by Julia Reed
She was on a mission, an urgent one that none of us had seen coming, though there had been a few hints. There was, for example, the catfish fry she and my father so graciously hosted each year during the Delta Hot Tamale Festival to thank the many chefs and writers and artists who come to contribute to the improvement of our town. “This is the last one,” she’d said as she directed the hanging of lanterns from the branches of the live oak tree spreading over our back terrace and draped cloths over the round tables that dotted the lawn from the terrace to the pool. I’d thought she’d simply tired of the annual effort, but less than a week later she broke the news: “I’ve found a house, and we’re selling this one.” I was stunned. “This one” was the house we’d moved into when I was two and my brothers were not yet born. It was the house my mother had made so eminently magical and welcoming with endless additions that drove my father mad. (“Remind me what it was that you liked about this house in the first place,” he would say as each new project started.) It was the house surrounded by trees and gardens she’d lovingly created as a novice: a young woman, barely twenty-one, who’d left the well-manicured environs of Belle Meade in Nashville to marry my father and create a life in the comparative wilds of the Mississippi Delta.
My mother had grown up on the banks of Richland Creek, a civilized rivulet filled with moss and watercress and rocks on which she and her cousin sunned themselves. Our house, on the other hand, was on land that had once been part of Rattlesnake Bayou Plantation, named after the muddy stream that once provided water for the whole town—as well as the rattlesnakes that never exactly cleared out of our yard. The property had been divided into spacious lots in the 1930s, when our house was built next door to the “developer,” Mr. Smith, who lived in an expanded version of the original plantation kitchen and who still kept horses and cows and a bull that once got loose and landed in our swimming pool. A levee, built by slaves in the 1830s as the only protection against the ravages of the Mississippi, still fronted our house and three more. On the rare occasions that snow fell, we sledded down its banks; in spring it was covered with the tiny heirloom daffodils with the heavenly scent my mother brought from Tennessee. The previous owners had pretty much left our six acres as it was, with clumps of cypress in the low-lying land in front of the levee and ancient pecans dotting the lawn. Mama got to work immediately, planting more cypress, dozens of magnolias, pin oaks and live oaks, crape myrtles and hollies. She planted borders in the back and thousands of bulbs in the front: more daffodils, crocuses, tulips, and snowdrops. There were masses of swamp iris to greet arrivals at the beginning of our long gravel drive; the summer border was a riot of hydrangeas and lilies and Queen Anne’s lace.
I loved that yard. I used it as my own private theater, wandering about while acting out dramas in which I imagined myself to look like Anna Maria Alberghetti (an actress I’d seen on The Mike Douglas Show), playing a singer who faced her many tribulations stoically while belting out the songs I’d learned in school (“If I Had a Hammer,” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”), terrifying the squirrels with a voice that is, in real life, not so hot. I read for hours lying on my stomach, picked wildflowers and made clover chains, created “houses” of my own inside the hollows of the vast honeysuckle hedges. A fenced-off area contained the pear tree that was my favorite roost, a fig orchard, and the mostly unmarked graves of: seven dogs; untold numbers of goldfish, turtles, gerbils, and guinea pigs; and my beloved gray cat West Virginia, named after what was, perversely, my favorite state at age three. There was also the ruin of the pen that housed the pet ducks we finally let loose in the lake and my beloved rabbit Carrots, whom Mr. Smith’s dastardly dalmatians made such a feast of that all that was left to bury was his fur.
My father had complained about the yard and its massive upkeep off and on for years, but I know he never dreamed he’d actually be pried from his lair. We’re sentimentalists, he and I, and anyway, what would we do about his books and all the stuff crammed into every drawer and every closet, not to mention all the memories? But as much as I loved every moment I spent in that house—the joyful, the profoundly sad, and all the ones in between—I was surprised to realize that I admired my mother’s resolve even more. At eighty, she was not heading to a retirement community but embarking on a new adventure and a fresh project (naturally, the house they bought required a ton of tinkering and, yep, an addition). The purge the move engendered was not just a lightening of the load (the house had become such a repository I’m surprised its foundation had not sunk deep into the fabled Mississippi mud), but also an exhilarating lightening of the spirit (my mother’s). I, on the other hand, was the beneficiary not just of my childhood possessions and the odd piece of furniture, but of massive boxes containing every photo ever taken with me in it and every letter I ever wrote home.
