Snow in Tennessee: Memory, Family, Place, and Winter

 

It is supposed to snow in Tennessee tonight—well, specifically in West Tennessee, where I am from. My family is from Gibson County. My parents met at Milan High School. My mom’s family is originally from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but she grew up in LaGrange, Illinois before moving to Milan in middle school. My dad’s family has much deeper roots in the county, dating back to a little after the Civil War.

 In particular, my grandmom traces her roots to Gibson County, but not Milan, per se. Her family bought land behind Double Springs Church off the Gibson Highway on Smith-Scott Road. Smith-Scott Road is a little cut-off road the skims a creek that feeds the north fork of the Forked Deer River. I am familiar with the land because I spent my weekends in high school working it, after a fashion anyway.

 My grandmom’s family, the Johnsons, bought a stretch of land about a quarter-mile long on the road. It stretched back about a half mile or so to a little ditch that fed into the nearby river. The Forked Deer in this part of the county is more a trickle than a solid stream. Just north of this ancestral land is less river than river bottom, a familiar landscape to locals from West Tennessee. It’s the type of dark, shifting landscape I wouldn’t spend a night in, unless I was snipe hunting. I hear bottom land is good hunting ground for snipe.

 My grandmom grew up out on this land until she was a teenager when one day, an older boy from a nearby school was out for a drive with his buddy in their fancy car. It was the mid-1950s. He was from Milan, though his family was from Maury County and had moved around a bit before settling in Milan for his high school years. He and his buddy took the cut-off on Smith-Scott Road. He drove by this house out there off the road and saw this pretty girl in the yard. He stopped and talked to her. The rest is family history.

 Mind you, I didn’t know this story until many years later. I first heard it from my granddad when my grandmom (the pretty girl in the story) was fighting breast cancer at the hospital in Jackson. She pulled through, but it was rough for a while there. So, one day, my granddad just got to telling stories. In 2014, when he died, we went through old photo to make a montage to play at his funeral. Sure enough, we found a photo of him and this priceless old car pulled up in a driveway that looked distantly recognizable. It was not their first meeting, but they were both so young, so set on the future. A good story can benefit from some token of material truth. I held in my hands a memory. For a moment there, no one had died. For a moment.  

 It is a great family story, no doubt, but hardly alone in the pantheon of old family legends. My dad recalls meeting his great-grandfather, Henry Snowden Johnson, out there on that land. My great-grandparents—Minnie and Hubert—lived out there in one house. Just up the road, Hubert’s sister Maggie lived with her husband, Shorty. Hubert died before I was born; M’maw (Minnie) moved in with my grandparents, who lived in Milan but on the edge of town going out towards the old home. M’maw died when I was in 2^nd grade. I was always just fascinated by her when I was a kid. She was always there, like some memory of a world lost in the quiet hours of progress we call American life.

 Maggie and Shorty lived until I was in high school, though I did not know them well, except through stories. I will say here only that Shorty was eccentric. He apparently had a scar in a rather awkward location, and he insisted on showing it to folks. He and Maggie had no children, and when they died, the family decided to sell off their land.

 The old land had been cut up long before their passing. By the time I became familiar with it, there were three houses. A man named Millard and his wife had bought M’maw and Hubert’s old house. The lot separating that house from Maggie and Shorty’s had been purchased by a man who put a mobile home on it. Millard’s land still stretched back to the ditch at the back of the property. This other man had just bought enough for a lot right on the road. Maggie and Shorty’s old house also retained its property line back to the original ditch, effectively half the original land (the other half being Millard’s). 

 The land was flat as could be for the first 600 yards or so. A peninsula of trees had grown up from the ditch and formed a dividing line between the two sister-properties. At the back of the land, it sloped away to lowland, a semi-bottom that was prone to flooding in Spring.

 I worked summers out on this land. It was purchased by a friend of the family, Lee Adams, who also ran the insurance agency and tax business where my grandmom worked. Lee’s wife had died many years earlier. Their home had burned down before her death, and since her death, Lee had lived in a mobile home out by Atwood near the Carroll County line, but he decided to buy Maggie and Shorty’s old property, clean it out, and tear down the old house to put his mobile home there instead. It was a quiet piece of land, with a wonderful view of sunset out its front porch. The field to the west sloped upward to Highway 186 off in the distance, and you could watch the occasional headlights in the evenings what seemed many lonely miles away.

