Solastalgia
Pleasant memories of places past: that’s nostalgia. But what do you call the grief that comes when the modern world leaves nary a trace of the place that raised you?
Even now, I can close my eyes and see the outline of those trees, as familiar as the veins on my wrist. Black lace in winter; brilliant red in fall; close and still on summer nights when heat lightning flickered on the horizon.
On windy days, I imagined myself under water, and the wind in their leaves was the surf above my head. They were old trees. The oak we used as second base in the front yard was so thick that my sister and I together could not put our arms around it. In mast years, the acorns rained down like hail.
It’s been nearly seventy years, and I still visit them regularly in my dreams. In these dreams I am fighting developers for their survival. In some dreams, the developers have already taken most of the trees and erected a massive hotel or office building, and I am bargaining with some nameless commercial entity to save what’s left. In others, my childhood home is a little green island in a sea of ugly commercial buildings, and I am trying to decide whether to stay or go.
The feeling is always the same—a despairing urgency about living things I cannot save, which also happens to be a fairly accurate description of the way I feel about the planet these days. In recent years, this feeling has become widespread enough that there are names for it. “Eco-anxiety” is one—the existential distress at seeing the despoiling of the planet. But the word that seems most apt and personal is “solastalgia”—a word coined in 2007 by environmentalist and philosopher Glenn Albrecht. Nostalgia is a longing for an imagined past; solastalgia is a longing for a very real place that has been rendered alien by the encroachment of industry, the ravages of war, fire, flood, or environmental degradation. Native Americans on the Trail of Tears felt it; refugees from Gaza no doubt feel it. It is a complex mixture of grief, a feeling of exile and estrangement, and an incurable homesickness for the feeling of belonging to the soil living beneath your feet. That connection is something not all of us have been lucky enough to experience. But I did. I learned it before I could talk, from my grandfather.
I called him Paw Paw. His real name was John Kleckley Derrick—J.K. to his friends and “Kleck” to his wife. He was born in 1885 on a farm in Campbell County, Georgia, which no longer exists; today the area is known as south Fulton County, a part of the Atlanta suburbs encompassing College Park, Red Oak, Fairburn, and Palmetto. My grandmother, Cora Derrick, grew up on a nearby farm. John married Cora in 1907, and at some point, he left the farm to work in the rail yards of Atlanta as a carpenter for Southern Railways. There is no record of any biological children. In 1934, when it must have been clear there never would be—Paw Paw was forty-nine, Grandma two years younger—they adopted my mother, who was eight. When Paw Paw retired, he bought a farm in south Fulton County about a mile north of Red Oak and deeded some of the land to my mother when she and my father got married, in 1947. I grew up in a house across a cornfield from Grandma and Paw Paw, the only grandparents I ever really knew.
The memories are little shards of sensory input: the feel of the cool red Georgia dirt against my bare feet as I watched him plow with Becky, his mule. Sitting on his lap as he peeled an apple—drawing a small utility knife from the front of his overalls and expertly separating the peel from the apple in one long stroke.
He was a big man—tall and raw-boned, with a prominent nose, a deep, booming voice, and the gait of a person who had walked across a lot of open fields. He never hurried; I never saw him lose his temper. I must have followed him like a puppy from the time I could walk, because he takes up so much space in my earliest childhood memories. At that age, a child’s brain is like a sponge. Decades later, walking through a museum of nineteenth century Maryland farm life, I found myself picking up various farm implements and telling my husband things about them I didn’t know I knew.
The time was the early 1960s, but the musk of the late nineteenth century still hung in the air. Grandma’s grandma had watched General William Tecumseh Sherman’s soldiers tear up the railroad that ran parallel to our street, the one Sherman described in his memoirs as “extending from East Point to Red-Oak Station and Fairburn” on August 28, 1864, during the siege of Atlanta. It was the Confederacy’s last supply line. The soldiers built bonfires with the crossties and heated the rails to bend them into what were known as “Sherman’s neckties.” Grandma spoke of this event the way people in my world tended to speak of the Civil War—as if it had recently ended and it was not entirely clear who had won.
We lived in a strange little rural bubble about one and a half miles southwest of what would become the main terminal of the world’s busiest airport; Paw Paw’s pasture sat athwart the route of what was about to become I-285, Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway. Our street was a residential dirt road on one end, a paved light industrial street on the other. At the industrial end, there was a country store called The H&H Bait Ranch, a one-room structure called the Oliver Grove Independent Baptist Church, and an old Armco Steel plant, where big machines produced corrugated rolls of steel that they turned into Quonset huts and nuclear fallout shelters people buried in their back yard. On every side, we were threatened by the encroachments of suburbia, light industry, and retail.
