Howards in the Garden of Eden
My grandparents on my father’s side were Mamie Roxanne
and John Washington Howard. Us kids called them simply Mamaw and Papa.
When I was young, they lived in a little white house in Eden, Alabama, tucked
next to a sawmill. That house seemed to belong to another time. Winters were
kept at bay by the heat of a cast-iron pot-belly stove, stoked with wood scraps
my grandfather gathered from the mill.
Lisa, Papa, Ronald, Mamaw
I can’t tell you if Papa ever had what folks today would
call a regular job. What I do know is that he went to bed with the sun and rose
long before daylight. He’d sip his coffee from a saucer, then walk up the road
to crank the sawmill machinery to life. After greasing the cogs and setting the
pulleys to spinning, he’d amble back down the hill just as Mamaw was pulling
biscuits from the oven. She made them in a hand-carved wooden bowl, oblong from
years of use.
Papa was already eighty-two when I was twelve, and Mamaw was
seventy-eight. He didn’t say much, his voice hushed and cracked when he did,
but I could tell he was listening more than folks thought. I’d catch a quick
smile when someone said something silly. Tall, stooped, always in overalls, he
carried the look of a man who’d lived his first life behind a plow before
moving to Eden.
They had raised my cousin Wayne, who was grown and gone by
the time I spent much time with them. By then, it was me and my sister Janet
who stayed for weeks in the summer. Cousins Adrienne, Nina, and Bonita lived
nearby, so we never lacked company. Without a television in the house—something
I don’t remember missing—we made our own entertainment. Monopoly games
stretched for days on the porch, and the sawmill itself became our playground.
Papa, Wayne, Faye, Mamaw
Once the workers were gone, we climbed conveyors, rode belts
toward the blades, and tunneled into the mountain of sawdust that piled high at
the edge of the mill. Papa warned us that one wrong move could trap and smother
us, but warnings meant little to fearless kids. To us, danger was just another
invitation. The drying sheds stacked with lumber twenty feet high became our
Everest. And then there was the vat of creosote—twenty feet long and six feet
deep. A chain dangled from a pulley overhead, and we’d swing across that black
pool as if it were the Nile. More than once I ruined a shoe dipping too close,
but by some grace none of us ever fell in.
Mamaw was always in her apron, cooking three meals a day. My
favorite memory is of her fried apple pies. Papa would gather apples from the
tree out back, slice them thin, and lay them out to dry in the sun. Once ready,
Mamaw simmered them with sugar and cinnamon, spooned the filling into dough
rolled from her big wooden bowl, and fried them golden. They never lasted long.
When she wasn’t cooking, Mamaw sat in her rocker with a dip
of Brewton’s snuff tucked in her cheek. She kept a tin can beside her to spit
in, and if one of us came crying with a bee sting, she’d rub a little snuff on
it. “Draws out the poison,” she said, and whether it truly did or not, we
always believed her. If she ran low, she’d send us to Old Man Lovell’s store
with a few coins—enough for her snuff and a paper sack of candy for us. He
never blinked when a twelve-year-old asked for tobacco; the world was different
then.
Mamaw, 1955
Mamaw passed on February 29, 1968. I was twelve, and it was
the first time I truly felt the weight of death. They held the wake in that
little white house, her body in one room, surrounded by begonias she had tended
with such care. I remember sobbing every time I walked in, overwhelmed by the
thought that there would be no more apple pies, no more snuff cures, no more
change pressed into my hand for a trip to Old Man Lovell’s.
After Mamaw was gone, Papa moved in with my Uncle Millard
and Aunt Audrey in Oxford. To me, Oxford felt as far away as another country,
and I didn’t see him much after that. He lived to ninety-nine, passing in 1984,
and was laid to rest beside Mamaw in Lawley’s Chapel Cemetery, surrounded by
family both before and after.
That little house in Eden still stands. Whenever I travel
Highway 78, I glance toward it and feel the pull of memory. I imagine the
sawdust pile, the creosote vat daring us to swing again, and the kitchen where
Mamaw rolled out dough with her wooden rolling pin. Time has moved on, but in my mind,
the place is still alive with laughter, danger, and the smell of fried pies
cooling on the table.
I cry when I think of it now—not from sorrow, but from
gratitude. Happy tears, for the sweetness of having belonged to that world.
 |
| far left- my grandfather John Washington Howard |
