My mother and my sons' father have almost all the photographs documenting my life, except for maybe two dozen. They think they're punishing me for having escaped, but they're wrong. Don't they know I have a mind and heart full of "snapshots" of my life?
In my mental photo album, I have a picture of my grandmother, salt-and-pepper hair wrapped around her head in braids, wearing a house dress and apron. My cousin Adrienne was about six, so I would have been almost five. My sister would have been 2 1/2. The pasture behind my grandparents' house had been mowed, raked, and made into "square" bales of hay the day before, and it hadn't been stacked and hauled to the barns yet. My grandmother dragged two bales end-to-end and sat down on one. She directed Adrienne to sit in front of her so she could plait her hair, and me to sit in front of her so Adrienne could brush my hair. My sister sat as still as a toddler reasonably can so I could brush the tangles from her cotton-white curls. This picture comes not only with a visual image, but the smells of the hay, the slightly sweet oily scent of my grandmother's skin, and the scratchy texture of the hay against my legs.
On another page not far past that first one, it's a dark, overcast day, and it's the Fourth of July. The heat is oppressive, and I have just helped my Pappaw fill the back of his truck with corn, stalks and all. The sky has just begun to rumble and the wind is picking up. Just as the first flashes of lightning cross the sky and big fat raindrops start to fall, we take the truck across the road to the house and back it up to the carport. He opens the tailgate and begins pulling ears of corn off the stalks. He puts them in a bushel basket and my grandmother puts the basket down in the middle of a circle of cane bottom chairs. My great-uncle Bear and his wife Elsie are visiting from Dallas, and we sit there as the sky opens up, enjoying the cool breeze coming through the carport. I listen to my elders talk and for that moment, my world is a good place for a little girl to be. The smell of the rain on tilled sandy loam, the murmur of the women's conversation, and the scent of fresh corn as it is shucked and put in plastic dishpans? Those can't be taken from me by anyone, ever.
