I’m on the floor watching Punky Brewster. Punky lives in Chicago, Illinois, with her dog Brandon and her foster dad, Henry. “Me and J.W. used to live in Chicago,” she says from behind me.
I can’t believe anyone I know has ever lived anywhere but here.
She tells me that after the Depression, lots of poor people moved up to Chicago in the 1940s to work in factories because there wasn’t any work back home. They’d gone with several of my grandfather’s brothers and their wives, and left my uncle — their son — to live with my grandfather’s mother so they could work more and save more money. I get stuck on how sad that must’ve been for my uncle, for everyone. She says he sent them letters and drawings, and tells me how much she’d missed her son then, how her heart broke to remember it, but how it had to be done. She tells me about hot dog carts outside their apartment window, about getting together with the other wives for coffee in the morning, the pizza place on the corner, the cold. Most of the wives just wanted to talk all day, but my grandmother had stuff to do; she didn’t have time for visiting and they drove her crazy wanting to gossip.
She says they moved back to Tennessee because my grandfather had wanted to come home. She’d wanted to be a stewardess and see the world; he’d wanted to make sure his mama was taken care of. She’d wanted to stay in Chicago and he’d wanted to come home, and she got tired of seeing him upset, so home they came. Right back where they started.
I will never come back to this place, I promise myself. Not even for my mama! Not for anybody.
If I ever get out, I’m staying out.
—1988
 Friday, June 6
Sun Drop is a soda that you used to only be able to get in the south, and it is delicious. Think Mello Yello or Mountain Dew, but better and made with actual cane sugar and orange pulp. For whatever reason this drink is a big damn deal in Tennessee — like it’s up there with The Vols and country music and Jack Daniels (which coincidentally is what we added to our Sun Drops before high school football games). Even though you can buy it anywhere now, I still only drink Sun Drop when I go back to Tennessee, which means it’s a Really Big Deal and Highly Anticipated.
We were in rush hour traffic on the way home from the airport on Friday when we spotted this car with a Sun Drop can affixed to the bumper. We weren’t shocked or confused because this kind of homage to the soda made sense to us. Yes, Sun Drop is so good and important that this person has glued a can to their bumper and I support them. OK.Â
But really the guy had just forgotten about it and the can had managed to stay there through all that traffic. He hopped out and grabbed it a few minutes after Megan took this picture. This is a lot to say about a soda, but it’s really important to me that you know how our trip began.
Saturday, June 7
It rains in Tennessee. My parents’ house sits on top of a hill, and it rains in Tennessee. It had been raining for days before we got there and it would rain for days to come.
My grandmother Elsie was a fraternal twin born in the early 1930s, who hated her name because of the Borden cow. She was the first person in her family to graduate high school. She’d say, “Get an education because that’s something no one can take away from you.” I’d wonder why anyone would want to take away my education to begin with, but I felt like I understood her message.
My grandfather J.W. was also born in the early 1930s, and he’d rather prank you than cordially shake your hand. (He would cordially shake your hand, of course. He had manners.) You could tell when he was pulling your leg because his nostrils would flare a little and suddenly a lot of effort was going into pressing down the corners of his mouth and his top lip. He’d turn his head away just before caving in, “What?? HAHAha huh?! HAHA!”
It smells like deep wet dirt when it rains in southern Arizona, where I live now. It’s a genuinely wonderful smell, don’t get me wrong. In Tennessee, though, it smells like trees are taking a shower — only you have to imagine that you feel the same way toward trees as you do your girlfriend. So imagine the way it smells when she takes a shower, but with trees. It’s how I know I’m here and that gravity exists and people love me, because the rain in Tennessee has always smelled like trees taking a shower, and it always will. There’s also an ice cold winter smell that’s steeped in bacon grease and wet bark that I haven’t inhaled in years, but I still know it. I try to recreate it in Arizona but you can always smell the dirt here and it just isn’t the same.
Sunday, June 8
Parts of the town had flooded a few days before we arrived. People were calling City Hall to complain that their gravel driveways had been washed out, like the mayor himself had sent the rain to those driveways and therefore had the power to stop it and was also responsible for fixing the damage. My mother says everyone should have to work for the public at least once in their life, so they’d know what not to say to people like her, and when not to call. When your own personal driveway washes away in a flood, for example.
