(I live in an old farmhouse that is filled with the past. It is a past that is slowly eroding. Photographs fade until the details of faces are lost. The floors sag and the entire house creaks in a high wind. Me and my house remind me of an interview I once read with an Australian aborigine. He was a happy guy who seemed filled with a disconcerting humor as he made sobering observations on his life and the vanishing world around him. He said, “The moa is gone. The kiwi is gone. And me ... well, I am going!” Then, he laughed.)

I burned my grandmother’s rocking chairs. I’ve been putting it off for years, kept making excuses as I moved them from the house to the barn and from the barn to the loft and finally to the old garden where they sat canted together among the cornstalks like two old friend confiding in each other. They have been there for three years. Sun, winter snow and spring rain weathered them badly. The cane bottoms are long gone, the rockers broken and the old fluted backs shattered. Each time I picked them up, determined to chuck them into the dump, I got fleeting images of my grandmother’s frail body rocking vigorously back and forth on the front porch as she sang old hymns in a keening falsetto.

“I’ll meeeeeet you in the moooorning ... and we’ll sit down, by the riiiiiver!”

Each time I remembered her and heard the thrum-thrum of the rockers, I would grant them another year’s reprieve and carry the two old carcasses into the corncrib or an abandoned barn stall, lifting them like frail invalids, putting them down carefully, and closing the door. They would lean quietly against the wall, wrapped in blankets of spider webs until one of my “spring cleanings” seizures would bring them into the light of day again, where I would rub, scrub and entertain foolish plans to get them refurbished with new bottoms, fresh-turned rockers and a coat of paint. Both chairs were beyond help, of course, riddled with fractures, rot and broken joints. If I had actually repaired them, they would have ended up composed of all-new parts — nothing remaining that remembered the imprint of my grandmother’s hand or body.

Fifty years ago, the two rockers sat on the front porch. The reason my grandmother had two chairs was simply that she yearned for company, and in the summer, she often got it. Her sister, Tilda, or her best friend, Myrtle Plemmons, would visit. Sometimes, Myrtle and Tilda would come together, and when that happened I would be told to bring out the little upholstered rocker in the living room. Then, they would all three rock together, occasionally shifting to stay in the shade or to get a better view of the cows grazing in the pasture. They would talk, oh, how they would talk! The quality of marriages was judged, shocking details of lives revealed, the symptoms of morbid diseases analyzed, and when they grew excited, the chairs would gain speed.

My grandmother and her friends were given to loud expressions of shock, amazement and shared judgment. “Why, you don’t mean it!” my grandmother would say. “Hey, hush your mouth!” said Tilda. “Well, I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” said Myrtle.

I would lurk about in the hopes of hearing something that would add to my education. Sometimes, my grandmother would send me on contrived trips to the barn or the grocery store when the discussions were judged to be unfit for young ears. However, there was always the likelihood that I would be forgotten if I kept quiet and out of sight. I became master of the sneaky tiptoe, lurking in the house or the yard.

But, mostly, I remember my grandmother alone, stringing beans or shelling peas as she rocked. On summer nights, she would rock slowly, listening to the rain-crows and singing songs from her youth when my grandfather would walk from Macon County to Big Ridge to court her.

“It was there that I knew, I’d love you forever, when the trees played the waltz of the wind.”

After a dozen failed attempts to haul the old chairs away, I finally realized that there was something callous and shameful about casting them out with the trash. Fire seems more fitting, possibly more honorable, like a ritual cremation. Then, there is this: If I burn them, in some ways I still have them.
They will always be here. Doused with kerosene, they burned quickly, despite a soft rain that fell on the charring wood and cane like a benediction. The ashes drifted through the garden, sifting into the plowed rows where corn, tomatoes and sunflowers are growing. It may be that my Silver Queen, Big Boys and half-runners will be nurtured this year by my grandmother’s singing.

“Can I sleep in your barn tonight, mister? It is cold lying out on the ground. The cold north wind is a-blowing, And I have no place to lie down.”

Ashes and music fertilizing moonflowers and Love Lies Bleeding. My grandmother’s chairs have become a part of my garden.

(Gary Carden is a storyteller and writer who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com)

 

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