If you have ever gone swimming in the ocean, you may know what it’s like to get caught in the exact spot to take the full force of a wave. We were in precisely the right spot to take the full force of two mighty waves of social change. The first was Atlanta’s growing prominence in the 1960s as an air transportation hub. The second was white flight, caused by the changes in housing and lending laws won by the Civil Rights Movement. Both had the immediate effect of bringing rapid, chaotic development to what up to then had been a rural area of small farms. My early childhood took place in the curl of those waves, in the historical moment before they crashed.
The memories are little shards of sensory input: the feel of the cool red Georgia dirt against my bare feet as I watched him plow with Becky, his mule. Sitting on his lap as he peeled an apple—drawing a small utility knife from the front of his overalls and expertly separating the peel from the apple in one long stroke, the dirt under his fingernails black against the apple’s white interior. The acrid smell of coal smoke as he hammered at a small anvil, repairing Becky’s shoes. The stench of my grandmother’s hen house. Picking up the yellow dinette chair that sat at Grandma’s telephone table and carrying it to the kitchen as he smiled at me. “Looky there, Cora!” he said. “Ain’t she a big girl!” The sweet, slightly nutty taste of a ripe brown fig Grandma plucked off a bush one day and put in my mouth. The tickle in my palm of a granddaddy long legs, which Paw Paw picked up and carefully handed to me.
“Hit won’t hurt yew,” he said.
Land in Human Use Must Be Used Lovingly
The world Paw Paw showed me was the world of a yeoman farmer, and it differed very little from the ways people had farmed a century earlier. He owned about forty acres, most of it in timber. On about fifteen acres of cleared land, he raised corn, potatoes, green beans (planted between the corn so the vines could snake up the corn stalks), black-eyed peas, English peas, yellow and green squash, lima beans, cabbage, and tomatoes. There was also an orchard of crabapple and peach trees. Their fruit was small, misshapen, and tart, but for that reason it made outstanding jam, as did the muscadine vines he cultivated. He also kept a milk cow or two; a well on the property provided us with water. My grandmother’s chickens gave us eggs, and an occasional roasting hen; and then there were five or six pigs, one or two of which were slaughtered every year to provide us with ham and sausage. Then there was Becky, his mule, and one evil gander who hissed like a snake. My mother and grandmother spent every August canning and preserving everything that came in, working in steamy kitchens in the punishing August heat. But in winter, we had warm bowls of vegetable soup, and fried apples, jams made of plums and muscadines, and my mother’s fiery hot pear chowchow.
I followed Paw Paw, and watched what he did, and only later did I realize the significance of what I saw. I have an ancient home movie of Paw Paw leading Becky by the halter through a field of red clover, with me and my older sister—ages about three and five—perched on Becky’s back. It was a pretty and comical picture: the lush clover, Paw Paw’s white spitz, Pogo, jumping high and disappearing, tracing a sine curve in the clover. Much later, I learned that farmers plant red clover in fallow fields to replenish nitrogen in the soil. He planted in the dark of the moon, following the folk wisdom which said that the magnetic pull of the waxing moon helped coax seedlings out of the ground. I watched him plow with Becky, and I learned. Years later, I was the only person in my Southern Literature class at Emory University who knew the difference between “gee,” the command used to tell a mule to go right, and “haw,” the command for left.
I did not know then that Paw Paw’s way was the same practice advocated by Wendell Berry as the ultimate in sustainable land use: plowing with a mule obviates the need to buy fuel for a tractor, and keeping livestock allows a farmer to use their manure for fertilizer, avoiding chemical fertilizers. Berry, now ninety years old, is the Kentucky novelist, poet, and environmental activist who is globally renowned for his advocacy of sustainable agriculture and rural communities. Paw Paw also used guano, which he bought in big white sacks from the feed store in Fairburn, digging his hands in the bag and sprinkling it over the seeds. I used to help him. (This was before I discovered that guano is essentially bat shit.)
I’m sure Paw Paw’s motivation was a lot simpler than achieving sustainability. Plowing with a mule was just something he’d done all his life—and, unlike a tractor, a mule was a living creature a person could have feelings for.
Long before I could put Paw Paw’s ethos into words, I absorbed the message, which is this: When you grow a large part of your own food, it changes your relationship with the land. Land is not “real estate”; it’s a living thing that requires attention and care.
