Owens at Home

I am sad to report that Scabbers the Rat departed this life at 9:33 this evening after a brief illness.

We’re not exactly sure what killed her, but Abby (who is pre-nursing) has diagnosed it as a respiratory complaint. We buried her in a handkerchief in the front yard and I spoke a few words over her grave: how I never respected the species of rats till I met old Scabbers. She was cunning and social; loving and yet a little creepy. She was (now that I think of it) like a lot of writers I know, but that’s neither here nor there. She’s gone to her reward and Isabel’s chief solace, voiced as we walked back to the house, was that at least the cats didn’t get her. She escaped that indignity and died in her own little bed of what appeared to be a runny nose, surrounded by her loved ones.

It sounds mawkish, but I can truly say that I won’t forget her.

Upon finding myself without reading material last week, picked up a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman in the library and thought I’d give it a go. Though Sherman has larger fame from his March Through Georgia, he figures in our family history primarily as the opposing general that three of my gggrandfathers fought at the Battle of Atlanta: Hortenscious Rudd, Mama’s ggrandfather, who was captured; and Burrell Altman, on Daddy’s side, who was killed dead as a hammer, and last but not least, my beloved Grannie Rice’s grandfather, Jack Roberts, who was also captured and sent to Rock Island, IL, where the grossest punishment he endured was having to walk back to Alabama when the war was done. Of the three, he came closest to Sherman himself, as Jack had been sent to scout out Sherman’s headquarters when he was detected and captured and sent to Illinois. If you take the trail up Kennesaw Mountain outside of Atlanta at the federal park, you can look down and see where Sherman’s tent was pitched, and pretty much figure where he was captured in early summer, 1864 – an unusually fortunate twist of fate, for if he’d lived to see Peachtree Creek later that month, he’d have probably been killed there; would have been sent back to Alabama in a body bag like old Burrell.

Which is all to say that Sherman has never been what you might call a family favorite, but being a romantic at heart, I had tender hopes that this bio would shed a kindlier light on the old boy: show him as a ruthless warrior but a nice enough guy; one who was fierce to enemies, but had mercy on orphans and kitties. At least that was my hope, but if this biographer is correct, then old Sherman was not only a butcher in the Florida Indian Wars, but had an unending contempt for the South; was a bound racist, an adulterer and yet a severe moralist; an egomaniac who never let an observation on his own personal superiority go unmentioned. As I read his life story, I found myself rejoicing in his every defeat and short-coming. When his wife Ellen refused to leave her father’s house and live with him out West after their marriage, I could only snicker, and in the long years after the war, when he was diminished by his own fame and estranged from his wife and children, I smirked and complimented them on their good taste.

I cannot help but compare his end with that of great-great-Granddaddy Jack, who lived a long and happy life after the war; would often tell his adoring grandchildren about his war escapades; would buy them candy with his pension -- including my matchless grandmother, of whom Sherman was not worthy to kiss her feet (and even he, in his better moments, would agree.) I can only hope that at whatever post-mortal perch he landed after he died (he was virulently anti-religious and would scoff at the idea of heaven) that he, of the rigid morals and high Victorian reticence, can look down on me every evening as I read his post-modern bio, that is shamelessly revealing, full of cunning Freudian interpretations of his relationship with his mother; with his mistresses faces happily affixed in the photograph section – and listen carefully. And the sound he will hear is my laughter.

Our remaining baby duck is recuperating nicely from a sore foot – no doubt hurt when whatever ate his brother was chasing them. He hobbles around with the chickens, but likes to sit in the pool skimmer most of all, and look out on the surface, quick to leap on any dive bombing bugs.

We are often out and about the pool these afternoons – partly because the weather is so vividly lovely – and partly because Abby’s graduation party looms close, in two weeks, and we’re decorating and planting around the pool in preparation -- hanging party lights and bringing in more gravel. I’ve also put in a small Blue Garden – that is: planted in mostly purple flowers – and have planted two huge new gardenias. They are my favorite plant on earth, but don’t do very well here in the woods; don’t know why. Too humid, I think. Get black spot. I carted in rich dirt and have buried the unfortunate chickens beneath them in hopes that they’ll take off.

If they do, I plan to put the flowers out around my house the first week in June and think of my old Mama, who used to do that when we were kids. It’s an Alabama thing – or so someone once told me: decorating your house with fresh gardenias. Patricia Anne -- the wonderful protagonist of Anne George's Southern Sister Mysteries -- does it, too, and she's an old Birmingham girl. To me, gardenias are the scent of heaven.

We have had tragedy hit the poultry this weekend. Two nights ago, the taller, more charming of our baby ducks came up missing from the chicken coop when we went to feed them. There was no sign of the body, but one of our cats (erroneously named Sweetpea) has been suspiciously nonchalant when supper time rolls around and his lack of appetite tells its own tale.

