By August, when I was still hanging around, knowing how antsy I was to leave, Miss Irby allowed me to pay month to month.

Early that September, my college friend, Paul, and I saw a UFO over the Ogeechee River at Jones Lane Landing … Well, at least, I saw it. Paul was blind, so I described it to him in real time. It was dark as pitch that night. We’d left the car and were walking on the bridge when, out of the blue, a big ‘star’ emerged from the tree-line, hovered, and zipped off in the opposite direction. Everybody thought we were crazy until they read it in the newspaper. Evidently, they’d been reporting UFOs all over Coastal Georgia that weekend—at Fort Stewart and Hunter AFB in Savannah, and on Tybee Island. Ufologists now call it the Hunter Incident, and say the government covered it up. For sure, we didn’t hear much later, but I never forgot that sighting.

Also, that September, friend, Debbie, and I, and one of her Atlanta buds, made a weekend pilgrimage to The Farm, the large vegan commune near Summertown, Tennessee founded by Stephen Gaskin. author of Monday Night Class. It was a fruitful, eye-opening experience, and the dedication to community and spiritual connection was genuinely impressive, but none of us were ready to commit to austerity. We left after the weekend was over.

Though my three-year position with the College Union Board had ended at graduation, I continued in an advisory role to facilitate concerts and accommodate artists. I’ll never forget when Debbie and I took Z.Z. Top drummer, Frank “Rube” Beard, sightseeing after the group played the Hanner Fieldhouse on October 10, 1973. It was almost a full Hunter’s Moon—perfect for a late night driving tour of special county landmarks that only the locals knew about including the Mill Pond—in those days you could still drive over it, —and the Harville House, which after sadly falling into disrepair, had long been labeled the area’s most famous “haunted house,” much to the family’s distain. Granted, it was spooky, even in the daytime. All through high school, I remember driving out just to ride by—it might have passed for a horror-movie set, especially at night. The photo below was taken in 2014, but thankfully, a successful effort is now underway to restore the old home to its former beauty and grandeur!

Bravo, Harville House!

The following weekend, Carolyn, our friend, Sheila, and I decided it was time to ‘go see the leaves.’ We hopped into Carolyn’s car, drove to Atlanta, stayed with her sister, Martha, in Roswell, overnight, then made a scenic, day-trip to Brasstown Bald and back. On the way, we paid a surprise visit to my brother at Tallulah Falls School. That was probably the most we talked all day. The spell of Autumn in North Georgia has a way of doing that to you, and in 1973, the colors were exceptionally spectacular.

Familiar with the local music scene and venues, I’d initially met and friended several members of the Atlanta-based horn-band, Stagecoach, when they played The Flame that summer. When they returned in late September, those friendships were rekindled. Toward the end of October, I traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to join them on the road, but in November, when the flute/saxophone player that I fancied landed a high-paying job with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, it was like Waitin’ on a bus – Jesus Done Left Chicago followed by A Rainy Night in Georgia – Pavone for a Dead Princess. The money was excellent, and the opportunity was special enough that nobody in the band blamed him, but it put them at a disadvantage, and that wasn’t all. His hasty departure prompted me to rationalize a hasty decision. Overruling his objections—independent-minded, liberated feminist that I was—I was adamant. But it didn’t take long to regret it, deeply.

On the third of December I arrived home at Mama’s after driving fifty-five-miles-an-hour instead of my usual seventy to learn a musician friend whom I’d known since high school had died coming back from a gig. It was late, the highway was dark, and the band’s gutted school bus had hit a log truck. The band member who was driving the bus was also a long-time friend. He was in critical condition with a head injury. His recovery would be long and painful, but he would survive.

By December seventh, I was back in Atlanta to visit my friend, Carolyn. She had moved into an apartment with our friend, Sheila, and started a new job. She’d also started reading her Bible. She said the Lord had been speaking to her. I listened, but despite my current state of mind, I wasn’t that interested. Regardless, it was comforting just being there, and before I left, I stumbled upon an odd job painting decorations on the front windows of the corner gas station—it was a quick fifty bucks just in time for Christmas.

I’d given up my rental at Miss Irby’s, so when I got home, again, I slept at Mama’s, at Gran’s, or in the house or the trailer at the pond. Daddy had a new lady friend that lived in Marietta, Georgia, whom he’d started visiting on the weekends. Except for Christmas Eve, my sister and brother stayed in town while they were home Christmas break. Granddaddy, the dog, and I, might have had the pond all to ourselves had I cared enough to be there.