 Lee paid me to come over on Sundays to clear brush and tear out wood from the house he could resell or reuse. We worked in Summer mostly, on days so hot they’d boil Christmas. Still, among the many lessons Lee taught me was the importance of wearing long sleeves and jeans anyway. First, just to keep the dust and brush off me. Second, to block the sun. I’d come home having sweat through my clothes, but it was actually surprisingly cool to stayed covered. I never had sunburn or felt that oppressive heat of UV rays frying my skin. He paid me $20 a day—I felt rich! He also bought lunch, though he’d send me to get it. I’d drive into Milan to get burgers from Wendy’s or Burger King. I’d bring them back out to his property, and we’d eat them in the yard under a shade tree. Then, unrushed by time or commitments, we’d both catnap in the shade for a while. I never knew how long. Just til we’d wake up and go back to work til supper.

 I was not familiar with the land in winter, except to swing out and visit. Winter in West Tennessee is hardly cold compared to my current life in Wisconsin, but it seemed cold at the time, you might say. Also, it’s just too wet in winter to do much work clearing brush or driving out into the fallow fields to haul leftover bundles of hay. Nonetheless, I felt a familiarity with the land, with the place. If a hallmark of Southern identity is our unique sense of place, then that old family property is the totem of my familiar southern identity.

 Then I went off the college, then off to grad school. We had family get-togethers out at Lee’s, but his health eventually began to fail. He died one April. I was in Oxford, Mississippi, reading for my comprehensive exams. My dad called to tell me. He had forgotten how much time I’d spent with Lee, so he off-handedly said he just wanted me to know, even though I wasn’t close to Lee or anything. I corrected him, of course, and he didn’t mean to undermine my memories. I spent my weekends at Lee’s after my brother had moved off to college; these were also the last years of my parents’ marriage. They were those flighty years when so much was changing and we all drifted into our adulthoods and separate independences. It only makes sense that we all had different memories of that time.

 Sitting in my armchair in Oxford that night, hours after my dad had called, I just started crying. Not sad tears—I knew Lee was not well and had said my goodbyes long before his final illness. I was perfectly nonplussed except I couldn’t stop weeping like streaming hiccups. It was a bodily experience, a heaving of tears that came on like spasms. I did nothing to stop crying. I was reading for my comps and kept thinking about William James’ commentary on feelings and emotions—that we don’t cry because we are sad, we are sad because we are crying; we don’t laugh because something is funny, it is funny because we are laughing.

 Or, to paraphrase Faulkner, the body feels before the mind acknowledges. Knowing happens later; feeling comes first.

 The displacement of self that happened when I moved to Wisconsin was significant, and while I recognized it would be a hard shift in perception, I was not prepared for how long I would feel unmoored. I arrived in Wisconsin the year after the 2013/2014 polar vortex. That cold was so powerful it had frozen Lake Superior—which was still partially frozen in August, when I arrived. The lakes control a lot of the weather this far above the Gulf, and the different quality of air and temperature from Mississippi when I left one day to when I arrived here the next was mortifying. I was wearing sweatpants my first summer here; we had frost by the second week of the semester in September. Our windchill dipped to -20 by mid-November before our winter turned into a brown landscape with meager snow and what locals swore were mild conditions.

 Friends in Mineral Point, where I first lived, did enjoy taunting me about life in a deepfreeze like the previous winter. I was told to be wary of blinking in that kind of cold—my eyes would freeze shut! My students told me stories about getting frostbite walking between buildings on campus. I ordered a parka from Cabela’s rated as good down to -30. I never wore it a single time outside, but I buried myself in it when it arrived just to get a sense of what a real winter coat felt like. In Mississippi, I only owned a light jacket and a handful of sweaters. Who even needed more?

 I have grown more accustomed to the burdensome cold here. When we had our last polar vortex, two years ago, and the university shut down due to the dangerous conditions, I found out my house here in Platteville is well-insulated and sealed. The only difficulty was taking my dog out to go to the bathroom, though, because evolution is real and she had benefited from it, by -30 as an air temperature, she was quite content to pee and poop on the porch as soon as I opened the door.

 That polar vortex came with snow, literally, in that prior to it, we had relatively little snowfall followed by thaws to clear the ground. Then a snowstorm announced the arrival of that incarnation of the ninth circle, but the overall amount of snow on the ground never rose to astronomical heights. I’ve been through some decent snowstorms since moving here, though none have reached the level of being formally called a blizzard. I’ve experienced some cold that has given me a new understanding of cold as a physical condition. Cold here is not a linear progression from warm to not warm. It has dimension. At any given moment, the felt experience of cold can be so encompassing that you can’t feel “colder,” but you can ride along the contours of that cold into new worlds of insidious profundity. It is like stepping into what you thought was a puddle that turns out to be a chasm. You are wet regardless of how deep you fall, but in this case, you look up and are troubled to see the surface suddenly and so unexpectedly so very far away.

 This year, we finally have the two-fer. It is cold, endlessly, insidiously cold. We’ve also had steady snowfall since the end of December without a significant thaw, so our world is smothered in snowdrifts and outlined in canyons shoveled off sidewalks. I could hide from cars behind the mounds of snow bordering my sidewalk the way soldiers in deep trenches in World War I could stand up without worrying their heads would be blown off. Not that I’d notice if my head got blown off. It is far too cold to notice such superficial things.

