Back to Abnormal:
Finding Home on an Old Farm in the New South

New book in progress: Back to Abnormal: Finding Home on an Old Farm in the New South, a collection of environmental essays.

  "This book had its birth as a direct result of my latest book of poems, One Good Hand, which deals largely with the impact of growth on the formerly rural North Georgia countryside.  When I finished writing that book of poems, I was pleased with what I’d written but felt I had more to say than could be said in poems. I began to write the stories of the old Barrow County farm where I live with two generations of my family. These stories show what the astounding rate of growth here—Barrow County, Georgia, is the twenty-fourth fastest-growing county in the nation—is doing to our land, our air, our water, our people. I am not a person who rants, so the southern tradition of storytelling is comfortable to me as a gentle way to raise people’s awareness. Here’s an excerpt from the second chapter in the book."   --  Dana Wildsmith

This chapter, as a stand-alone essay, won second place in  the Emma Bell Miles Essay Award competition.

  Mama said this morning that she and my step-dad, Mac, both of them eighty-something’s, have reached an awkward stage in their lives: their sofa is wearing out, but they’re not sure it’s worth investing in a new one. This is the same woman who, when she was just a few years older than I am now, bought a worn-out farm in rural north Georgia as the place for her and my daddy to live out their retirement years.  Half the outbuildings here then were falling to their knees with rot. The house’s only bathroom stood twenty steps out the back door. A fuse box installed to service five overhead bare bulbs thirty years earlier had been optimistically laden with wiring for stove, refrigerator, and sundry small appliances, the not surprising result being that unless my parents turned off a light, any light, before plugging in the toaster, a fuse blew. The house’s one wall phone was tied in to a twelve-party line (not exaggerating here) that the eleven other parties treated as a seventies version of web cam. A neighbor from down the road passed by every week or two pushing a wheelbarrow filled with bags of sugar and copper tubing. And our farm’s former owner was weekly digging up and hauling away the flowerbeds. So why would a woman who willingly took on this sort of challenge now be asking me if buying a new sofa might be chancy?
 

    I’ve got her pegged. This is just her Old-age Excuse for not going shopping. Mama has a sofa with no visibly exposed stuffing and only the slightest sag towards the end where she reads by lamp light with a cat on her lap. Adopting a foreign sofa into her home would mean first considering a headache of choices—Solid? Print? Two-cushion style, with its built-in fault line for any middle sitter? Or three-cushion, with its air of parlor manners?--, and second, having to live through the courtship period inherent to life with new furniture. Bringing home a new sofa makes a living room feel about as comfortable as if you’d seated a tax auditor there. You can’t shake the uneasy feeling that the new sofa knows you’re capable of major indiscretions involving ketchup or wine. Better to stick with furniture that knows your eating habits. As far as Mama is concerned, the poet Emily Dickinson had it wrong. It is after purchases, not after death, that “a formal feeling comes.”
 

   One of the dearest delights of living on a tired-out farm is the comfortable broken-down-ness of everything. Our log smokehouse had been easing to its haunches quite a spell before Mama and Daddy’s tenancy began, which fact allowed them and now me the grace of open-ended repair time. Jacking up the smokehouse must not be a priority seeing as how the last family never got around to it, so just Put it on the list, we say. The act of updating a list functions as a sort of hour of prayer in the home repair world. By giving name to a need, we acknowledge its existence and claim responsibility for its ultimate resolution-- but not right away. Having given the job over to the list, a bright benevolence of time lightens our days.