PRESENCE

 

Sister Mary Zita's cap

Here it is—a rose-colored cap with red and white stars on it—the last thing Sister Elizabeth slipped into a bag of snacks for us when we left Sewanee a few weeks ago. It was an object that brought forth in me a “gusher” of tears. The cap belonged to Sister Mary Zita, one of the Anglican Sisters at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee who sat in her wheelchair before me at weekly Services. She died this year while I was in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Sister Mary Zita is memorialized in many of my books of poetry, and while I wrote about her gardening and flower arranging talents, a paramount thought surfaced when I pulled out the rose-colored cap that was of something called “presence.” Although this small Filipino Sister could read the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer and was often an echo after each line we recited, she never conversed with me or others in chapel (except with Sister Elizabeth}. She just embodied “presence.”

When I was enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education preceding my ordination as a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, I learned a lot about presence, the act of being at a bedside without speaking or reciting prayers—just standing alongside a suffering person in inviolate silence, perhaps inwardly praying or just being there in the co-inherence of suffering. Fully Present.

My good friend, Janet Fault-Gonzales wrote a powerful essay about Presence in her book entitled Road Home that I feel is one of the best I’ve read on the subject. It involves a eulogy written at the death of her beloved Grandmother Mae:

“In trying to prepare myself to give her up, I realized in the months prior to her death that my grandmother was the still point for me—the center of peace and stability inside of a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated. When everything else I had known seemed chaotic and changing, Mae had been the same. She had been there. That’s all she had to be. She didn’t have to be anything else … She’s the greatest loss I have had. Today, my heart aches for someone with whom I talked about pinks, bachelor buttons, glads, zinnias, and roses—grown from seeds supplied by the Standard Coffee salesman. It isn’t what Mae said or what she accomplished that affected and still affects all of us (family)—it’s simply that she was there.

“Once I heard a minister deliver a sermon about ‘being there.’ He said that our attendance at church makes a difference, not only in our lives, but also in the lives of others. I thought the sermon was about role modeling and influencing others by our attendance. But what I learned from Mae isn’t about role modeling, intentionally setting an example. It’s simply about being—having presence—contributing to others because you exist, hold a place for all you love. Mae remained in Eufaula as the same, the comfortable, the familiar that my relatives still hold dear—that place her sisters and brothers couldn’t get back to but they’re glad to have had—the place where it hurts most to lose: her presence. It’s a powerful thing to be who you are …”

I’ve read and re-read Janet’s essays many times, but the memory of that particular essay always comes up when I think about the word “presence.” I chided Sister Elizabeth for causing me to cry when she passed on Mary Zita’s cap to me, a soft cushion of stars hidden among snacks for the journey back to New Iberia. However it is now a “presence” in my bedroom that reminds me of a “center of peace, stability inside a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated …”

Thanks for the cap, Sister Elizabeth.

SOUTHERN CROSS

Front cover of Southern Cross

Janet Faulk, a native Alabaman now working in New Iberia, Louisiana, stays close to her southern roots when she writes most of the time. However, when she discovered a diary written by an anonymous Alabaman who traveled abroad to find his fortune following the War Between the States, she became fascinated by his account of a colony of Alabamans who settled in Brazil and moved her literary interests farther afield. Over a decade later, after transcribing the handwritten diary of an anonymous man who authored the Brazilian Travel Diary, she wrote finis to Southern Cross. 

Based on a true account, but written in the tradition of “non-fiction fiction,” Southern Cross also mesmerizes readers with a love story between the major characters, John Foster and widowed Kate Teal who develop a shipboard romance en route from Baltimore, Maryland to Brazil. The romance is related in deft, accessible prose, and Kate’s life of “inconsistencies…in which she moves toward something rather than away from something” keeps the reader transfixed about her survival once she departs from Mississippi near the Escatawpa River for the hinterlands of Brazil.

Faulk’s finesse with description emerges in the first chapter; e.g., “Nothing brings buried thoughts to the surface like the first dark of evening. At twilight when shadows lay long and thin in the grass, the fading light of day pulls color along with it and orchestrates a symphony of evening sound. This is the time of day when it becomes difficult to tell a black cat from its shadow and stillness spills over the earth like indigo ink. Then, the night movement takes shape with the subtle rustle of a raccoon family easing along the water’s edge, the whirr of seven-year locusts creating a rhythmic background for an occasional bullfrog croaking and the singular intermittent chirping of a lone cricket…”

Faulk skillfully weaves rich descriptions of the diarist’s visits to farms and lumber operations scattered throughout Brazil and brings into focus the politics, slavery issues, and future of agriculture (cotton, sugar cane, etc.) in 19th century Brazil. Romantic scenes between John and Kate are interspersed in alternate chapters to sustain interest in the diarist’s detailed explorations of the diverse countryside.

