Cedar Grove

TRIBUTES TO MARY LEE SETTLE Cedar Grove Chuck Kinder As soon as I heard that Mary Lee Settle had died, I was drawn back to her Addie book. This book has always held a special meaning for me. I was born in Montgomery on the Kanawha River, just a few miles from Cedar Grove, and lived there off and on during the years I was growing up. So the eternal twilight of that ancient valley is one that has illuminated my own memory and imagination over the course of my life. Generations of my own people lived on those riverbanks and are buried in those hills. As I was re-reading Addie I found myself marking passages, paragraphs, lines, phrases, images; then I went back and wrote them down in my notebook. I must have had a dozen pages of Mary Lee Settle's wonderful words there in front of me when I was done. I don't know where the idea came from, but I started to sort of "harvest" those words, lines, passages—meaning I began to shape them into a sort of single utterance, into a sort of "found" (or "stolen" is more like it!) poem. My goal was simply to arrive at a single page of Mary Lee Settle's own words that in some way captured my sense of loss of a woman I never met in my life but felt as though was an abiding old friend from my home ground. Miss Addie It was Aunt Mary who loved and cared for Addie more than all the rest They sat together talking in the parlor in winter in the twin mahogany armchairs with the needlework Addie had made in the summer in rocking chairs on Addie's porch shaded by Addie's rambler roses for the rest of their lives together Oh my God, Mary, how long does it take an old woman to die? The only sound was the soft churl of the doves in the attic They had not left The house was crowded with people from the town of Cedar Grove There were the classic bowls of potato salad, fried chicken, canned tomatoes, cakes, pies The first snow of the year drifted onto our heads and our hair The naked trees had lost color in the near darkness The casket lay on clean steel rods to hold it above the grave It would be lowered into the ground as soon as we had gone away We hugged each other and promised to call The funeral staff blew on their cold hands and waited for us to leave Uphill through the dusk and the snow past the wrought-iron fence was where Uncle Preston and Aunt Helen, Aunt Violet, Uncle Babo, Uncle Roger, Aunt Polly Aunt Myrtle, Elsworth, his wife Loretta and June-Bug lay Addie was being removed from her house All the closet doors hung ajar empty, except in Addie's room There on the floor like a discarded rag lay the Joseph coat I loved The beautiful black feather stitching that held the pieces of her memory together had not faded. It hangs behind me as I write in the voice she had used for telling me stories when I was a child. Let me tell you something I've been thinking about in the garden by the time I was eighteen I had three daughters and I had talked to Jesus What did Jesus sound like, Miss Addie? Real quiet, a little like your grandfather ...