Читать книгу Wild Card Quilt - Janisse Ray - Страница 7

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 bonds—both 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 lost—as people depart homeplaces, as the landscapes are destroyed—no 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.