I Am From

This is my "entry" into Owlhaven's writing contest, due by noon tomorrow. She has an "I am from" writing prompt that I fell in love with it and couldn't stop thinking about until I had done it. So here it is:

I am from slow rumbling thunder on drizzly days, handmade quilts, moss hanging from live oaks, and purple hull peas shelled on the porch swing. From empty Coco-cola bottles refunded at Piggly Wiggly, and Ford pickups moseying over country roads with kids in the back holding Sonic cherry slushies.

I am from front yards ankle-deep in pine needles and leaf piles burning. From jacks tingling from Mama’s hands onto the green kitchen linoleum and the crackle of kindling in the fireplace while socked feet pad down the stairs.

I am from abandoned cemeteries overrun with daffodils, dogwood trees blooming in the back ravine, ticks and mosquito bites, fat tadpoles in Mason jars, lightening bugs cupped in our hands, cockleburs stuck on our bobbysocks and sour wild plums along the barbed-wire fence.

I am from graveside ceremonies that aren’t over until everyone’s shoveled some dirt on. I am from white Easter hats and stockings on sisters who romped during the week in corduroys with their bottle-fed goats, calves, colts and kittens. I am from gentle brown eyes and delicate fingers on strong women, from Farris and Mary and Marie. From saw-dust hands carrying leathery doctor’s bags, from E.A. and Charlie and Charles.

I am from Dixie and Confederate flags and KKK, but from family who taught me “Ain’t no difference ‘tween my black skin and your white, we all the same unda’neath. And God loves ever one of us.” I am from Southern hospitality to ever one. From thinkers and doers “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

From “Pretty is, is pretty does” and “Practice makes perfect” piano lessons tomorrow. From “Hold your shoulders back.”

I am from week-long revivals and old-fashioned-day Sundays with “dinner on the ground” and flappy calico sunbonnets. From yelling preachers and a mama whispering prayers on her knees every morning and “let’s fix the windows on the widow’s house before the cold sets in.”

I'm from hillbilly Louisiana and red-neck Mississippi, French Huguenots and Scottish nobility, from Indian women who married English gun-packing farmers. I am from fried apple pies and turnip greens. From lucky black-eyed peas on Magnolia china for New Years and fruit salad mounded into watermelon baskets on Fourth of July.

From the grandfather who called me his gal-baby and taught me how to punch the letters of my name into leather, from the grandmother who’d let me watch cartoons sitting Indian-style on the floor with an entire bottle of Maraschino cherries, and from another grandmother who wrote poetry and fiddled and sang and painted and crocheted her creativity into my soul.

I am from dresser drawers stuffed with journals and farmer’s almanacs and old love letters. From snapshots hanging on all the walls and in little frames on every tabletop. And from long-gone storytellers whose precious memories still travel from my lips to the ears of my boys snug under their quilts at bedtime.