The day after Christmas, I met up my flute/saxophone player for a short trip to Biloxi, Mississippi, before the C.C. Rider regimen resumed. Now, I was even more determined to move. Most of my friends were already in Atlanta. By the end of January of 1974, I’d found a temporary place to stay in West End, and was chasing rainbows of my own, even applied for a job at the High Museum. I was a musician at heart, but my degree was in art. Go figure.

But I kept running into musicians that I knew; others, I met at clubs in Underground Atlanta, and by the Fourth of July 1974, still looking for rainbows in places I’d never even dreamed of visiting, I’d packed everything I owned and could carry into my Maverick, and by way of Dallas, Texas, a recent association with a band called Wild Bill and the Buffalo Yankees, and help from what I’ve always believed was an angel, I’d arrived safely in Western New York… At least I didn’t hitch hike—I had my daddy’s Shell card. Clearly, someone was praying.

That October, when I stopped in Atlanta on the way to South Georgia from Western New York, I learned the former lead guitarist for Stagecoach had recently wrapped his car around a tree. He didn’t survive. Neither did the band, and my flute/saxophone player, who’d long left the C.C. Riders, had long left Atlanta as well. That weekend I stayed with my friend, Carolyn—this time, we prayed, and when I opened her Bible, as if a finger had directed me to the verse, there it was—Psalm 51— staring me in the face. “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” I read aloud. “And renew a right spirit within me…” In an instant, the veil lifted, a light turned on, and I was changed forever. After a month in Georgia, I returned to New York, albeit age twenty-five a different person—a new creature!

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With plenty of room between the lines, I can honestly say, most of the baggage I carried from those days was rightly discarded. I never called the pond house ‘home,’ again, but I did stay there at times. When Daddy remarried in 1975, he remodeled it—adding a new kitchen and enclosing the screened porch to make it into a master bedroom with a full bath. At the time, I was working at his office. When I married in August of 1976, I continued working there until the birth of our first daughter. After my daddy’s second marriage ended in early 1977, later that year, my husband and I moved to Atlanta, but we came back for Christmas with the baby, and stayed with Daddy at the pond. That was the Christmas he burned the turkey, and most everything else that could go wrong, went wrong. He married again in 1978, the year Granddaddy died on July 27th. From then on, he spent less time in Screven County, in fact, he moved back across the river to his third wife’s home, taking the trailer went with him. Gran lived in it for a while, and when I visited with our little daughter, we slept in the rear bedroom.

Gran had told me years ago that Daddy’s case of rheumatic fever as a child had resulted in a damaged a heart valve. It kept him from active duty in the army, and caused a mild heart attack in the early sixties. In 1979, he went to the V.A. hospital in Augusta, GA, for a valve replacement operation. They botched the job, and the procedure had to be redone using a pig’s valve. The heart doctor in Savannah said it was a miracle he lived, but he was able to return to work, even without a pacemaker. Four years later, in September of 1983, the pig’s valve failed, and he had a massive stroke—a global aphasia that left him completely paralyzed on one side, blind in one eye, with only a minimal ability to speak.

 In July 1986, a month before he died, a listing for a 400-acre parcel of property in Screven County appeared in the local want ads—it also featured the pond and the house, —then—just like that, it was gone. His third wife had given up caring for him, sold everything he owned including the land, placed him in a nursing home, divorced him, and opened a business in Hilton Head, SC. But I need to add something here: In 1978 and during the ordeal at the VA, he’d started back going to church, and while there were medical bills and difficult outcomes to face without him, it’s worth noting that the two things out of his mouth during his last days on earth were, “God is good” and “Get to go!” —and he didn’t mean to Screven County or any other place on the planet, —he meant “home.” Thankfully, he never knew about the sale, and those of us who did dealt with the loss and moved on. Eventually, all that counted were the vivid memories of the special times we spent together as family. Forty years later, it still holds true.

Never the less, special people and places have a way of living on inside you, fueling the fires of the psyche, and inspiring introspection. But not all such reflections have to do with family, friends, or personal relationships. As I’ve suggested, some center around a place itself and raise recurrent questions. In this case, going back to 1972, there’s one particular incident that baffles me to this day. It took place at the pond house on the second weekend in June, a month before my parents sold their house in town… under a waning moon.

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