The Home Place
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J. Drew Lanham. The Home Place
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For all who wander and love the land
The Home Place
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In the complimentary light of a fading sunset, with your eyes squinted just so, Mamatha’s place looked quaint: the little house in the big woods. Coming closer and stepping through the ill-fitting door would reveal the truth, though. Probably built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, the Ramshackle was almost a functional museum of the Depression-era South. The house was a shoddily constructed thing, with an interior of hastily painted Sheetrock walls and creaky, uneven floors covered by sheets of cheap, fading vinyl. In one room, a remnant piece of threadbare beige carpet provided the “luxurious” touch to an otherwise basic decor. The indoor plumbing, with exposed metal pipes and white enamel basins, was a relatively recent addition. Insulation had been an afterthought. The modern improvements included a 1950s Frigidaire that Mamatha always called an “icebox.”
In a scary, dimly lit, and moldy-smelling lower room that had probably been someone’s quick-fix idea of an addition, a coffin-sized deep freezer sat entombed in piles of old clothes, magazines, and other junk my pack rat grandmother just couldn’t bear to throw away. The freezer kept other items in an icy state of suspended animation. Plastic containers and bags filled with the bounty from gardens past sat stacked and frozen against some future famine. Foil-wrapped mystery meats and leftovers from long-ago church suppers were wedged into every nook and cranny. There was food in there that had seen several decades pass. If Mamatha had pulled a coelacanth—the prehistorically creepy, bottom-dwelling fossil-fish-amphibian—from the depths of that freezer, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. I suppose my father came by his hoarding gene honestly.
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