It wasn’t a self-sufficient operation; my mother made weekly trips to the grocery store, and my childhood diet included Kool-Aid and Cocoa Puffs. But a large part of what sustained us came from the ground at our feet. Much of the produce we ate fresh from the field, and most of the rest was canned for the winter. Some of the corn was sweet corn, raised to be eaten, and some was feed corn planted to feed livestock. We harvested the feed corn in the fall, and the corn shucks were fed to the cows and pigs. The dried ears were put through a machine, one ear at a time. It looked like a giant pencil sharpener; you stuck the ear in the hole, cranked the handle, and the ridges inside stripped the kernels from the ear. The dried kernels were then ground up in a machine he ran by somehow attaching its fan belt to the tractor engine—I’m not sure how that worked—and were then fed to the chickens. He used table scraps to feed the pigs, and cottage cheese past its sell-by date that he bought in bulk from Atlanta Dairies. I have a distinct memory of helping him open the containers of smelly spoiled cottage cheese and dumping them in a huge bucket, then following him out to the pig pen and watching him empty the bucket in the pigs’ trough.
We were not poor, but we lived frugally. I remember Martha White Flour that came in cloth sacks with an easily detachable kitchen rag on the outside, thrown in for free. Most of Grandma’s pillowcases were made from the remnants of those flour sacks—bleached, starched, ironed and prettied up with some embroidery on the edges. It was also a lifestyle with significant drawbacks. Since we drank milk straight from the cow, we all caught brucellosis when the cow did. Mostly a Third World disease today, brucellosis back then was called “undulant fever” because its hallmark was a fever that peaked during the afternoon, like malaria. I am told it laid me and my mother low, and the cows had to be put down. And since our water came from Paw Paw’s well, I was a teenager before my teeth were exposed to fluoride. (Many years later, when I moved to Washington, D.C., and saw a dentist for an abscessed tooth, he dealt with the emergency at hand and then examined the rest of my mouth. When he was done, he sat down and sighed. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.)
Long before I could put Paw Paw’s ethos into words, I absorbed the message, which is this: When you grow a large part of your own food, it changes your relationship with the land. Land is not “real estate,” or a pretty landscape to be preserved, or a lawn to be moved, or blank canvas for future development; it’s a living thing that requires attention and care. It is your home, and because it is your home, you protect it. This is not a matter of ideology; it is as natural as looking at the sky to gauge the chance of rain. Paw Paw’s farm was my first home—his farm, and the simple white frame house he and Grandma lived in, under the canopy of those towering red oaks.
The Way It Was
One morning when I was four, I opened the front door to find a miracle: the world had been transformed inro the interior of a diamond-studded jewel box. It was the first time I had ever seen snow. I stepped outside, barefoot, into a world of absolute silence—not a dog barking, not a door slamming, no airplanes, no cars. The oaks in our front yard were now intricate ice sculptures; bosomy, pearl-gray clouds hovered just above the treetops. It was so beautiful I couldn’t breathe. After a few moments, from several hundred yards away, the silence was broken by the sound of someone driving in low gear down Roosevelt Highway. I stood there, enthralled, my feet going numb, until I heard my mother’s scandalized voice behind me: “Tracy Anne!” Weather records show on March 11, 1960, Atlanta recorded four inches of snow. By Atlanta standards, it was a blizzard.
There is no magic equal to the first sight of snow to a child who has never seen it before; there is no fervor comparable to that child’s subsequent prayers for more snow. A chilly rain would descend; inevitably, the temperature would hover maddeningly close to, but just above, freezing. Please Lord, I would say, but God was stingy with his responses; if there was any snow at all it usually amounted to less than an inch, and that would be gone by the next day. Since our winter precipitation tended to be rain or sleet, the real menace was ice storms. The sleet would coat every needle on every pine tree and accumulate there, and after a while the trees would snap like twigs, usually onto a power line. In other places, rosy-cheeked children made snowmen and snow forts, skated on ponds, careened down hills on sleds, and had snowball fights. Georgia children got mud and power outages. This seemed outrageous to me then—and still does.
Sometimes a mockingbird would sing all night. Around 4 a.m., when the thin, ambient light that precedes sunrise began to lighten the sky, my grandmother’s rooster would start to crow.