My mom and stepdad live on one of the highest points in the county, so flooding isn’t something they worry about — flooding just means that the pond at the bottom of the hill fills back up. Megan walked me over to listen to the frogs who’d made it their new home.  We got down low and scooted as close to the cattails as we could without a) falling in or b) getting chiggers. Megan’s number one fear of the South is chiggers, even though I’ve yet to experience a chigger on my person in all 33 years of my life. After getting sufficiently frustrated by how good the frogs were at hiding — and despite the constant danger of chiggers — Megan agreed to walk with me along the tree line. This is where we accidentally happened upon something so perfect that I ran all the way back up the hill to get my camera, then ran all the way back down the hill to take a picture, and that perfect something was a happy little snail hanging out under a red capped mushroom.
Friends, it was like a vintage line of Hallmark stationery circa 1980 had sprung to life 10 inches from my feet. I mean it was all this girl could ask for.
Tuesday, June 10
I used a stick to scratch my initials into the wet cement at our house on the hill on Tuesday, March 3, 1992. Four years later my grandparents bought a few acres across the street and built their house in the woods. We’d walk across the road with casserole dishes. We shared a garden in our backyard and there was a bumper crop of zucchini. They argued over when the corn would be ready.
Three years after that, we brought Slade home from the hospital to my grandparents’ house dressed in a thick white jumpsuit covered in polar bears and snowflakes. The lacy bassinet was set up in the living room and one of the downstairs bedrooms had been opened up for us. Elsie made brown beans and cornbread for dinner and we realized sometime around 2am, after all three generations of women had taken turns rocking, walking, swaying and cuddling this crying newborn baby beast for five hours straight, that eating beans and then breastfeeding was maybe the worst idea any of us could’ve had. We spent the night in the dark living room — one of us in the rocking recliner, one of us in the oversized armchair, and the other on the sofa — them trading stories about their first days of motherhood and me listening, watching the snow fall and wondering how I would ever be good at this without them.
Their house in the woods is for sale now because both Elsie and J.W. have died, as people do. I thought I’d maybe try to be an adult about it this year because I certainly wasn’t last year. The house being for sale, I mean. That last song and dance.
There wasn’t room for anything in my mom’s fridge Tuesday night, so we drove our Bonnaroo drinks across the road to my grandparents’ empty fridge so everything would be chilled before we left for Manchester early Thursday morning. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to cry in their kitchen or like, wander around the house touching collectibles and flashing back to how my one year-old Slade used to eat bananas and ice cream in that chair in Elsie’s lap, or how J.W. would sing “wash your face and comb your hair and change your dirty underwear!” to him in the mornings.
Anyway that’s what the moon looked like on the night we walked out to the truck to fill an empty fridge with cheap beer and water bottles, before I let myself cry in their stupid kitchen and before anything, really. This was the part of the trip when you ring the doorbell and wait for someone to let you in. I mean we were still standing on the porch of our summer vacation.
We went to Walmart at least once a day, every day, except for the days when we were at Bonnaroo.
Thursday, June 11
Slade and I moved to Florida right after I graduated from high school. My mom and stepdad drove everything down and helped us set up our tiny apartment near the the St. Johns river. On the morning it was time for them to go, I sat with my mother on my bed and cried, “How could you just leave me here with these boys? I don’t even know what I’m doing!” and she cried and told me that I’d be ok, that I’d figure it out. It was the first time I’d freely admitted to being scared of anything since the time my dad had let me watch A Nightmare On Elm Street in first grade. She told me later that all she could stand to eat on the 14-hour drive back to Tennessee was a baked potato from Wendy’s.
I always wish my mom could come with us to Bonnaroo, but she’s not much of a camper. This year we made her promise that if Paul Simon is ever on the lineup, she’s getting a ticket.
From June 12-15 Megan and I camped and sweated and danced on the farm at Bonnaroo, which you can read/see about right here: Bonnaroo 2014: A Photo Diary From The Guts of a Real Person.
And then we came back.
