The volunteer cantaloupes growing in the compost heap have ripened and fallen off the vine. I rescued them in time, but the pumpkins – also a compost bin surprise – have been attacked by something invasive that turns them to mush before they are fully orange. Ugh. I am not crazy about bugs, worms, funguses, and the general process of decomposition, although it makes some good dirt.
The pears are ripe – more or less. We have two pear trees, and I have been harvesting the one with the earlier crop. I can only get to the lowest seven feet or so of the tree and there’s lots more fruit above me. There’s plenty of windfall on the ground too, in various stages of decay. Pears collapse into slime underfoot, and two more drop as I move around the tree. And I notice the smell. Our dog, gone two years now, used to roll in the stuff and return to the house, fur sticky and matted, on an aromatic wave of rotten fruit.
The South, I think, is hot and smelly. This is my Northern prejudice, of course. I still have a bit after twentysome years in the South. When we first moved here, after five years in North Dakota, I noticed the dead armadillos, the carports, the big hair, and a frequent odor which I assumed was the Decay of the South. It made sense to me – plants grew in such profusion and the arc of their growth seemed so accelerated. One moment it was spring and almost instantly after, it seemed, we had overheated summer, early harvest, and the swift movement from ripe to rotten. I later discovered it was a local paper mill I was smelling. Arkansas, after all, is not really the Deep South.
Still, a lush, semi-tropical area – smells included – is the perfect garden for the literature of southern decadence: earthy, sultry, florid, and overripe. I imagine Faulkner, drunk on magnolia and swamp water, springing indigenous from the Mississippi ground. A heavy vapor by the crape myrtles coalesces into Tennessee Williams, complaining about the heat. Arkansas produces something a little different: not so much decaying aristocracy, a lot more redneck eccentricity.
Geography defines us. Having grown up a Midwesterner, I still feel a bit of an alien here, although I like living where I am. We have roots and fruits here – literally (apple, pear, pecan, cherry, blackberry) and metaphorically. Our son is Southern. This is his landscape.
It is not exactly mine. Kathleen Norris writes about the high plains of South Dakota as her spiritual landscape. I understand that. It resonates for me. It’s no wonder I’m more abstract and monochromatic. My spiritual homeland is still Kansas, and even though I grew up in a city, it’s my grandparents’ farm that feels like my real center of geographical gravity. This may work better in metaphor than in reality, I tell myself. I don’t live there; my grandparents are both dead now, and the land has been sold to strangers.
But that is my aboriginal landscape: the native tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. Because the soil is rocky, there’s more ranching than farming. I can remember standing behind my grandparents’ barn where, like many places in the Flint Hills, the view goes on for miles, with only the occasional line of scrubby trees indicating where the water washes into rills after rain. There is nothing but moving grass and moving air. I am held up and belled out by prairie wind. At twelve, behind that very barn, looking out on prairie, I had a vision of eternity. I could not hold it; it seemed something like a moving mathematical architecture, as if a galaxy might be a cathedral, and akin to perfect perpetual motion. But obviously I can’t reconstruct it. It was as if I’d understood, in a flash, quantum physics, but had no vocabulary to keep that understanding.
So there’s my spiritual anchor, for what it’s worth. I’m a girl of the arid plains, but when I come in from my hot Arkansas backyard, sweating, with bags full of pears, I smell like the South.
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