Power outages affected only the lights. For heat, our house had an old-fashioned furnace fired by coal oil—a red-eyed household demon that lived in a closet just outside my parents’ bedroom and was fed by a mysterious tanker truck that would arrive once a year and attach a pump to a hole in the driveway I never noticed at any other time. When I was feeling brave, I would sometimes open the door of the furnace closet and crack open the door of the furnace itself to see orange-red flames. We also had a fireplace that was open on two adjacent sides, a design I’ve never seen since, and for firewood we used a supply of railroad tie ends. (Paw Paw knew a guy.) Soaked with creosote, they burned exceptionally hot. Over the years, we melted two iron grates.
So that was winter. Fall was the oaks across the cornfield turning a flame red against a clear blue October sky. Spring was dampness and heat and an extravagance of blossoms: forsythia and azaleas and dogwoods, yellow jonquils, white plum, purple thrift. Our plum tree was planted on the side of a hill, and on one side its branches swept down to the ground, creating a little blossom cave. I remember crawling inside and sitting under a canopy of blossoms, entranced and, at least for a few moments, unafraid of the bees. But in my memory, all the other seasons combined were just brief interludes between summers, which seemed to last for years. I would fall asleep to a cacophony of summer noises coming through our open windows: crickets, tree frogs, cicadas, the bang of June bugs hurtling into the window screen. My mother would put the round hassock fan in the hallway between the bedrooms, in hopes of creating some kind of breeze. On nights when it was too hot to sleep, I’d watch heat lightning behind the oak trees as a thunderstorm spilled rain somewhere twenty miles away. Sometimes I slept on an old Army cot on the back porch, watching the stars through the leaves of the mulberry tree in the back yard, sleeping, then waking again to see that the stars had moved while I slept, then falling asleep again. Sometimes a mockingbird would sing all night. Around 4 a.m., when the thin, ambient light that precedes sunrise began to lighten the sky, my grandmother’s rooster would start to crow.
My sister and I spent the hours when we were not at school or in church exploring. Grandma and Paw Paw’s house, for instance, had a fascinating root cellar, accessible only by going out the back door, around the house to the side, opening a small wooden door in the foundation, and slithering in feet first. Inside there were rows of canned vegetables and fruit and some potatoes Grandma kept with which to start the next year’s crop. (There were two kinds of potatoes: sweet taters, and “arsh” taters; the latter was the way Grandma, with her ancestors’ Appalachian accent, pronounced “Irish.”) Their house also had a delightful secret passage. If you opened the hall closet door and pushed your way through the coats and rain gear, you would then encounter another row of clothes—Grandma’s Sunday dresses and workaday housedresses. If you pushed past that, there would be another door, which opened into my grandparents’ bedroom: the hall closet and the bedroom closet were all one space.
The barn was a helter-skelter collection of partitions made up of boards nailed together more or less parallel. Farmers in the Deep South didn’t value snug construction; they valued air flow. But even by these standards, Paw Paw’s barn was ramshackle. The old saying that so-and-so “couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a hat full of rice” held true here, but not because of an inaccurate throwing arm: any rice tossed at the side of Paw Paw’s barn would have gone through the wall. You could reach the hayloft from any point in the building by finding a toehold in various gaps in the wall and working your way up, and wherever you wound up, there was likely to be a gap in the hayloft floor big enough to wriggle through. The tack room was built three feet higher off the ground than the stalls, there were random holes in the interior walls, and then there was the one room we never spoke of or went into.
The chicken house was built onto the far side of the barn, and the ammonia smell of chicken shit on a hot day could bring tears to your eyes. The back of my grandmother’s hands always bore a jagged series of bright orange mercurochrome-ed wounds where the hens had pecked her, yet she was always after me to gather her eggs.
“Those hens won’t hurt you,” she insisted, but I wasn’t stupid; I had eyes. In addition to the hen house, there was Grandma’s biddy house, where her baby chicks clustered around the heat of a 100-watt bulb that hung about eighteen inches off the floor. The biddies were soft, almost weightless, and incredibly fragile; Grandma told us that if they lost their balance and fell in the drinking pan, they were helpless to lift themselves up and would drown. Her way of describing someone truly evil was to say he or she “would push little biddies in the water.”
His death was one more event whose significance was not clear to me until much later. Now I see it as a symbol of the dying of a way of life—not just in my little world, but the developed world as a whole.