Then there were the dozens of champagne flutes, water goblets, sherbet cups (sherbet cups!), wineglasses, and one of the three sets of breakfast china (breakfast china!) Mama was given when she got married. I toted out felt bag after felt bag of silver trays and soufflé dishes, boxes of embroidered place mats, and the stemmed garnet glasses that were only ever hauled out at Christmas. Clearly it’s time for me to write another book on entertaining, but what to do with my Woodmen of the World history award plaque from eighth grade or, indeed, the mouse house?
Meanwhile, my parents’ new place is beautiful and light filled and stocked only with the treasures that mean the most to both of them. When I visited the old house just before it sold, it was shockingly empty, but the memories had not yet left. In the quiet, I heard the ghosts of countless parties past: the tinkling of laughter and the lilting female voices I can still identify drifting from the pool house to my bedroom window on late summer evenings; William F. Buckley, Jr., banging out “Cielito Lindo” on our piano accompanied by a close friend who invariably arrived with his vibraphone; the pop and fizz of the Roman candles my friends and I were allowed to set off on the front lawn every Christmas night while the adults carried on inside. There were birthday parties featuring the full-size merry-go-round that was a gift from my extravagant grandmother, legendary teenage summer bashes held when my parents were out of town that required heavy cash and comic book payoffs to my brothers, who were charged with retrieving the hundreds of Budweiser pop-tops off the bottom of the pool. There was my fortieth birthday dance, a fabulous wedding that kicked off a pretty good run of a marriage, endless cookouts, and the aforementioned catfish fries.
There were sad times too, of course. When my paternal grandparents were killed in a car wreck about two hours out of town, my parents took off to the scene and by the time they got back, at least a hundred cars lined the driveway. My grandfather’s contemporaries were sitting stone-faced and stiff-backed on the sofas, toddies between their legs, while ladies from the church had positioned themselves by the front and back doors with spiral notebooks in which to write down who had brought the various casseroles and cakes that had already begun to arrive. When the funeral was finally held, on a rainy Easter Sunday afternoon, we had already hosted a nonstop three-day wake. Still, my mother laid out more food for those who remained and lit a fire, a spark from which set our shake roof ablaze. After a valiant effort by one of my cousins, the fire department arrived to stanch the flames, followed by my father’s best friend and business partner, Barthell Joseph, who drove across the front yard and bounded up the porch steps, wild-eyed and demanding to see that “Tyrone” (his nickname for my father) remained alive and well.
It is those memories that remind me that it’s not the house that held us all, but the larger community, which remains in one way or another still intact. My parents’ new house is just down the street from Barthell’s widow. I’m building my own house, a tiny one, on the narrow lot behind our old house, between a tall fence and the dirt road across from the pasture where I once kept my horse Hi Joe. My closest neighbors will be my childhood friends Amanda and Carl Cottingham—Amanda’s father drove us to school in his Mustang conv
ertible every day of my life until Amanda was old enough to drive us herself.
Before the lovely new owners closed on the old house, I’d vowed to host an enormous farewell on the grounds, but then it seemed somehow unnecessary, wrongheaded even. That trusty, sprawling board-and-batten structure had served its purpose and given us plenty. Instead, I decided to take a leaf from Mama’s book and look forward. Better by far to host a groundbreaking shindig on my own property or start a new Christmas party tradition at my parents’ place. In one of my many boxes there are probably some ancient Roman candles, and I can always bring the garnet glasses.
Part Two
Critters
The Awesome Opossum
Last summer I had the pleasure of signing books at Asheville, North Carolina’s terrific independent bookstore Malaprop’s, which also stocks a variety of very cool postcards. I was struck by one in particular: a delightfully naive pencil drawing of a sweet mama possum toting a passel of babies on her back (passel is the correct term for a group of possums, by the way, as in a wake of buzzards or a gaze of raccoons). The drawing was inside an outline of the state of North Carolina, which had, according to the text, designated the Virginia opossum as its state marsupial in 2013.