 So, when I think about that fact that it is snowing in Tennessee tonight—let’s just say my thimble of sympathy is plum full. I have no room to offer more to anyone. Mind you, this southern snow is supposed to be significant. Some forecasts put the possible accumulation, on top of ice, at over ten inches. For a place that can get less than ten inches of snow in a full five-year period, to get all that at once is not to be trifled with. And no one owns a shovel, and no city hires plow drivers. The one mound of salt in any given county is maybe somewhere near the interstate or major highway and probably can’t do more than clear a mile or two of a few main roads. It will be hell for a few days, before it melts off, and the temperatures return to the 50s. My god, my god, why have you abandoned your blessed South! [insert eyeroll here].

 Sadly, I am confessing here that the thrill and fear of snow—the sense that it is unique, beautiful, a wonder of the physical world—that has gone from me. When I see snow, I start counting the minutes until I have to shovel it; then I count the minutes until the plow driver buries the end of my driveway in it again. It is insufferable. I hate the snow. It is pretty for maybe five minutes. Then it is heavy, cold, gray, and needless. Yet it falls and falls some more just the same.

 But an old family story comes back to me sometimes. I heard it from my grandmom, and both myself and my aunt Trish have submitted versions of it to teachers in response to different writing assignments in our lives. It involves M’maw, and while I don’t know what house she lived in as a young girl well over a century ago as I write this story into the night here in Wisconsin, I always associate it with that little stretch of Smith-Scott Road where my grandmom grew up, where my granddad passed by one day on a drive with a friend in the country, and where I worked away my Sundays in summers now more than 20 years ago.

 Snow is not uncommon in Tennessee; it just isn’t ubiquitous nor long-lasting. Any good winter will see a snow or two that shuts down schools and businesses. One ought wisely to heed the warnings on the news to get milk and eggs in the house—being the rural south, no one flat says to grab the whiskey, but I assume these instructions are implied, if your local blue laws don’t forbid it. Snow on the ground in Tennessee will be gone in a day or two. It might be a couple inches. It is often wet and heavy, and it usually falls on a layer of ice.

 But it is snow! That magical power that falls from heaven above upon the place beneath, maybe a bit like mercy, or, if nothing else, like a kind of muted elegance that softens the brown and jagged edges of the world.

 My grandmom says that her mother had a tradition when she was herself a young girl. When it would snow, she and her siblings would pull off their shoes and socks. They’d go outside. Then, barefoot, they’d run around the house in the snow. Then they’d come inside and warm their feet by the stove.

 I did this myself once when we had a snow in Oxford, Mississippi, and I lived in a small cottage on the northwest side of town. It will wake you up and get you moving, of that there can be no doubt. It is as delightful as laying down in the snow to make an angel, as ridiculous as thinking it matters that for a day or two you’ll just have to stay home and can’t do all those regular, busy things that usually structure our lives.

 I have not had the chance to try this here, in Wisconsin, at a home I own as I lean into the middle years of my life. It is entirely too cold and the snow too overwhelming to try this now. I don’t think it is just my age and reason speaking against the inner child of my nature when I say that it would probably be dangerous on a night when the temperature is a cool -8 and the snow a deep three feet as drifts, so cold it is solid except in treacherous places where I’d likely slip and could regret my recklessness. I don’t think I can live up to the old family legend tonight.

 Yet my thoughts drift like snow drifts, wandering south to a place that has long since slipped out of the life of my family and even our associations. Lee’s family sold the land off, as happens to land in our economy. I can drive by it when I’m home, but rarely do. Instead, I find myself often driving over to the cemetery at Double Springs where many folks in my family are buried—ones I never met, like Henry Snowden and Hubert—and ones I hold dear forever—M’maw, my granddad.

 Life is such a funny paradox of accumulation. As you accumulate years and possessions, you accumulate loss of things material and things ephemeral, which, in their turn, compound into memories deep, rich, and thick.  

 On the one hand, for any southern boy, any time he wants it, it can be that time and that place again. Or something like that I think a writer wrote once.

 More honestly, you can’t go home again, as some other Southern writer declared.

 I offer no such wisdom here. Just memory, cold feet, a longing for the ineffable, and the recklessness of young people who grew up and passed on.

 E. B. White once wrote an essay about geese and their daily dramas at his farm in Maine. He turned their seemingly small, ritual tribulations into metaphors to declare of the wrongs we all feel we suffer: “I don’t know anything sadder than a summer’s day.”

Well, I don’t suppose he ever spent a cold winter’s evening in a small house in Wisconsin, staring out frosty windows, thinking of home.