Georgia summers were bearable only because we lived under a canopy of red oaks; our yard was so shady that we never had a front lawn. Living without air conditioning in that climate meant our windows were open to the outside world for a good seven or eight months a year. It made me attuned to nature in a way I have since lost. It made me notice things, such as the precise moment in July when the year’s brood of cicadas tuned up, or the slight electrical charge in the air before a thunderstorm, or the Red Oak Fire Department siren that went off at precisely noon every Wednesday, marking the exact halfway point of the week. Time was subtly different, governed less by the clock and more by the angle of the sun.
Porches provided the perfect halfway point between indoors and outdoors. They were the best places to experience the full fury of a thunderstorm without getting soaked, or read the Sunday comics, or listen to the Georgia-Alabama football game. They also fostered community. From your front porch, you could have conservations with people passing by—though on our street, there wasn’t much foot traffic. Sitting on your front porch also telegraphed the message that you were at home and open to drop-in guests. In that time and place, it was not strictly necessary to wait for an invitation to go visiting. Preachers on their pastoral rounds did it, and neighbors, and extended family; someone who had taken home the leftovers of the banana pudding you had brought to the church supper a week earlier might pause on her way to the grocery store to return the casserole dish. Social customs were in every way the exact opposite of today, where houses have decks in the back, away from the gaze of passers-by, and unscheduled visitors are scrutinized on smartphone screens via wireless security systems.
Grandma and Paw Paw’s house had a front porch, with a swing hung my chains that clinked softly when the swing moved. I have a picture of me and my sister sitting on that swing with Paw Paw. I am maybe eighteen months old, standing next to Paw Paw, nestled securely in the crook of his right arm.
Paw Paw died, of a stroke, in May 1962, at the age of seventy-seven. I was six. I remember his stern, mute profile in the hospital bed set up in the front room, which was hot and stuffy and full of old women. On the night he died, I woke to the sound of my mother sobbing. His death was one more event whose significance was not clear to me until much later. Now I see it as a symbol of the dying of a way of life—not just in my little world, but the developed world as a whole.
The Outside World Arrives
Change came like a tsunami—which, contrary to what many people think, does not always announce itself with a mighty roar, but seeps in under the door when you aren’t looking. It was happening even before Paw Paw died. In 1959, Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, where my father worked, introduced the DC-9, followed the next year by the Convair 880. Propeller planes like the DC-3 were hardly noticeable when they flew over our house, but the new jets were exponentially louder. When the heat and humidity broke in the fall and sound carried further, we began to hear the faint sound of jet engines revving for takeoff while they were still on the runway. It was a harbinger of things to come.
At roughly the same time, state surveyors came through to stake out the route of the future Interstate 285, Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway. When the bulldozers came, they cut a swath that cleaved Paw Paw’s pasture in two and put us, technically, inside the perimeter. We couldn’t see the interstate from our house, but if you listened, you could hear the distant, low rush of traffic. At some point in the early 1960s, the county came through and paved our whole street. No longer did my mother have to constantly clean the thick red dust that settled on her furniture whenever a car went by. But the cars went by faster, and there were more of them.
And somewhere during those years, the Armco plant closed. Overnight, it seemed, the buildings were disassembled and carted away, leaving a vacant lot pockmarked with in-ground vats. I never knew what they had been used for, but after a while they filled with rainwater, the surface of which gleamed iridescent with oil and who knows what chemicals. There were no fences, no warning signs, nothing to keep a person from falling in. Strange as it seems to me now, it never occurred to us to complain. It would stay that way for several years before somebody decided to build a strip mall on it, and whatever was in those vats I’m sure eventually leached into the groundwater.
Grandma made poor-mouthing into an art form. After Paw Paw died, she described herself as “a pore old widow woman,” even though, thanks to Social Security and, later, Medicare, she lacked for nothing.
After Paw Paw died, Grandma sold all the remaining livestock. I woke up one morning and Becky was gone--and after a few years one of her sisters, Clara, moved in with her. Paw Paw had always been steady and calm; Grandma was his temperamental opposite. Her hands were always busy—gesticulating, stringing beans, stirring a pot. She was a tart old lady without a trace of sentimentality in her soul. Once, when I was around seven or eight, my mother sent me down the road to her house to return a china saucer. When I was almost there I tripped and skinned my knee; the saucer went flying out of my hand and broke into pieces. I picked up the shards of the saucer and walked the rest of the way to Grandma’s boohooing, snot-nosed, blood running down my leg over the permanent layer of dirt that I usually wore all summer long. I could clearly see Grandma sitting on the front porch with one of her lady friends from Buffington Road Christian Church.
