Wednesday, May 27, 1998

Strength and joy found in a quiet spot

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. -- Sonny Terry is singing on the radio and my front porch, and the door is open so the cool spring night and Sonny's voice can come inside.

A lightning bug is caught on the screen, and I count its Gatsby-green blinks to try and sleep. But I'm not really ready to sleep. The old couch is soft, and I'm full as a tick with fried catfish from the Tennessee River and a joint called The Wharf. I want this night and its pleasures to last a little longer.

Happiness is not a constant state, but isolated moments here and there. I think people could save a lot of money they pay therapists if more understood. Happiness is an old bluesman on the radio, a lightning bug on the screen and catfish in the belly.

The creek has been out of its bank three times lately, the neighbors say, washing away parts of the road and withering the May apples.

But I get lucky, popping in for two days, both of them sunny and glorious. I'm sure great gardening writers like Lee May or Henry Mitchell have written about and chewed on this, but it always amazes me how some plants thrive on neglect. It's a hard admission, but my entire garden grows better without me.

The yellow rosebush that my friend Laura Coleman gave me for a housewarming gift a decade ago never bloomed much while I watched. But today it is covered in butter-colored roses, its branches running over the driftwood I use to prop it, lacing through the porch banisters and spilling its extra petals in a yellow pool.

I won't even mention the wild Sweet William and dwarf irises and a Christmas spruce I left for dead. The wisteria I lugged in three little tubs from Biloxi and planted on an arbor finally has taken off and over, just as wiser heads warned it would.

I open the house for summer. I store winter quilts in the cedar chest my father built in a high school shop class. He even cut the cedars and dried and planed the boards. My old teddy bear is in that box, laid nose up, so he can breathe.

The whole place is covered in a layer of dust and ash from the wood fires of winter. I take special pains cleaning my photographs, including two that the late Gladys Castle shot 40 years ago. One is of a little boy with a toy guitar; the other is a girl holding a chicken. Gladys never considered herself an excellent photographer, but then none of us knew her full worth till she was gone.

I fluff cushions and scrub toilets and swap the autumn-leaves flag for one with stars and stripes. I straighten the unfinished portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, noticing, as I always do, that near-death becomes him. Then I cheat the time clock, sitting a long while in the porch swing to moon over pictures of "my" children frolicking here -- nephew Ben with the dog, niece Chelsey swimming in a galvanized tub. I wonder what they'll remember most about this place when they are grown.

There are quieter hideaways on this earth; I have seen them in the National Geographic and in Imax films. But this is my quiet spot, the one that makes me stronger.

When the words get stuck in my fingers, or I'm too tired to think, I can come here and get something back that I'd swear had been lost. This is a place furnished with gifts from those who believed in me, who believe in me still. This is a place with a garden that grows on its own to delight me.

A place where the road routinely washes away and nobody worries too much about it.

King Features Syndicate