A Place in the World by Frances Mayes

Author:Frances Mayes [Mayes, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

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The House on Lee Street partially burned when I was in college. My grandmother Frances was long dead. My grandfather fled the flames in the night and died of shock two days later. Aunt Hazel had the exterior of the house restored, replacing the gracious wraparound porch with too-thin columns. For all my adult life and until Hazel died, the shell of the house was maintained on the outside, down to the polished brass knocker and marigolds along the sidewalk. “Tacky,” my mother said. “Marigolds have nothing to do with anything.”

Hazel, on her pilgrimages to the past, rode by and murmured, “Doesn’t the house look good? I announced my engagement to Wilford to all twelve of my beaux, who sat around me on those steps.” Eye roll from my mother, smirk from me at the word beaux. Meanwhile, Hazel lived in a tropical tiled house in Miami, which she said, always with an explosion of tears, would never be home. She had hiraeth, a Welsh word meaning the feeling for a home that can’t ever be revisited or never really existed. Her Spanish Mediterranean home was a thousand times more interesting than her parents’ late Victorian, but the square white house on the corner of Lee and Lemon had captured her heart, and she never let go.

Here’s the crazy part, the haunting part, the unforgettable part, the part that made my sister say, “It’s the last house in the United States I’d want to buy”—inside, the house was still burned. The baby grand, charred, leaned under the sagging staircase; the walls were black, and the furniture sticks of glassy ash. I did not write about this in my southern novel Swan. The metaphors felt too dense to sort out. I wonder how many small children peered in those windows and ran for their lives.

One college professor of mine claimed that the southern sense of place derives from the lost war. He meant, of course, the War Between the States, as it was then called. “We are the only people in America to fight for our land and have our land scoured,” he proclaimed. “We have a sense of loss that never will be overcome.” I did not believe him. I felt too shaped by the land itself, not some far-off war. I came to the study of history with a conviction that wars are given far too much space in the texts. I wanted an explanation that came from hidden wells, water hyacinths, moonshine, hunting rifles, hatboxes, walking rain, cottonmouths, sheet lightning, scarecrows, lynchings, canopied beds, sinkholes, cotton bolls, auctioned humans, palmettos, ether vials, moonvine, and screen doors slamming on a summer morning. A place’s icons are what move inside us, compel us toward what we are becoming.

Living in Tuscany reiterated this primary knowledge. My house became my icon. As it moved into my psyche, it seemed timeless. The House—my oldest playtime, my six-windowed childhood room a location for dreaming, the hideouts for everyday or sublime creativity and a chance to be myself in another version.

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