That was bad enough, but now two chickens have likewise died, and one of them is missing. Given how much the new coop costs, the eggs will now costs $200 a piece instead of merely $50.

I think this is the reason the older generaton of southerners were so ruthlessly practical: they'd grown up on the farm and had no delusions about the nature of life; knew it could be summed up in four little words: eat or be eaten.

Isabel has taken in the remaining duck to live in her bedroom with her and her pet rat Scabbers. Scabbers makes you respect the race of rats as she lives a life of conspicuous luxury, sometimes in her cage; sometimes roaming around Iz's bedroom. Isabel didn't know exactly where in her bedroom till she found a hole in the bottom of her top-of-the-line Simmons mattress and found Scabber's second home, stuffed full of left-over sandwich bags and Cheeto's and whatever other plush material she could lay her little hands on, far from the reach of the cats.

We're hoping she teaches the duck a few lessons.

My how time flies when you’re editing a novel and building a chicken coop.

The coop came about unexpectedly after the girls came upon cute baby chicks at Tractor Supply and bought ten (and two ducks for good measure.) We had an ancient old coop out back and my plan was to stick them there and be done with them – collect a few eggs by mid summer. Then Wendel stepped in and after inspecting the old coop, tore it to the ground, literally and drew up plans for a magnificent new outbuilding – chicken coop on one end, and dog house/goat barn on the other. The thing is enormous – eleven feet high on one side, and fifteen the other – so that Isabel, looking at it from the upstairs office, commented: “Mom? Who does dad think is going to collect our eggs? Shaquille O’Neal?”

So far, the structure has cost right at about seven-hundred dollars, and it isn’t finished yet. I’m thinking that we need to buy a goose when we’re done, in hopes of coming across an elusive golden egg, to pay freight for the rest of them…

I went to Mama and Daddy’s yesterday for the usual eat-a-thon. Iz had woken up with a stomach-ache and we weren't sure we could go, so I didn’t call and invite myself till just before we left for church, at about nine-thirty; told Mama we’d be down there before twelve. By the time we arrived, she had, with no more warning than that, set a Sunday dinner table which included: Roast pork, Baked whole carrots and onions, Country fried steak, Deviled eggs, Okra and tomatoes, Butterbeans, a salad of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes and onions, homemade biscuits, homemade cornbread, homemade pimento cheese and crackers, and probably a few other things I've forgotten. In around these main dishes were different kinds of home-grown peppers and pepper-sauces and plates of sliced cheese and pickles and garlic salt, so that we had to eventually move some of the food to the counter because there was no more room on the table. Mama spent half the meal apologizing that she hadn’t had time to make a dessert – offered the girls Hershey Flips and bags of Oreos and Starbursts; told me the next time we came to give her more notice so she could really cook.

Sorry to keep you hanging on my book selections, but I was out of town last weekend, and came home to a half-finished chicken coop and a huge tornado-like storm that blew down more trees than the hurricanes of last autumn. The chicken coop will soon be home to our ten chicks, who are just getting their long feathers and look positively homely. The ducks are still cute, but they’ve gotten spoiled as the good-looking often do, and whenever any of us walk by their pen in the afternoon, they set up a great squeaking-quack to try and make us take them swimming in the pool. They like to skim for bugs, and especially love it when Abby or Iz spray them with the hose while they’re swimming, which is duck-ecstasy, apparently. They can’t get enough of it.

Anyway: here is the Official First Selection of the Janis Owens Bookclub: A CHILDHOOD; THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE by Harry Crews.

As some of you know, Harry was my old writing professor at UF, and has a huge cult following around the country. This is his own memoir of his depression childhood, growing up in Bacon County Georgia, penned the year I graduated from high school and two years before I met him. It’s been re-released by a small press in trade paper (in an anthology with some of his fiction) and to my mind, the best southern memoir around – spare and hardscrabble and hilarious, all at once. My favorite part his when his families hired man wrestles with a tooth ache while a young Harry watches from window. He lunges around the room, agonizing; finally pulls the bad molar out with a pair of pliers and holds it triumphantly aloft, shouts: “Hurt now, you son of a bitch!”

After talking to Daddy last night, I realize that I’m leaving my blog readers in the dark about the momentous developments on the new novel. I know that because Daddy interrogated me shamelessly, and asked outright what was going on? When was the new one coming out? He’s particularly interested in that this one is dedicated to him, and it was my unhappy duty to tell him the truth, which is: not soon.

