The Middle of the Forest

It is pre- or very early 1950's in a deserted piney-woods section of East Texas. I am in my grandmother's sitting/dining room, fascinated by the quality of light coming from the kerosene lamps that light the room. Later, the lamps will be picked up and moved into the bedroom so that we can see to go to bed, then snuffed for the night as we settle under patchwork quilts until morning. (Should we "city kids" wake during the night, there are pails in the room which will be emptied by my grandfather in the morning.) More pleasant morning happenings will involve getting dried corn from the corn cribs to feed the chickens, and going with my grandfather to the smokehouse for a slab of bacon, which he will take to the kitchen at the back of the house, and very thinly slice strips to go with the breakfast. My grandmother will allow me to "help" her make buttered biscuits to cook in the large, black wood-burning stove that takes up almost half the room. The eggs have already been gathered and are kept in a bowl on the counter. The ice-box actually holds blocks of ice which my grandfather gets from the "store" down the road, and brings back daily. No one would consider the need to put those eggs into the precious ice-box space. They keep perfectly well on the counter. ( Later the kerosine lamps would be replaced by a single light bulb in each room, hanging on a wire from the exposed beamed ceilings, with a string hanging down beneath each exposed bulb for turning it on and off.) Any other light comes from the double fireplace that opens into both the living room and the bedroom.
In my eyes those simple rooms had the romantic feelings of warmth that you speak of. I thought the place was heaven itself. It wasn't until much later that I came to recognize the very real darkness of that place. (My mother and her brothers spoke of mountains of green tomatoes left to rot in the fields after the market was flooded with those brought down early from farms in Oklahoma, and of my grandfather, an intensely religious man who believed that God sent the Great Depression to force people back to their "simple roots," and who was later seen by his children, banging and rebanging a bloodied fist into a fence post, tears streaming down his face and over and over again asking God, "Why?")

When I was in college, I went one weekend with my mother and her brothers, and we laid in a ceiling, and walls, and painted everything a pale green. We also added a bathroom and septic tank, so that my aging grandparents would not have to deal with those nightly pails. Some years later we found ourselves in that house again, after my grandmother's funeral. A distant cousin had bought it and used it for a weekend hunting lodge, so when we all came back to bury my grandmother, he invited us to come by for coffee after the services. My mother kept telling my children that the house had been much "nicer" when she had lived there as a child. My brother and I just looked at each other and remained silent.

It was not until then that I began to realize how "romanticized" my view of that life-style had been. My mother and her brothers had had to deal with the stark reality of it.  I was starting to understand how one's perception could affect the "reality" of the world around them.  To me, thanks mostly to my grandmother's gentleness and loving patience, my grandparents farm was a place of peace and light.  My mother looked at the same place and saw only its darkness.  Before the Depression, and the subsequent move back to the old family homestead, my grandfather, I was told by Mother and her brothers, had been a formidable individual, a stern and dictatorial patriarch.  He had been a school-teacher, a merchant, the church organist, and the superintendent of the school district in the town where they had lived through the 1920's, but he was not a farmer, and was broken by his inability to control the natural world.  I remember only a broken man who sat meekly in front of the fireplace while the women of the household, who had not time to sit,  worked around him as he stared blankly into the flames, his personal depression mirroring the grand economic situation that had put them there.
   

My mother carried the memory of that darkness throughout her life.  it was a pervasive influence on our household, even though the physical, material circumstances were quite "light" and refined, and for too many years was a factor in my own perceptions as well.  Now, I can see, as I wrote in A Myth in Action, that "...the mythological concept of the hero?s journey is a symbolic exploration of the darkness within each of us, and psychologically, it is in that darkness where we find our greatest treasure."

I wish my mother had been able to confront, and come to terms with her darkness.  She had the potential for shining a great light.