“Cora, who is that child out there?” I heard the friend ask.
“I’ve never seen her before,” Grandma said.
I turned around and went home.
Grandma made poor-mouthing into an art form. After Paw Paw died, she described herself as “a pore old widow woman,” even though, thanks to Social Security and, later, Medicare, she lacked for nothing; if someone asked her how she was doing, she would describe her latest illness or injury and then sigh dramatically.
“I’ll live,” she’d say, “but I’ll never look as well.”
She loved Live Atlanta Wrestling, which was on Channel 5 on Saturdays at 5 p.m., and stoutly refused to believe that any of it was staged, even though a child like me could see that it was. She also watched The Porter Wagoner Show, where I first saw a very, very young Dolly Parton sing, in a voice like cotton candy. Grandma loved to have me do her nails, which usually started with my using the pointy end of a fingernail file to dig out the dirt.
“Don’t get the meat!” she would exclaim theatrically if I accidentally gouged her. “Don’t get the meat!”
When I was ten and my sister was twelve, my parents finally granted my sister’s fervent wishes and bought her a horse. Poncho was a pinto gelding my mother had picked out from a herd at some local horse dealer who probably did most of his business with slaughterhouses. “That one!” she said. “With the white spots.” Poncho turned out to be a one-person horse, and his person was my sister. Me, he wanted to kill. He ran away with me twice—once into the barn, where he scraped me off the saddle via the roof of the hayloft, and once alongside a freight train which, fortunately, beat him to the crossing; on another occasion, he bit my upper arm so hard that I had a spectacular purple, brown, and yellow bruise from shoulder to elbow. Once when my sister and I were washing him in the front yard, he waited until my sister was looking the other way, then deliberately lifted his left front foot, placed it on top of mine, and shifted his weight onto it. The pain rendered me speechless. When my sister finally noticed and pulled him off, he rolled his eye at me. “Next time,” he was saying.
The next year my parents bought a horse for me. George was a dark bay gelding of advanced years who was Poncho’s opposite in every respect: if he’d been able, he would have crawled up in my lap. The father of a friend had a three-horse trailer, and on occasion he would drive us to trails or horse shows, but most of the time we were left to explore our own shrinking neighborhood. To the north was the old Armco plant site, which offered an open place to gallop, as long as we were careful to avoid those in-ground vats of who-knows-what. There were the woods behind the cornfield, and the railroad right-of-way that ran parallel to Roosevelt Highway.
Increasingly, we were hemmed in by traffic. Interstate 285 cut off our access to the rest of Paw Paw’s property, about ten acres of woods that fronted on Godby Road. Old National Highway, to our north, seemed to be constantly under construction for some kind of widening or improvement. Traffic on Roosevelt Highway itself was increasing, as was the speed of the traffic on our street. One Saturday morning when I was in seventh grade, my parents woke me with the news that one of the cars that now went flying by our house had killed my beloved calico cat.
Imperceptibly, our connection to the land was changing. Land which is not sustained and tended starts to look disheveled, the same way people do when they become lonely and isolated. Paw Paw’s pasture began to look scraggly, unkempt, and weedy. The fields of rich red dirt he had once plowed with Becky in the harness looked similarly neglected. We still grew our own tomatoes, and one year I experimented with strawberries, but most of the vegetables he had planted and harvested now came in plastic bags from the freezer at Kroger.
And then Grandma announced that she and Clara were moving. She was too old to keep up any kind of garden, and Clara wanted to move closer to her own grandchildren. Grandma rented out her house, and strangers took possession of a place that was dear to me, that I had thought of as mine. They made little attempt to keep up the property, and they let their chickens roam everywhere. Grandma’s departure also meant we lost access to Paw Paw’s old barn, so my dad and some of his work buddies one weekend hastily constructed a two-stall structure on our property near the woods line to house Poncho and George. It was snug and practical, but it wasn’t the same. Their pasture now consisted of the back half of the old cornfield, the front half of which was devoted to our own modest vegetable garden. My world was shrinking.
Airport noise was becoming increasingly intrusive. For a year or two, my father had been talking about the work underway to build a second major runway at the airport. The new runway was finished the year I entered eighth grade and encountered algebra for the first time. A cluster of takeoffs—what my dad, intimately familiar with scheduling issues, called “the eight o’clock complex”—happened every night, right about the time when I sat down with my algebra book, struggling to make sense of this alien new idea of putting letters and numbers in the same sentence. While I tried to work, a jet roared over our house every four minutes, and during the brief periods of quiet I found myself listening rigidly for the beginning of the next earsplitting roar. One night I broke one of my bedroom windows throwing my algebra textbook across the room in rage and frustration. Increasingly, the house I loved, the only home I had ever known, seemed shabby—not my beloved home, just a place where noise periodically made it impossible to think straight.
