Thursday, May 15, 2008
Burial Day
The landscape behind the house. The soil is a sandy loam, and it is a good clay when you're a kid. You can model figures out of it pretty easy if you bring water to the dirt. My mother and father bought about 5 acres well outside of any established municipality in the late 40's or early 50's. She was a fish that never saw water again.
Unfortunately, someone cleaned out the house before the funeral. There was never a space in her house which didn't have some sort of knick-knack while she was alive. It would have been a really different photograph if the house hadn't been "cleaned."
Most of her kids and grandkids are prolific. This is a great-grandkid I never met before today. She's Maureen's grand-daughter. There are presently 20 grandkids and 17 great grandkids. This one looks just like the rest of us.
My mother lived in a trailer until she fell and broke her hip a couple of years ago. The trailer was a pretty big step up from the retired army hospital/shotgun shack she used to raise her kids. It had running water, air conditioning, heating, cable TV and carpet.
Originally, she was a good Irish Catholic from Boston. Boston to Mission. Not that she ever stopped being a good Irish Catholic girl. She spent at least the last 58-60 years of her life in the hottest, flattest, most un-Boston place I can imagine but she was always a Catholic. And she was pregnant most of the first 20 years. I went to her girl-hood home a few years ago. Family still lives there. She grew up in the shadow of Harvard. She had an accent she wouldn't acknowlege. There were no hard "r's" in her vocabulary. Ask my sister, Martha. Or, rather, "Maatha." The Rio Grande Valley isn't Boston. And it's not even Santa Fe. It's not as pretty and it never has been. It doesn't have the spiritual thing either. It's not a romantic town. We all wish it was, but it's just not. It's hot as hell, dry as dry can be. People have no money and are often desperate. People get sick and can't get better. Anyway, it's a hell of a place to choose to move to, especially from Boston, and it is a hell of a place to birth 11 kids.
Louise was mother of 11, ten raised to adulthood. Six girls, four boys. The fifth boy died in infancy. Mom was pregnant 16 times, or so I heard.
That's the crazy kind of love she had for my prematurely authritic father. He liked it hot because of authritis. Very, very hot. He found the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the Great Depression, when he and my uncle, Woolsey, were working in a traveling carnival, making "instant" pictures. Mostly tintypes and other stuff they could deliver on the spot to families and young couples who valued time more than quality and who couldn't sit around for a real portrait.
There was always a guest bedroom in her house, but not many people wanted to stay in it. We always found some way to avoid this room.
I never liked to go in there much. My memories are all about the hard-baked south Texas land. I stayed outside most of the time or under a tree or by a window with a book. There wasn't any air conditioning as long as I lived in the Valley. One of the big days was when there was air conditioning for my mom and another was when, years later, she had potable water coming out of the faucets of the trailer, and didn't need to go to town for water anymore. For the most part, only the automobiles changed. The junk changed, but it was always there.
Since, as I said, she was a good Catholic, here's a photograph of a crucifix in her house today. It won't be there in a week. I guarantee it.
This was the hotel room I stayed in for the funeral. La Casa de Palmas. This hotel has been around forever. It burned down at least once and was rebuilt. My interview for Rice University was by the pool. It is a long way from Mission, Texas, to Houston, Texas, too.
Out in front of her house. I've printed most of these photographs and cropped them a little. There are plenty of landscapes but I won't post them here.
In no time at all, just about everything withers in the south Texas sun. I picked this blossem from a glorious tree just after the funeral. It's from a Royal Poinciana. By the time I drove to the lunch, after the funeral, it was heat-struck.
1 comment:
this is really nice
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