The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

It’s never wise to wonder if you’d be friends with your family were you not bound together by blood. Like a waterlogged door that can never close properly again, once entertained, that question can permanently change things, making it easier for you to notice the faults and the foibles of the people you’re tied to for life.

See, it’s a dangerous thing to let people grow up believing they have all the answers. They close their minds and stop questioning. Nothing’s a mystery anymore. Nobody’s right but them.

What an effort she made to change me, and when it was clear those surface alterations would never occur, she began to mistake my solitary nature for sullenness, my laughter for mockery, my silence for a judgment I didn't start to feel until much later.

That’s all it takes sometimes. Just one person who really knows you and who’s got your back.

The touchstones that stand in our memory rarely match up to reality. They suffer from the distortion of time, with a tendency to become bigger and grander whenever we call them to mind.

I wasn’t taught to question when I was young. None of us were. We were told what to think, not how to think. I was led to believe I’d been born wrong. Nothing I could do about that, except pretend to be other than I was. That was the only way I could be accepted by society, the people I loved,

Time is a god we all must serve, enduring its vagaries the best we can,

Every house is haunted. Some are haunted in the traditional way: by spirits generally more mischievous than malevolent, who take delight in closing the open door, rocking the empty chair, or snuffing out the flaming candle, unfortunate souls who failed to squeeze enough enjoyment out of their paltry allotment of days to sufficiently satisfy their eternity. Most, however, are wanted by our own memories: bits of ourselves, individual and unique, left behind and lying dormant for decades but with the power to quicken and breathe the moment we step back inside.

Our southern accent might lie dormant when we were in other parts of the country but was known to reemerge without warning in sympathetic surroundings.

The back roads of the South are, like the South itself, a medley of disparity. The storybook sight of fat-bellied cows, like soft polka dots on lemon-lime fields, can momentarily lull the passerby into believing he is traveling through paradise.

It really doesn’t matter the amount of time that passes between visits to your hometown. It’s as if a sleeping sensibility awakens in the very marrow of your bones to answer a call made even more insistent by its silence. It’s a call from within, a visceral response to the way sunlight lies across a certain green field or the sight of a mockingbird all alone on a fence post.

Growing up in the South is not for the faint of heart. An enigmatic place at the best of times, it is paradoxical to the core. Finding your way through the various switchbacks and roundabouts that make up the overgrown maze of its personality can be a bewildering experience and one that often takes a lifetime, at least. Just when you think you have it solidly in your sights, it slips around a corner, leaving only the faint fragrance of a fading magnolia hanging in the muggy air. At the very moment you feel confident in its definition, it can, without warning, fashion itself into a creature of myth, sending you back to huddle over your history books and crystal balls, once again in search of the truth about this place you call home. Its a land where heart-stopping beauty and heartrending ugliness flourish in tandem, a land of kindness and hate, of ignorance and wit, of integrity, blindness, and pride.

Families change when a parent dies, and not always how you'd expect. Sometimes they turn brittle, splintering off into dark places, like a pencil stuck too far in the sharpener. Sometimes they just get quiet. Their conversations float on the surface, never venturing into the deeper waters to reach the fears and gray questions that keep each one of them awake in the dead of night, eyes wide open in the darkness of their separate rooms lined up along the same hallway. Little things that don't matter become stand-ins for things that do. It's just easier, I suppose, to be angry over who got the gooseneck rocker when Aunt Jo died that it is to admit you're scared because you don't know why Aunt Jo had to die in the first place. She was only forty-six years old. But you don't realize this when you're young. You just think adults don't talk about things because they're not really important, or maybe they don't think you'll understand. So you start to push the scary questions away, deep down inside yourself. It's not until you're older that it dawns on you that adults are afraid to ask the questions themselves.

It’s a land where heart-stopping beauty and heartrending ugliness flourish in tandem, a land of kindness and hate, of ignorance and wit, of integrity, blindness, and pride.

For all its rigid constancy, time can be so malleable in the face of memory. Something as simple as the smell of old roses can bewitch it completely, causing it to twist and turn back onto itself until entire decades are lost and you feel as though it hasn’t advanced one hour from that bright morning when you were six, standing alone in the garden sun to watch an orange butterfly flicker among the white flowers.

I just decided a long time ago that love can never be evil.

Opening our minds to other points of view could very well deliver a kick to the foundation, a kick that could lead to a crack that could splinter and spread till it brought the whole thing crashing down on our heads.

The past often rides on the notes of a song, and as this one wove its way around the car and out into the open air, it carried with it all the carefree vacations we’d taken to our favorite Florida beach before the loss of our father changed everything.

It’s probably true that solitude can enhance your eccentricities, but it’s also true that since there’s no one around to point them out to you, those eccentricities can soon become a comfortable part of your personality, leading you into a contentment born solely of not giving a damn.

So much hurt in the world, and for so many years. All over who people love.

But doubt welcomes questions, and questions are often the doorway to truth.

Their soul connection to this island had not been guaranteed by birth, yet they'd recognized from the first moment they'd stepped out onto its rocks that they felt more at home here than anywhere else in the world.

Just because they're in the majority doesn't mean they're right. Once you realize that, you can hear your own soul a whole lot better.

It was as though we'd stepped right into the stories he'd told us. I could almost hear his voice on the wind.

I understood now that it's possible to be living a lie even if you're not the one who told it.

They were extras in the movie of my life- a cameo here, a walk-on there- people who'd populated the scenes of my childhood but who'd lacked the dramatic flair to be remembered.

This is just one of life's curveballs. We all get them if we live long enough.

We were the dark bookends on either side of her fairy tale.

The cloth from which I'd been cut was as wildly divergent from the one that had produced my mother and sister as satin was from tweed.