Choctaws, African slaves, Brazilians—Faulk introduces international diversity among her cast of characters, working to achieve authenticity and remaining faithful to historical detail through the extensive research she completed. Her readings included the work of Zora Neal Hurston, Sylviane A. Diouf, and Sandra Medlock, Operations Manager, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. 

Conversations between John and Kate contain serious ruminations about religion and ethics, and the end of Southern Cross will leave readers contemplating a softer denouement, but Kate embodies a kind of Faulknerean observation that humans will not only endure, they’ll prevail. This is a real page turner, as well as a heart warmer told with certainty of tone and narrated with an instinct for detail and sure sense of self.

Janet Faulk

Janet Faulk is a native of northeast Alabama and has resided most of her adult life in south Louisiana where she lives with her husband, Rudy Gonzales. Southern Cross is her first historical fiction. Previously, she published a book of personal essays, The Road Home, and co-authored Porch Posts with the poet Diane Marquart Moore.

Available online from Amazon and signed copies by mail from the author (janet.faulk@yahoo.com).

CORNBREAD DRESSING AKA STUFFING

Nothing arouses an appetite so much as the smell of cornbread “dressing,” as we southerners call it, baking on Christmas Eve. On the day that the kitchen becomes the central room in the house, memories of my childhood Christmases spent in the old Victorian home of my grandmother Nell rise to my consciousness. I know it is Christmas, not by the scent of candles and evergreens, but by the mixed aroma of turkey fat and cornbread cooking!

Myriad recipes for dressing aka stuffing fill cookbooks: bread and oyster stuffing, bread with mushrooms stuffing, giblet stuffing, wild rice stuffing, sausage stuffing, chestnut stuffing…but no recipe can surpass the one for a good southern cornbread dressing, for which I have no written recipe. The ingredients and approximate measurements for dressing passed from my Grandmother Nell to my Mother Dorothy and then to me, and I think that most southern cooks probably don’t “go by” a recipe, they just put together a dollop of this, a dash of that, crumbling and pouring, mixing and baking to produce this quintessential dish that complements a baked turkey.

My good friend Janet, who was born and bred in southeast Alabama (the heart of red dirt country), talks about that cornbread dressing, as well as other southern delicacies in her charming book entitled Road Home, which emerged a few years ago from folders she had labeled, “Things to Think About.” The last chapter in the book is entitled “The Road Home,” and is a delightful chapter about holiday food, including a few sentences about having dinner with friends at Chapel Hill one Thanksgiving and being forced to partake of Mushrooms Berkeley as the main dish, a food swimming in what she calls a “dark, brooding sauce…”

In the chapter entitled “The Road Home” Janet tells about her grandmother’s famous cornbread dressing, which she explains had to be made in two different pans – one for cornbread dressing with onions and one without onions for the children and her adult uncle. “Food from this part of the country tends not to be highly seasoned; onions were the exotic seasoning in our kitchens, and you had to admit, even if you didn’t like the taste of onions, the smell was fabulous…” All of the food from the Christmas dinner was stored on the kitchen counter, covered with the oldest tablecloth on hand, and was left unrefrigerated until supper time, but Janet relates that no one ever became sick after a holiday or a Sunday meal. And, of course, everyone always took some of the remnants home with them.

The best part of the cornbread stuffing vignette in Road Home has to do with storage of leftover food. Janet writes: “My sister, who as an adult is a fastidious housekeeper, wins the prize for the most creative ‘to go’ storage container. One holiday when she was eight years old, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Jennie left Granny’s house with cornbread dressing, sans the onions [thank goodness], wrapped in aluminum foil and tucked way down into the toe of a knee-high sock. Unmindful of her cargo, we returned home, and my sister took the sock directly to her room with her other belongings. Weeks later, when a peculiar odor caused my mother to track down the sock, which had found its way to a resting place under Jennie’s bed, she was the only one who could unequivocally identify the sock stuffing as cornbread dressing…”

I hope you “passed a good Christmas,” as the Cajuns say, and perhaps enjoyed a scoop of cornbread dressing aka stuffing.