The fact of the matter is that the new novel still isn’t where it should be. It’s good enough for my agent and husband to love, but in the big picture, that is rarely good enough. After turning it over in my head a few weeks, I’ve decided that I cannot polish one more floor or wash one more window and remain in good mental health, and regretfully informed Joy (agent) that I have to have something to work on this summer, and have no inclination to start another book. Therefore, the new book (working title: When The Chickens Came Home to Roost) is my summer project – which means it won’t even go on the market till late August, and even if it sells on the second day (which Claybird did) won’t be on the shelves till, say, 2006 or 2007.

I know this is a blow to the few people who I haven’t yet harassed into reading it in draft, but there it is. In the meanwhile, I will try and come up with a Recommended Reading list of good books that will keep you busy for the next two years till my own fiction can be read. I’ll call it Janis’ Book Club, and with luck, it will become as influential in the writing world as Oprah's Bookclub. Whenever my own next book comes out, it will automatically be that month’s selection, which is shady and manipulative of me, but hey: welcome to the book bidnis.

I don’t have a premier book in mind yet, but give me time. I have to speak this weekend in Jacksonville and that will take up a good bit of mental space till then. But on Monday, I’ll make my grand announcement and commentary on why I picked it. My taste is uninformed and eclectic, so brace yourself.

Oh, and my webmaster genius, Val, wants to update and redo the website this summer. She's into high-tech and I'm into country, so we've settled on a style that can be called High-Tech Hillbilly. On new site, I can post pictures, which will be fun. You won't have to imagine in your mind what my daddy or my oak trees or baby chicks actually look like, but will have pictural evidence to help you along.

I am celebrating a belated Easter on my blog by printing, in toto, a sermon written and preached by the Dr. Reverend Dennis Campbell, lately of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Arkansas. That’s his official title, though beneath the pomp of a doctorate, he’s just our own Dennis-Campbell (pronounced as one word) – a good old Arkansas boy who used to attend our church during the summer, when he came down and stayed with his aunt in Florida. During those summers, he was a running buddy of my older brothers, and entertained all and sundry with mythic tales of his life there in Trumann, Arkansas – stories in which his best friend, Wendel-Owens, was prominently mentioned. When I was nineteen, Dennis offered to set me up on a blind date with that same Wendel-Owens, and since I was, even then, a sucker for mythic tales, I agreed, and so met my future husband, who I married four months later (and recently celebrated my 25th year along side.)

So I owe old Dent, who long ago abandoned the Assemblies of God to become an Episcopal priest (“Right around the corner from Popism,” our preacher commented at the time) and now lives in Little Rock with a stunning wife and four magnificent children. He emailed me last week when he was working on his Easter Sermon and asked for Resurrection imagery, and sent me a copy of the sermon itself on Monday – a doggone good one, I think, proving once and for all that he is thriving in the Spirit, still.

+Easter, 2005

Growing up in Trumann, Arkansas, I remember reaching a point of insufferable curiosity when I finally got to the place of asking my grandfather a question that I just didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone else. I was about eight and I’d noticed that we didn’t bury people in Trumann, we took them to Jonesboro, which was over Crowley’s ridge. We’d buried my father there a year before. Now, I knew that we always went to Jonesboro or Memphis to do our major shopping but I couldn’t figure out why we’d go there to bury people. We had a radio station, a high school, a local newspaper; we couldn’t have a local cemetery? So I asked him “Grandpa, why do we bury people in Jonesboro instead of Trumann?” And he said, “Well son, the land is too low. If we buried people here they’d float away.” Immediately and forever thereafter, I saw this image of caskets floating down Main Street. Ghastly.

Ghastly. If it were not for two thousand years of Christian tradition, ghastly would be our response to the Gospel today. Ghastly, scandalous, tacky -- take your pick. But hearing that Gospel backwards through two thousand years, the image of an empty tomb for us brings forth images of joyous celebration, Easter egg hunts, new clothes, chocolate bunnies, the Arkansas Brass, and resurrection; nothing ghastly there. But if we were those who lived at that time either Jew or Greek, we would have been horrified by this scene. The Greeks had a very clear idea about death, they entertained the idea that maybe something continued but it would be in a vague shadow world set apart, with very clear boundaries, and no one would be making excursions back here. And even after some Jews developed the concept of an afterlife, they saw that occurring all at once for everyone in the end time. In the Gospel of Matthew, after the crucifixion we are told that people rose from their graves and took a little jaunt through town, and this was not well received, there was no joy in seeing one’s relatives return from the grave, it created an earthquake in terms of how people understood the universe. Scary and ghastly.

But that’s what we have in the Gospel today. An empty tomb. Now I’m sure that if our friend Alf Williams, faithful Junior Warden, had been there that day in charge of the Jerusalem Tomb Society, Alf would have been sweating bullets. Empty tombs, someone is going to start asking for refunds.

