Feels Like Home to Me

You ask us how we found this place and I tell you it was listed in the Second Hand News, but you still wonder how we  knew it was ours. You wonder what drew us, what spoke to us. Life changes in a moment, with a single thought, an idea, and sometimes a feeling. Familiar is a good feeling and it just happened, trust me. No one saw it coming.

In its prime, what we now call A Point of View was a self-sufficient farm.

My grandparents on both sides were Alabama dirt farmers, and I remember my aunt telling me about the Harris family farm in Tallapoosa County where her grandparents lived. They too were self-sufficient. The diagram she drew looked like the map of a small town.

They worked many acres of land and lived in a centrally-located house with a wrap-around porch. Alongside the house, they planted vegetables for the table and grew rows of fruit trees and berry bushes. Also close to the house, there was a well, a bell-tower and an outdoor privy. Further back, they got eggs from a chicken house, raised pigs in a pen and cured meats in a smoke house. The mule lived in a fenced area with his own barn next to sprawling fields of cotton.

Conveniently located across the road from the house was a fenced cow barn with milking stalls. Beyond it, cows roamed the pastures. Just down the road ,a car barn housed Grandpa John's new Model A Ford next to another barn for a prized and well-cared-for wagon. Behind that was a blacksmithing house and fields of corn and sugar cane. Syrup making was an celebrated annual event. The mule moved a turn-style that extracted juice from sugar cane, sorghum and millet which was then cooked down to syrup.

I don't remember that farm in its heyday. My grandparents got a farm of their own when they married, and then they moved to town (Opelika, AL) soon after my dad was born and opened Harris's Grocery. But I do remember the Saturday I got to travel back to the country with my grandparents for a hog killing. While I've repressed any memories of an actual killing, I remember the pot-bellied stove and making lye soap out of fat. I also recall the taste of biscuits with fresh butter melting under a drizzle of cane syrup. 

My mother's family (Barnes) even a generation later managed to be self-sufficient as farmers and grew cotton  as a cash crop. I remember eating pomegranates under the kitchen window  and my grandmother's pound cake at the table. She made clothes for 8 children of which my mother was the last.

Traylor's family (Traillour in France) was more diverse, but not much. His family had more ministers, bankers and Kings (James of Scotland,) than farmers, although there were Parks and Bakers. Maybe he was meant to direct things and people, and thus-no surprise-ended up in Human Resources with one foot in Grassy Creek and the other reluctant to leave the city.

And what about those Scotch-Irish and English immigrants who settled the Highlands of North Carolina? They were our ancestors. A John Harris arrived from Leith, Scotland in 1685, and Renfro which means "flowing brook," traces back to the Renfrews of Renfrewshire, Scotland. We both have roots in England, Ireland, Wales and a smattering from parts of western Europe.

We live off Sussex Road near the Youngs (Scottish) on a farm that was long owned by the Waddells (Scottish) with a flowing brook and rolling hills. Still, we are less than a day's drive from the coast.  Couldn't we be somewhere in the past in the British Isles?

And maybe it's also natural to love Spain. Over 5000 years BC, the mountain people of the central Iberian peninsula (Basque country) migrated to what is now the British Isles. Those early wandering people remained a genetically unaltered race because there was little outside influence. Even after the Celtic expansion, there was little genetic change in the Scotch-Irish people, while the Iberian peninsula itself was under constant, sometimes radical change. (see www.worldology.com/Europe)

Finally, out of farming comes a love of food, fresh food, processed only as needed to make it safe or to survive the winter. What I remember about both of my grandmothers is what and how they fed us. We ate with them on Sundays, and Sunday dinners in the South have always been more than the average meal, but to me the dining room table was the altar in the home. We prayed there and we were nourished there.

So there it is. I've come to believe in genetic memory. It just feels right to be here. The rolling hills, animals grazing, gardens and forests, neighborly folks around us raising chickens and blueberries and making apple cider, sewing and digging in the earth.

We work hard, play hard, and eat well-close to the earth. Feels like home to me.

Grassy Creek, North Carolina, USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEcv5uPbYsU

link to a YouTube slide show of the Isle of Harris, Scotland