To Tavia

New Orleans city kids, my brother and I--nine and seven, respectively--usually spent some part of our childhood summers with my paternal grandmother in rural Louisiana. My three cousins Leroy, Delvin, and Marlin, who already lived in Opelousas, joined us at "Muh's" and we played school (with me, of course, as the teacher), shot marbles, caught dragonflies (what we called mosquito-hawks), tormented frogs, and played card games in secret (my grandmother forbade card games: the devil's work). Of the aforementioned activities, I joined in the very first and the very last much more frequently, being too uninterested in marbles and too frightened of dragonflies to be a cling-on to the boys' fun.

The five acres of land running flat from Muh's six-room house (we'd been born just in time to take advantage of the newly installed indoor plumbing) provided ample space to waste away the atoms of energy that bounced us outside the back door and onto the porch, temporarily enclosed us in clubhouses made of milk crates then propelled us on top of them, fueled us as we ran over imaginary baseball diamonds with uprooted pipes and tall plants serving as bases, hardened our "city" feet as we walked barefoot on gravel roads, gave us the speed of Flo Jo when we realized we'd built our sandbox around a colony of ants. Our summer home came complete with a huge pecan tree, fig tree, and chicken coop in the "back yard," gardens to our right and to our left, a swing on the magnolia tree out front, and cows chillin on the land "next door."

In these days we grew older but did not know aging and were ignorant of how our lax summers connected with tomorrow. My brother and I, eager to begin a day of dirt-between-the-toes and swinging-in-the-magnolia-tree, let the screen door slam and entered freedom, "forgetting," sometimes, to brush our teeth (whenever, that is, we could get away with that...kids...). We all took for granted our grandmother, as though we'd be in one of these six rooms every summer and she'd always be working the gardens or making a roux--as if we would never place her on the back burner in efforts to "live our own lives" and "come up."

Well, we thought no further than picking what to wear from our mismanaged suitcases, sopping starchy homemade biscuits with honey, teasing Ronald Potaigne about the smell of the hogs his parents kept, and going off to see "what was back there on all that land anyway." The important was right where the June sun beat down to burn grass, where the smell of muscadines hung ripe in the air, where our grandma watched "The Price Is Right" without fail at ten o'clock each morning, where a hound dog crunched chicken bones for dinner and didn't come in from the cold, and where there was always a little black girl named Shuggie to do Muh a favor and sweep the porch of the yellow house on Bay Ridge.

And wouldn't it always be so? Never did we think of paying gas bills (though we saw the uniformed man come to fill the tank in front of the yard on numerous occasions) or how babysitting your five or six (or sometimes seven or eight) grandchildren during the summer months was a labor of love for a sixty-plus-year-old woman--a woman now eighty-three--whom I have seen maybe three times in the last year. Her last words in our phone conversations haunt me when I think about the weekends I could've driven the hour and fifteen minutes it took to see her more often: "Come when you can, cher." And I will. I will.