This one really isn’t a ‘live’ memory. It’s kind of a memory of a memory, one that’s always kind of haunted me.
When my kids were about ten and twelve years old, ten years after we left Arkansas and moved back to California, the three of us travelled around the US doing some sightseeing and visiting. We stopped in at Home Farm Arkansas to see Ben. Wanting to both see the old ‘James Taylor Place’ and show Rose where she was born, the three of us drove over the mountain. The mountain road was still the same old windy steep rutted dirt and gravel county road. We drove in the mile and a half or two road that led into the ‘James Taylor Place’. That road was now overgrown, rutted and more washed out than when we’d lived there. (I must add that driving in that damn road cost me. Over the course of the rest of the eight thousand mile trip, the sharp rocks caused three of our tires to one by one separate and blow out. The first time in a very inopportune moment too: climbing the busy interstate up onto the bridge that ran over the Mississippi River. Ahh, all those good memories)
But I digress.
We parked out in front of the old homestead. The building was now eerily empty and silent. I led my kids down the path beside the now very overgrown and rocky old garden area, to a patch of weeds at the bottom.
That’s about where you were born, Rose, I pointed.
After that I wandered around.
Near the old homestead was the barn. It was a shed really, one half with an open end, and the other a windowed room about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. The shed was not in good shape and looked like one more big storm and the whole thing would start to come down.
Inside the shed, through the open end, in the back, in the shadows, was the wood platform up about three feet where Dean slept. I remembered the night he went to bed and noticed movement at the end of his sleeping bag. A copperhead snake was coiled up, most likely waiting for a rodent. He kept the mule food in there, for Jeremiah.
I stepped over to the doorway that led into the windowed room. When we’d lived there Les had patched the roof over it, built rows of shelves from miscellaneous scraps of wood, and lined the walls with them. In the center of the room he’d put his kick pottery wheel to throw clay.
The pottery wheel was gone. The shelves were still there. Sitting on them were rows of bowls, plates, cups, and vases of all sizes and shapes. Some of the vases were over two feet tall. Designs were painted on some of them. Some of them may have been etched too, I don’t remember. The pottery, the clay, was all white. Les had thrown them and set them on the shelves for the first drying. They had two more stages to go: ‘bisquing’ (firing at a low heat) then firing at a high heat. All of it looked very fragile.
Some pieces of the roof had fallen in and the pottery on the shelves was smashed. Scattered over the dirt were shards of broken pottery. Most of the pottery was still intact. And standing upright. Cobwebs stretched from the ceiling to the pottery, between the pottery, around the shelves.
How bizarre, I thought. Here I am in the middle of nowhere in some secluded little valley, down some barely accessible little road, in some dilapidated shed looking at this hidden sanctuary full of beautiful art work, frozen in time.
Les’s industriousness and creativity was so strong in that room.It was so easy to imagine him bent over his wheel working away.
After that I called the kids, we climbed back in the car and continued on down into the valley so I could show them the Buffalo River where we used to swim.