THE HAPPY GARDENER

Every Spring when we return to The Mountain, I hanker for gardens and to dig in the dirt, and I manage to plant a small flower bed at the entrance to the cottage.  This year, the garden struggled through the worst of July heat and has been revived by late summer rains.  I haven’t had to replant; however, perhaps I should!  My good friend, Janet Faulk-Gonzales, is a consummate gardener and used to create a flower bed for us exactly on Good Friday every year when she lived in an apartment adjoining our Louisiana home and dug her own garden.  This morning, she sent me an e-mail with gardening information excerpted from Plant Delights Nursery that had been forwarded to her from a friend in North Carolina. 

According to a newsletter from the Plants Delights Nursery, a study done at Bristol University and University College London has shown that dirt is a good anti-depressant.  It seems that a soil-borne bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae, has the properties of an anti-depressant because it causes brain cells to produce high levels of serotonin, which most of us know is the “happy hormone.”  I suppose that you really have to get a lot of dirt under your fingernails to get the best effect for mood elevation, but I believe that the researchers are probably right – all the gardeners I know are happy gardeners.

Janet wrote two essays about gardening that appear in her delightful book, The Road Home, a book of happy memories about her childhood in Alabama, and I pulled the book from my shelves this morning to re-read before I went off to morning services at St. Mary’s Episcopal Convent.  The one essay that best represents Janet’s love of gardening is entitled “A Garden in Eden,” and I am again publishing excerpts from it, hoping that the passages will present a new way of getting serotonin uptake without resorting to pills:

“When I was ten, I lived in Eden, a place midway between here and there, right in the middle of nowhere, a tiny town carved out of a pine thicket where the railroad used to run.  Summers were spent riding my blue bicycle on packed gravel roads all the way to California (in my mind), swimming in an oversized cow trough, and ducking horseflies…

“The yard in Eden was a magnificent place.  At night it was filled with the sound of crickets chirping and the flashing of neon green fireflies.  It was the safest place in the world to play “Ain’t No Boogers,”
“Hide and Seek,” and other never-find-me games.  In the daytime, the backyard always provided shady places for picnics of outrageous pickle sandwiches, Oreo cookies, and Coca-Colas in eight-ounce, thick, green glass bottles.  One of the coolest places was under the pomegranate tree near the back door of the house.  I remember not liking to eat the pomegranate so much as I loved its rich red coral color dotted inside with hundreds of brown hard seeds.  Along the old rickety "bob-wire" fence on the east side that separated our yard from the yard of a haunted house, heavy round, orange-gold plums grew.  Farther down, there was a blackberry thicket where delicate white blossoms turned into purple juicy fruit. 

“A perfectly rectangular garden bordered by yellow and orange marigolds, both giant and dwarf varieties, covered the farthest edge of the backyard.  By design, the marigolds helped keep pests from the vegetables, but to my delight, the flowers drew summertime butterfly dancers, mostly yellow ones, and sometimes the orange and black or blue and black Monarchs.

“Tomatoes grew tall, their thin stalks made sturdy by tying them to wooden stakes with worn out stockings.  Summer squash plants grew as wide and round as the kitchen table, with blossoms that turned into yellow crooked necks.  When stewed down with onions and black pepper, these vegetables became the smell of summer supper cooking.

“There were always green beans and tiny butter beans, just enough in our garden for a “mess.”  Okra grew tall and prickly, waiting to be cut, floured, and fried…I begged for my okra to be fried to dark brown, just barely burned.

“The backside of the garden was strung with shiny tin pie plates that reflected sunlight to scare off birds.  There were enough tassels to allow pollination of the corn that grew at the edge of the garden, running perpendicular to the other rows.  Sometimes a watermelon vine or two threatened to spread and conquer the entire garden, but was worth the trouble when you found a thumping ripe melon with smooth, green variegated rind and anticipated the cold, sweet juice that dried sticky on your face after you had eaten so much chilled melon you thought your stomach would pop.

“When I was ten, I lived in Eden, but did not know it.  Now, on winter days when the best I can do is hope for Spring and the warm explosion of color, and when I cannot bear to watch another Sunday afternoon colorized movie classic on television, or to hear another basketball shoe squeak against the highly-glossed parquet floor, my greatest longing is for a little sunshine and the smell of good dirt.  The next best thing is to reach for the Burpee Seed Catalog and to choose prize-winning vegetables, low shrubs, fruit trees, to contemplate pears and peaches and the time it will take to harvest the first pecans from a newly-planted backyard sapling -- and I single out the best hybrid roses, the wildest vines of morning glory and fragrant jasmine…so I can recreate Eden.”

Hope this message from a southern gardener incites visions of digging in the dirt and getting your shot of serotonin via rich soil.  Happy gardening!

Select The Road Home by Janet Faulk-Gonzales to order or write to Border Press, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee Tennessee 37375.