Janisse Ray - Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home
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- Book:Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home
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Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home: summary, description and annotation
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This account of rediscovering her Georgia home and its landscapes is another must-read book by the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Tulsa World).
Seventeen years after shed left for good, Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home.
For Ray, a naturalist and an American Book Awardwinning author, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of placeof recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. This memoir recounts Rays journey as she works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware storeand struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place.
Alive with good imagery and colorful characters. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is nature writing at its best . . . Her book will make you long for home. St. Petersburg Times
Seventeen years after shed left for good, Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home.
For Ray, a naturalist and an American Book Awardwinning author, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of placeof recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. This memoir recounts Rays journey as she works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware storeand struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place.
Alive with good imagery and colorful characters. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is nature writing at its best . . . Her book will make you long for home. St. Petersburg Times
Janisse Ray: author's other books
Who wrote Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Janisse Ray
Kirsten M. Parris
Jennifer Chiaverini
Anna Grichting (editor)
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Table of Contents
ALSO BY JANISSE RAY
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
FOR MY FATHER
AND MOTHER,
AND MOTHER,
Franklin Delano Ray and
Lee Ada Branch Ray,
Lee Ada Branch Ray,
AND FOR
Susan
Susan
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flameand make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Dont let yourself lose me.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Dont let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
RAINER MARIA RILKE,
God Speaks to Each of Us
God Speaks to Each of Us
Introduction
Many years after I left the place I was born, I returned to the family farm in rural south Georgia, hoping to find there a home I had been looking for all my full-grown life.
These stories are from those years on the farm. All of them relate to coming back and making a life in a place that held my past, a place that as a young woman I had gladly left behind. In this book I rejoin with place, land, kin, history, and neighbors in an attempt to gather the pieces of my life. I wanted to live in a less fragmented, less broken, more meaningful way, to have more of what I loved around me, to say with my body, This is what matters. I was looking for wholeness.
The stories are examinations of personal, family, and community history. They are observations on rural living, accounts of my efforts to find society, and essays about the landscape around me. Only by inspecting each piece could I come to a conclusion about whether my life belonged there.
Instead of a tribe, what I found in my south Georgia home was an erosion of human bondsboth to each other and to the land. Those elements I sought, such as community and sense of place, had been compromised one way or another. I saw a way of life that once had made sense pitched into failure.
During the past century, our country suffered a rural exodus; current figures estimate that 80 percent of the United States population now live in cities. The result is that agrarian communities are diminished. Nowhere in recent human history are our tribal, interdependent natures more realized than in farming communities; although these social units are not without dysfunction, ostracism, and strife, here the human spirit seems to thrive. I wanted to inhabit that life.
Perhaps stories keep us as a people in place glued together. As the stories vanish or are lostas people depart homeplaces, as the landscapes are destroyedno new stories form to replace them. Without the stories that fasten us each to each, the web that is community commences to unravel, its threads flapping in the wind, finally tearing loose completely and wafting away.
A life constructed of stories can be had. A simple, wonderful existence is possible in the country, one full of beauty and meaningful work and shared resources. It is possible, though many forces of the twenty-first century would tear it apart, to live in community.
I am clinging to a shaking cobweb strung between a leaky house and a wind-torn barn. I am spinning like crazy to reconstruct it, conversing with the ghosts of the pine flatwoods to weave their old stories in with the new ones. Here and there across the web, others are working hard, laying thread on top of sticky thread, to catch and bind us anew. People are spinning night and day, adding the bright colors of their dreams. We may make a beautiful net yet.
Kitchen side of the house, spring.
Long Road Home
When I shoved open the door of my grandmother Beulahs farmhouse, shut tight and neglected many heavy-hearted years, I entered a history that stretched backward not simply to the limits of my memory but to the farthest point of my familys memory, although the people who knew that beginning are no longer known.
It was night when we arrived, my son and I. Mama and Daddy met us at the place, and Uncle Percy strolled over, the tip of his cigarette a pinpoint of orange ash. A security light on its tall pole cast pearly shadows across humps of bushes in the yard, lighting the concrete steps. The screen of the porch reflected the light, as if a huge moon were shining, so that the screening appeared silver and not deep rust, and translucent, as it would by daylight. The screen door, loosed at its joints, sagged against the porch floor, whose gray paint was tarnished by a thick layer of dust the umber of the road running east of the house.
Then we were standing on the porch, trying to get in through a door that had not been opened in years. In the dim light, I recognized a plant stand in the corner that Granddaddy had made out of a tree for Grandmamas flowers. He chose a cedar with many branches, and each branch, planed level, now held an empty clay flowerpot. Spiderwebs constructed around the porch corners, having collected the reddish gray dust that blanketed everything, dangled like old rags.
Uncle Percy fiddled with the door. The eldest son who had never left the homeplace, Percy lived in a trailer across the yard. This key aint wanting to turn, he said. I believe Ive bent it.
Can you get it out? Daddy asked. Uncle Percy fiddled some more, then handed the freed key to my father. Looks like its cracked, Daddy said. Percy, you mind if I try it? Well be in a fix if it was to break off. My head hurt from a terrible blend of fear and excitement, and from a long day driving east, pulling our possessions behind the truck. I sat down in one of Grandmamas rocking chairs.
The incandescent bulb lit one side of Daddys face, which was the face of concentration. With a great deal of jiggling, Daddy forced the locks tumblers into position and the doorknob turned. The door groaned as it separated from its frame. My father can make anything mechanical workhis heyday was the era of machines.
When I rose, the back of my shorts and shirt were stained with dust. Mama tried to brush it off. Cant sit down until we clean, I said.
Its that road, Mama said. The summers been so dry. When cars pass, the dust boils over the house.
Daddy did not enter the unlit doorway but instead relocked the lock. He jiggled again, and again the door heaved loose from its frame. You got to back the key out about an eighth inch, Daddy said to me, and turn it counterclockwise. That keys cracked and could break anytime. You got to be careful. He returned the key to Uncle Percy ceremoniously, and my mothers brother, who had inherited the house, turned to me.
Youre the one gone be needing this, he said.
I wouldnt, as it turned out. In the years that I occupied the house, it would almost never be locked from the outside.
Id take that key down to the hardware first thing tomorrow and make a copy, Daddy said emphatically. We need to replace this doorknob. Ill look on the yard for one. By the yard he meant the junkyard he owned, seven miles away, where I was raised.
Daddy stood back. Mama too. I moved past them and hesitantly stepped through the open door into the interior darkness. Behind me, Uncle Percy fumbled for a set of light switches on the wall by the door.
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