One day in eighth grade I walked into my sociology class and discovered a bulletin board presentation one of my classmates had made entitled “Slums in Our Neighborhood.” One of the pictures was of an old Victorian mansion that sat on the other side of my grandparents’ old house. My friends Billy and Leanne lived in a trailer behind that house, and my friend Brenda lived in the house, which had been rented out to a succession of tenants for years. Brenda was in my sociology class, but she hadn’t walked in the door yet. Before she did, I quickly took the picture off the bulletin board, put it in my skirt pocket, and took it to my teacher. He looked mortified and quickly shoved the picture into his desk drawer.
I was acutely aware that most of my classmates lived in relatively new subdivisions to the north of Roosevelt Highway; there was even a Sun Valley contingent of popular kids who lived in a subdivision of that name. My house seemed shabby compared with their houses, with their modern kitchens, shag carpets, and central air conditioning. It was 1968, the year I turned thirteen. I was a teenager now, and it had been six years since Paw Paw had died. The things he had taught me, the way of life he lived, seemed increasingly distant, buried in my brain behind an onslaught of new input: puberty, political assassinations, the Vietnam War, my urgent need to own a John Romaine purse like all the other girls had.
I watched from my bedroom window through the branches of the red oak trees—the oaks I loved, the oaks I had even given names to—as the huge machines moved slowly back and forth. They looked like monsters scouring the ground for something to eat.
Then came more news: the owners of the old Victorian mansion had sold their land to Levitt’s Furniture, which was going to build a warehouse on the site. Levitt’s was in a big hurry: bulldozers showed up soon thereafter, and worked long into the night, toiling back and forth under the orange glare of mercury vapor lamps. I watched from my bedroom window through the branches of the red oak trees—the oaks I loved, the oaks I had even given names to—as the huge machines moved slowly back and forth. They looked like monsters scouring the ground for something to eat. Between the eight o’clock complex and the ugly growls of the earthmovers, clearly audible from my bedroom, there was no way to hear crickets, or mockingbirds, or June bugs, or anything else. This implacable tide of commercial and industrial development was now, at last, literally at our doorstep.
The day the movers came, the day we picked up the last little shards of our lives and crammed them into the station wagon to carry to our new house in the next county, I did not look back.
Dreaming of Trees
These days, when I get on Google Earth and enter my grandparents’ old address, all I see is asphalt and warehouses. Whole neighborhoods have been obliterated. My old elementary school fell victim to the airport expansion; today it’s an abandoned building with saplings growing out of its roof, incoming jets screaming overhead at three-minute intervals. Of the hundreds of red oaks that graced our property, not one remains. The perimeter highway that cut Paw Paw’s pasture in two has grown from four lanes to sixteen, and what’s left of his old property on the far side is filled with rows of cookie-cutter townhouses. The airplane noise is so bad that if my childhood home were still there, it would be unfit for human beings to live in.
The landscape of my childhood was swapped for this dystopia. And what did we get in exchange? Some consequential things. A higher standard of living, for one: the house we moved into when I was sixteen was a mansion compared to the house my parents built. The same air traffic that interrupted my algebra studies has taken me to places that broadened my horizons, expanded my understanding of the world, and allowed me to see places of breathtaking beauty. The airline industry that employed my father paid for college educations for my sister and me and allowed my mother to live a comfortable old age after our father died. The airport itself provides stable jobs for tens of thousands of people. My hometown of Atlanta has grown into a thriving international city and a mecca for Black artists. All of these are good things, and maybe they were even worth the obliteration of every lovely thing I grew up with as a child, and the disappearance of the means by which a gentle man named J.K. Derrick could live lightly on the earth.
But what amazes me now is how little we valued what we had, and how casually we traded it all in—how we settled for living down the road from a toxic waste dump (that old Armco plant) without holding the corporation responsible, how it never occurred to us to negotiate for preserving some of those trees, how we merely accepted every interference with our daily lives as the inevitable price of progress. The idea of progress itself was a large shiny object that blinded us to everything else. Very few people in the 1960s ever asked the question of whether there was still a place in the world for small farmers like Paw Paw and the communities that supported them—and, if so, where would that be.