Without delving too deep into potentially divisive territory here, I would venture that voting for an official marsupial might be a less, um, disruptive use of the North Carolina legislature’s time than some of the other stuff they’ve gotten up to of late. And, you know, it wasn’t that hard to choose: Didelphis virginiana happens to be the only marsupial (pouched mammal) in all of America, and Canada too.
Though there are several species of marsupials called possums in Australia and New Guinea, scientists now believe that all marsupials (including the ancestors of the kangaroo and the koala) originated in North America and that they did so at least sixty-five million years ago. Nobody named them until 1608, when Captain John Smith came up with “opassom,” from the Algonquian term meaning “white animal.” Folks started dropping the o pretty early on, but Smith stuck with it, writing: “An Opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignesse of a Cat. Under her belly shee hath a bagge, wherein shee lodgeth, carrieth, and suckleth her young.”
The good captain made no note of his sentiments toward the creature, but I could tell that the artist who drew the postcard, Julie Wade, is as crazy about possums as I am. For one thing, she drew hearts in all four corners. It turns out that there’s a growing number of folks who also feel fondly toward the much-maligned mammal. Rick Ostfeld, senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, calls possums “the unsung heroes in the Lyme disease epidemic.” Unlike the lazier tick carriers Ostfeld studied, including rodents and birds, they are star groomers, he says, “hoovering up more than 95 percent of the ticks that try to feed on them.” A single possum can kill a whopping four thousand ticks a week, and they also get rid of a whole bunch of other stuff that most folks would rather not have around. They eat garden pests such as snails and slugs and beetles, they keep roaches and rats at bay by competing for their food or simply killing them when they trespass on their territory, and, thanks to their remarkably efficient immune systems, they can consume rattlesnakes and cottonmouths without being affected by their venom. Further, unlike the great majority of other mammals, they are happy to dine on carrion, a proclivity that has earned them the sobriquet “sanitation workers of the wild.”
They are also possessed of an impressive set of physical attributes, not least of which is a forked penis, a curiosity that led colonial Americans (who apparently conducted some mighty close anatomical inspections) to believe that the male possum bred with the female through her nostrils. They do not, in fact, hang from their prehensile tails (or at least not for long—once they’re grown they’re way too heavy); they use them instead for stability while climbing and to carry bundles of grasses for their nests. Like some primates, they have opposable “thumbs” on their hind feet, which make them uncommonly agile, and they have more teeth—fifty—than any other mammal except the killer whale and the giant armadillo. The latter gave rise to the expression “grinning like a possum eating a sweet potato”—or a persimmon, which they especially like, but you can fill in the blank with almost anything. A friend of mine swears that when he kicked a mule to see if it was really dead, two possums emerged from its rear end, an admittedly disgusting image that might well explain the origin of another adjective having to do with a grin, but hey, this is nature, after all.
A possum is a nocturnal, naturally gentle sort who tries admirably hard to keep to him- or herself, so all those teeth are rarely put to use biting humans. “Playing possum” is a real thing—an involuntary response to danger in which the creatures fall into a catatonic state for up to four hours—as well as a trait I’d most love to have. Imagine being able to go rigid and stare off into space every time someone bugged or bored you (this is sometimes preceded by belching and hissing, which would also be pretty damn effective). The late columnist Robert Novak once hit the floor of my living room after being treated to a lengthy monologue by the pedantic tax reformist Grover Norquist. An ambulance was duly summoned, but by the time it arrived, Novak was fine and I knew exactly what had happened, having talked to Norquist myself. One does what one can to survive.
The downside for possums is that these instincts are often switched on in the middle of a highway, where they spend a lot of time munching on roadkill, making the automobile the species’ most effective predator. Though said to be smarter than dogs, they are slow to get out of the way, a state of affairs that leads to the rather succinct lyrics of a ten-minute Phish song: “… riding down the road one day and someone hit a possum … The road was his end, His end was the road … Whoa possum, possum, your end is the road.”
