Clear Springs

My grandmother baked cookies, but she didn’t believe in eating them fresh from the oven. She stored them in her cookie jar for a day or two before she would let me have any. “Wait till they come in order,” Granny would say. The crisp cookies softened in their ceramic cell—their snug humidor—acquiring more flavor, ripening both in texture and in my imagination
.

“Coming in order”—an apt phrase for writing a memoir. My life is coming in order, as memories waft out of that cookie jar. But what is the recipe for those cookies? Who knows? My grandmother is dead, and her knowledge and memories are lost
.

Like many Americans, I long to know the past. There’s a sense of loss in America today, a feeling of disconnectedness. We’re no longer quite sure who we are or how we got here. More and more of us are rummaging in the attic, trying to retrieve our history. We draw genealogical charts and hang old quilts on the wall. We seem to hope that if we can find out our family stories and trace our roots and save the old cookie jars and coal scuttles, we just might rescue ourselves and be made whole
.

I grew up on a small family farm, the kind of place people like to idealize these days. They think the old-fashioned rustic life provided what they are now seeking—independence, stability, authenticity. And we did have those on the farm—along with mind-numbing, back-breaking labor and crippling social isolation. Farm life wasn’t simple. I remember a way of life before
I Love Lucy
and credit cards and Watergate, a time when women churned butter and men plowed the fields with a team of mules and children explored the fields and creek beds. Sometimes I think I can remember the nineteenth century. When I was born in Kentucky, in 1940, farm ways had not changed much since pioneer times. No true cultural up
heaval had hit Clear Springs, the rural community my family came from, since the Civil War. We seemed to live outside of time
.

But World War II hurled us into the twentieth century. After my father came home from the Navy, we got a radio the size of a jukebox, and we started going to drive-in movies. I began dreaming of a rootless way of life, one that would knock me loose from that rock-solid homestead and catapult me into the fluid, musical motions of faraway cities. All three generations of our extended family were challenged simultaneously by news from a fast-moving outside world. My elders had to carry on with their inevitable labors, but seductive promises seemed to whirl in front of my eyes like a fireworks pinwheel. I was mesmerized, churned up by popular songs and Hollywood images that filled me with longing
.

Suddenly it was possible for the newest generation of country people in our region to go to college, travel to Europe, and even choose a life off the farm. (I had a notion to work as a secretary for a record company.) My parents encouraged even my most ill-informed ambitions, for like most Depression-era parents, they wanted their children to have easier lives than they had had; and they wanted us to rise above the shame so many country people felt. The movies and the radio insisted that country people were inferior and backward. “Put your shoes on, Lucy, don’t you know you’re in the city?” There was a fatalism in my parents’ hopes for their children, a fear that we would move on up to some highfalutin place where, cocktails in hand and spouting our book learning, we would look down on them
.

I didn’t want to spend my life canning beans and plucking chickens, so trundling my innocence before me like a shopping cart, I headed for New York—where else?—and got a job on a movie magazine. But I wasn’t a glamour-puss, I hated cocktail parties, and writing celebrity gossip soon palled. I wanted to be a real writer, which I thought meant I had to become a Greenwich Village bohemian. I didn’t know that the postwar portrait of the Village artist was already turning into a caricature. Bob Dylan—Nick Carraway’s country cousin—had arrived in the Village some time before, not as a starry-eyed tourist like me but as a revolutionary messenger from the boondocks. But it was a long time before I understood how Dylan affirmed the very resources I had left behind
.

Confused, unsure of my direction or purpose, I left the city for an upstate New York graduate school. Then the sixties exploded. In one ear I heard the Beatles singing the magic of transcendence, and in the other I heard about my grandmother’s nervous breakdown, apparently caused
by her worry over me—the innocent who had “gone off up North” to the evil big city. I teeter-tottered between two worlds. As I struggled to become sophisticated, my folks and their country culture were always present in the deepest part of my being. Yet I was estranged from them, just as I was a stranger there in the North. I was an exile in both places
.

This book is the story of a family trying to come to terms with profound change. It truly centers on my mother. If she’d had the chance, she might have busted out to the big city years before I dreamed of doing so. Many of the impulses I felt burned in her breast, too. But she remained caught in a household dominated by my cautious, worried, tight-stitched grandmother. To understand what happened to my mother and subsequently to me, I recently began to sort through the scraps of the past, looking for the patterns of our quilted-together lives
.

—B
OBBIE
A
NN
M
ASON
, K
ENTUCKY
, 1998