In the core of my heart I knew what was happening to me: it was a violent sundering of self and place, so painful at the time that denial was the easiest option.
Today you can drive through the heart of the Mississippi Delta or South Georgia and see one abandoned town after another and still others teetering on the brink; you can see huge hog and chicken farms owned lock, stock, and barrel by Big Ag and the farmers on that land reduced to being mere employees, not even owners of the seeds they plant In the short run, Big Ag has fed the world, albeit with diets full of corn sugar and processed foods and meats and poultry from living creatures who lived out their miserable lives in cages, subsisting on an unnatural diet of grain and antibiotics. In the long run, Big Ag is now one of the chief culprits in wrecking the planet—them, and our own insatiable appetite for cheap junk food. Real food—beef from pasture-raised cows, eggs from free-range chickens, organic produce—is something only the well-off can afford to eat. It’s true that there are a new generation of farmers who are trying to recreate what Paw Paw had, but for the most part they are boutique designers in a world of sweatshops. The only people who still do what he did are the Amish, widely considered to be the universal symbol of all things Uncool. Yet the Amish were among the tiny minority of people who asked the essential question: is technological advance really an inherently good thing? Historically, they have regarded the idea of “progress” with a skeptical eye and carefully chosen what kinds of progress were truly beneficial. In the event of a social collapse, they will be better prepared than most of us.
Years ago, when I was doing some research in Mississippi, I talked to a Black farmer about his work, and a passing remark he made stuck with me: his delight in that moment before a thunderstorm when the leaves of the crops in his field are all fluttery.
“I think of that as a happy thing,” he said. “Like they sayin’, ‘We fittin’ to get some rain now.’” He told me this as we stood in a field outside the dilapidated house he grew up in, with twelve siblings, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He wanted to fix up the house, he said, but none of his surviving siblings were interested in joining him on that project, and none were interested in farming.
On that long-ago moving day, I didn’t look back, partly because I was sick of the noise and eager to see our fancy new digs. But another reason was that in the core of my heart I knew what was happening to me: it was a violent sundering of self and place, so painful at the time that denial was the easiest option. On a global scale, denial has also been the easiest option—but now the denial is wearing off, and there is a vast grief now for a planet that is changing before our eyes because of our carelessness and our failure to realize that the earth’s resources are not inexhaustible. I suffer from solastalgia, the pain of it is in my bones, and it will follow me all the rest of my days.
I dream of the red oaks now. It’s all I can do.
About the author
Tracy Thompson is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Suwanee Review, O Magazine, Washington Monthly, and other publications. Her most recent book was The New Mind of the South (Simon & Schuster, 2013). In her twenty-year career as a newspaper reporter, she worked for The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
What a lovely piece, Tracy. Thank you so much for sharing it.
I was born and raised in Atlanta in 1961. I miss old Atlanta! I grew up there & lived there for 30 years before moving to many other places.
My grandparents had farms in the mountains of north Georgia and western NC. You could have been me describing my childhood happily visiting and roaming their pastures, gardens, old farmhouses & barns. It was my happy place and a magical world.
Now I live in those mountains. This entire story is thoughtful & so beautiful. I feel the grief for Atlanta and our tiny mountain communities.
Weren’t we the lucky ones to grow up in a world like that? Thank you for a tender look back into the wonder years of time and place.
Tracy Thompson has given us an Ode and a richly detailed history lesson.
A Home story reminiscent of John Prine’s “ Paradise.”
A place that remains with her and is extensively drawn for the reader.
We are enriched by her powerful story.
Thank you.
The best story I have experienced in many winters! Thank you Ms Thompson for writing such a touching story! Thank you Chuck and Stacy Reese for making it possible for us to savor this nonfictional work of written art!
My grandfather was born in Campbell County in 1882. His father died three months later from gangrene, the result of hitting his leg while chopping wood. He was 25. My grandfather and his mother then moved to Fayette County to live with her parents. Still he felt a deep tie to Campbell County all his life. He directed that he was to be buried in the same churchyard as his father had been. During much of my childhood my grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters, cousins and I would trek to the Bethsaida Baptist Church to clean the graves and place flowers. I have clear memories of that church building and churchyard. The building is no longer. When my sisters, a cousin and I drove there from Atlanta about 10 years ago, nothing looked the same except the double headstone of my grandparents and the older single one of my great-grandfather. No longer is it off an unpaved road but next to a four lane highway. Thank you for sharing your memories.