In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene returns to the grave, the tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid to rest. It is early morning, early enough to be dark. The sun has not risen, it is dark and damp and cold. She retraces her steps to the place and as she nears the spot she is horrified to see that the stone has been removed from the tomb and it appears to be empty. Who among us would think of anything else but vandals; someone has desecrated this grave; someone has stolen the body of Jesus. She came in grief and is now stricken with fear and confusion. So she goes to the disciples with the biggest hearts, Peter and John. She tells them what she’s found and they tear out of there running to the tomb, can’t get there soon enough, surely after everything else, this can’t be true, this can’t have happened. John gets there first and can’t even go in. He simply stands at the opening and peers into the empty tomb. Then Peter arrives, never afraid of being the first one, he enters and sees the grave clothes on the floor. Finally, John enters and he sees the grave clothes that covered Jesus’ body and the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head, and he knows that this is not the work of grave robbers. He doesn’t exactly know what has happened but he knows somehow Jesus has defeated death. He doesn’t understand what is going on but he believes. They too are fearful and confused, the empty tomb does not hold a final answer, so they simply go home.

Mary is left there at the tomb, at this ugly, terrible scene. Just emptiness. I suppose her heart felt emptier than the tomb. And so she sits down and just has a good cry. None of this had turned out the way she thought it was going to be. It was a short span from waving palms to the cross to an empty tomb. So she weeps and feels loss and fear and confusion. Good Friday is still alive and well for Mary. But then she stands and leans down to peer into the tomb one last time just to make sure, and she is astounded to see two angels sitting where they had left Jesus’ body the day before. One is sitting at the head and the other at the foot.

They say, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.”

You see, Mary just wanted to put the pieces back where they belong so they could move on and end this sad experience. And then suddenly, she feels something, someone behind here and a voice says, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it that you’re looking for?”

Mary thinks this guy is the gardener, and she pleads with him to tell her where he’s put the body of Jesus. But he says, “Mary.” And that’s all it took. The shepherd knows her name and she knows the voice of the shepherd. She says: “Rabboni.”

She is the first to witness the resurrected Jesus Christ. She is the first disciple to give witness to not just an empty tomb, but that Jesus was alive, different, but alive.

Jesus tells her to go tell his brothers, “tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” God became human in Jesus Christ; Jesus lived, suffered, and died. And then he is resurrected and ascends, returns to the Father, our Father, ascends to God, our God. “I have seen the Lord.”

A couple of days ago, I was pondering this sermon, wondering what I might say that would be new. There is nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to Easter. I emailed a friend of mine, a woman named Janis Owens. She is a Southern writer who lives in Florida. I hoped she might give me an image, something that communicated resurrection in a new way. She said: “Look to the live oak, my friend. You know, I live in a grove of them, and am staring at four dozen as I write. Right now, they’re all still winter white and bare, with hardly any leaves, looking dead as doornails unless you closely look at the tips and see the swelling buds. Soon, and practically overnight, they will burst into beautiful light green leaf – a sight to behold and as good an image of resurrection as I can think. Goes from dead to life so quickly, and is a heck of a tree anyway – the most efficient for soaking up water in the worse drought and returning it to the heavens – a whole little factory beneath its spreading canopy that keeps the woods damp and happy and our whole little ecosystem functioning. Good metaphor of salt and light, what they contribute.”

Many of you here today may feel like that sprawling live oak tree; winter white and bare, with hardly any leaves, looking and feeling dead as doornails. But the news of Easter morning is “I have seen the Lord, and he is alive.” And because of that so are you, bursting into life overnight.

So take heart and rejoice and remember these words that St. Chrystostom said sixteen hundred years ago on Easter Sunday:

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
For Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. AMEN!

We had our usual eat-a-thon of a holiday yesterday for Easter, and will be living off the leftovers for many days to come. I’d been exhibiting great will-power in not eating any of our chocolate eggs and bunnies, and even (mostly) stayed clear of the jelly-beans.

In short, I was living a life of respectable aestheticism till about an hour ago, when I was vacuuming the living room and came upon a chocolate Milky-Way egg on the coffee table. I'm doing Laurel Mellin's Solution workshop -- primiarily a weight-loss group -- where mindless eating is the Great Sin, and had I thought it over, I might have fled temptation and let the little egg sit there undisturbed. But old habits die hard, and as soon as I saw it, I ate it without pause, like one of our little chickens do when they come upon a piece of corn: just peck and gulp and its gone, in a purely primal reaction: I see chocolate, I eat chocolate. I wear a bigger dress size than I used to.

It's another one of those Southern Circles of Life.