For a long time, the possum’s end was also the serving platter. The marsupials were introduced in the western United States primarily as a food source, and as late as the 1960s, Joy of Cooking included them along with directions for proper scraping and cooking. Even now, on a website run by “Recipe Girl,” there is a plethora of possum recipes, including one for “Sweet Taters and Possum” that begins, without irony: “First catch a young fat possum. This in itself affords excellent sport on moonlit nights in the fall.” The nation’s twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft, was so fond of possums that folks started sending them to the White House in the mail, a practice that caused a bit of a brouhaha when some Leesville, Louisiana, hunters left a live possum addressed to Taft in the post office’s package department and the traumatized animal chewed up the rest of the mail in the box.
It all started in January 1909 when the president-elect asked that possum be served at a banquet given by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce in his honor. The natives of Worth County formed a Possum Committee in order to hunt and provide “one hundred fat possums,” which were then boiled, baked, and basted with a newly invented “special sauce.” Sweet potatoes were served as an accompaniment, and since “liquid from foreign vineyards” was illegal in Georgia, “a lady admirer” of Taft’s brewed a barrel of persimmon beer for the occasion. Taft was said to have gobbled up his personal possum so fast that a nearby doctor advised him to slow down. But he kept up the pace throughout his one-term presidency, driving up the cost of possum from one dollar to ten dollars per carcass and serving up a twenty-six-pound possum at his first White House Thanksgiving. Thus began a drive to entice the president into putting other such regional delicacies on the culinary map. In Wyoming he was served prairie dog, and when it was discovered that the people of Louisiana planned to serve him alligator on a visit to the state, the New York Times was moved to publish an admonishing editorial: “It is no part of the president’s duty to eat strange foods merely to satisfy neighborhood pride. We earnestly beg Mr. Taft to stop with the ’possum.”
Waxing philosophical, a member of the Possum Committee told the Worth County Local that “a possum is not like anything
else under the sun, except another possum.” While this is certainly true, there are people who bear at least a passing resemblance. His close-set eyes and distinctive nose earned George Jones the nickname the Possum long before he was saddled with the less affectionate No Show. Ezra Pound called T. S. Eliot Old Possum, and it must be said that Eliot’s nose was his most prominent feature. It’s ironic, then, that the world’s most famous possum, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, didn’t look all that much like one, though he possessed many of the creature’s more noble attributes, including a certain equanimity, humility, and the good sense to avoid trouble.
Indeed, Pogo was possum as everyman, and some of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent on my father’s lap while he read the comic strip aloud to me, hee-hee-heeing throughout. One of Daddy’s many fine qualities is his endless ability to laugh at himself, as well as at the general ridiculousness of his fellow man, a particularly useful trait if you happen to live where we live. Pogo’s full name was Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum, a not-so-subtle send-up of the aristocratic airs of a certain breed of Southerner. But Pogo himself was as literally down to earth as the other members of his species.
When he and his cohorts embark on an expedition beyond the confines of home, the Okefenokee Swamp, he sends back a message: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Yep, it surely is, but Pogo remains ever hopeful. When he tells Porky Pine that he reckons “ev’ry critter’s heart is in the right place,” Porky answers, “If you gotta be wrong ’bout somethin’, that’s ’bout the best thing to be wrong ’bout.” There is plenty more wisdom for our always unsettled times, including, also from Porky, “Don’t take life so serious, son. It ain’t nohow permanent.” It’s good stuff not just for our age (though, man, it would be fun to have Kelly around about now) but for the ages—let’s not forget that Kelly began writing the strip in 1943 and among the politicians he lampooned were Senator Joe McCarthy (Simple J. Malarkey) and Vice President Spiro Agnew (a hyena who spoke in alliterative nonsense). At any rate, it’s instructive to look back at the vast cache of strips. You never know: It could well be the unassuming possum who leads us out of our own collective swamp.
