Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality

What We Will Call Nature

What We Will Call Nature Cia White When the world wearies And society ceases to satisfy There is always the garden. —Nineteenth-Century Homily, Cross-Stitched, Framed and Hung on a Bedroom Wall in the Late Years of the Twentieth Century I made off from the landscape of my grown-up life in the middle of the night, when I was forty-three. Early July, and a moat of fog was rising chest-high in pastures all around the house; cricket call went ratch-fitch as usual, volleying back and forth across the yard; under the long porch roof I met the scent of my tall Enchantment lilies, condensed in mist beaded on the bellied screen; and all of these familiars were tethers of a web I had to breast and tear, in walking out. I drove off in a tunnel of headlights down one country lane after another, on a path with many turnings, like a branching intuition, leaving little Henry what we will call nature • 199 County. My hands, legs, and chest got me along the thirty miles, first to the Interstate and then to the city, where there were bottle rockets popping on the street and the muffled booms of a big show at the river. It wasn’t like me—to veer off, to be abrupt, to be keen for once in the body’s sufficient prudence. For years I’d stayed in place, subdued, bent to various intentions . Reading to the children from our illustrated book of myths, I saw my inner station reflected back to me by the picture of poor Psyche, head in hands, in the cell where Aphrodite set her to the task of sorting out the heap of jumbled beans and seeds. Perseverance Furthers,1 I read and read, tutoring myself from the book of ancient oracles. And for years until the woodstove’s heat dried it and the summer damp unglued it, a fortune-cookie slip was taped to the lamp on the little desk in a musty room I called my study and others called the parlor: “Patience is the cure for every ill.” It wasn’t like me: I moved as if outside myself, wondering what I’d do next. So who was this, stone-deaf to conciliation and decorum, hardly dressed, and running barefoot from the house lit in only two windows? Who was this, with my ownbighands,barelegsinshorts,wideneck—thisungovernablemare,prickling with new constellations of adrenaline and kicking off the traces? I recognized her anyway, and my diplomatic, skeptical, and matronly self—who had scrupulously kept her own counsel and disciplined her smallest impulse—surrendered to the plain ambitions of her body, and allowed herself to be delivered by this bolder being with her name. I made off from a fortress, my retreat, my Edwardian novel of a house: the big white farmhouse, arrived in pieces from Sears, Roebuck at the river landing in 1907, and brought up to the ridge by wagons on an ox-cart road. In later years the house had suffered, during the decline of sons of sons of farmers, been kicked around, its gardens let to grow up in buckbush and motorcycle husks, until at last Miss Mena, a remnant in-law widow in the evaporating line of land- 200 • white owners, rescued it at auction, where her offer was delivered secondhand by a wily old country-courthouse lawyer in a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat. Miss Mena sailed the neighborhood in her big boat of a car, in overalls and garden gloves, bidding the drawing of wagons into the yard to haul away rats’ nests and trash, bidding the bushhogging of weeds, the scouring of dismay, and then the sale of the reborn house and three and one-half acres to the new family I was wife and mother in. It was an old idea, this house, and also more (or less) than an idea: a loose tent conversant with the weather, where chimney swifts sometimes darted in the hallways, and plaster walls never finished making maps of fine cracks through winter, summer, winter. I left my patched-on kitchen at the back—its caned rockers, goblets, antique platters, braided rugs, and bookshelves—where I was rooted at the sink, keeping my eye turned resolutely outward, toward worthy things in season: the long hill and water tower, the pasture creek rushing beyond its groove after heavy rain. The...