land, ho!

my father grew up in a country crossroad that when i was a child seemed like the prettiest little place on earth. he spent his first 17 years growing tall and fishing in wooded ponds, later working in the shop where his father sold Fords. when Daddy died, my brother told a story i had never heard. that when Daddy was working in the shop, my grandfather asked him to change the oil on a car, which he dutifully did. only he forgot to put new oil back into the car he was working on. so instead of inheriting the family business, my grandfather decided the boy who would become my daddy would be better off fixing people than fixing cars. so he sent my father to medical school.

i spent my childhood going back to my father's home, visiting my grandparents for a week during the summer. there is so much i remember about the place. the back yard swing where my grandfather used to push me into the sky. the storage house that smelled of moth balls but held a thousand treasures. the garden where we used to dig for potatoes and pick butter beans. the old shop, where we would sit in the showroom cars, turning the steering wheel and blinkers, then get cold cocolas from the old stoop-shouldered machine.

our visits also included 'going to ride,' which meant driving down quiet farm paths so my grandfather could check the crops growing on farms he had owned for some time. to my knowledge he didn't plant the rows himself, but he was overseer. one summer, he took friend Lydia and me down the path to see the largest hogs we'd ever seen in our lives.

over the years, as we headed to and from the beach, i would try to point out that farm but could never quite find it. then a couple of years ago, Daddy asked us to go back. 

though my grandparents have been gone for years, he wanted us to see the landmark of their legacy — the three small farms that are now leased, the land worked. Daddy wanted us to know where they were, so we would not forget. 

so we drove down country roads to the familiar places of my childhood and his. the first farm stands between my grandparents' burial place and their house, and that spring, before the crops went in, we could see their breakfast room window from their graves. 

and then down another road and a surprise. a family cemetery i had never seen, where my great-grandfather Moses Byrum is laid to rest. i still can't figure out why i never knew it was there.

and then, back to the farm where those hogs once grew, an expanse of winter wheat waving at us along the short drive toward the old house and barn. i watched, as Daddy's eyes scanned the horizon, the circle of land his father owned that now belonged, in part, to him. And i wondered what would become of it. 

turns out, Daddy knew. 

a few weeks ago, as we headed to the beach, we made a couple of stops with the kids. first, to the family cemetery where their great-great grandfather is buried. then on to the farm where as an 11-year-old, i had tried to pet a few gigantic pigs.

the kids took pictures, as i recounted my last visit there with their grandparents, Daddy in his favorite yellow sweater, Mama telling me how she tried to convince my grandfather to be more progressive and put indoor plumbing in the tenant house, almost 60 years before.

my siblings and i now own this farm with my aunt, my father's sister. Daddy gave us this land in his will. which i have to say was a big surprise. we did not expect anything... and though i always knew he loved this farm, i never imagined he would entrust its future to us. cityfolk though we all are.

i don't think i have ever owned anything outright. maybe a toaster. a book. a pair of shoes. but not land. 

land.

as i write this i don't know quite what to say. even after close to 25 years in our current house, the bank still owns a small part. cars? all loans, though one is coming close to being paid off. i know people who buy cars with cash, but we have never been able to do that. 

but cars are not the same as land.

land. 

the thing that drew the Israelites from Egypt and

 kept them going, 

the thing that kept Noah and Christopher Columbus in the boat, kept Scarlett O'Hara from losing her mind. (well, maybe not.) 

it is a small plot, considering. 

but it is ours. and it is land our father loved, and our grandfather before him, so there you have it.

we often joked in years past that we would one day own a third of a half of something — this land — just about enough to put a lawn chair on so we could watch the sunset on a summer Sunday afternoon.

guess i didn't count on it actually coming true. and now, though i am pretty sure where the sun will go down on a summer Sunday, i am wondering just where Daddy would want us to place those chairs.

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Departing the Text

The little town where I grew up has seen its share of tragedy. Those who grew up there know that death always comes in threes, and in the past 10 days or so, that adage held true. A young woman who as raised there to a tragic accident. An elderly woman whose husband owned a favorite hamburger stand in the 50s and 60s. Then brother of longtime friends to another accident. Add to that, damage done by a foot of snow on Christmas night to one of the few thriving entities in town. So we breathed a little. But today, comes another, this time the town optometrist, long loved by all. Dr. E. was once kidnapped by a prisoner from a nearby prison farm who had come to the office to get his eyes checked. When we heard on the transistor radio at school that a doctor in town had been kidnapped, I panicked, because I had been present when some of those prisoners came to my father's office across the street. I don't remember all the details clearly, but I seem to recall that the prisoner forced Dr. E. into the country, where he left Dr. E. shackled to a tree. But first, he took Dr. E's his clothes. Dr. E. lived many, many years to tell that story. 


But no more.


Thinking about this, it seems as though I need to pay tribute to my little town in this space. I did some years ago in the newspaper. In the years since, some of the landmarks I wrote about are gone. The town has grown smaller, sadder, poorer. I suppose everybody who has been raised up by a small town thinks of their world as special. I know those who hail from my town do. And when something bad happens, we are drawn to each other in hopes of saving what's left of it, if only in memory.


Anyway, sometimes things just bear repeating. Thanks, Doug, for the pics.

The Town that Raised Me

Copyright 1999 By Susan Byrum Rountree

“What this place needs is a GAP,” my daughter says as we drive down Main Street toward the house where I grew up. As we pass The Freeze — the landmark of my teenage years where they make the best Pizza Burgers in Eastern North Carolina — I try to see my hometown through her eyes.

There is a battered car wash, old buildings and empty store fronts in need of fresh paint. The Idle Hour Restaurant sign advertising “air conditioning” hasn’t been lit in years, and the Zip Mart stands empty, its front windows boarded shut.

This is Main Street, Scotland Neck, NC, how a passer-through on Hwy. 258 might see it. People who don’t know it and love it as I do might find little here but the remnants of a once-thriving farm town.

But I wish that my daughter could see what I see. Her view, when compared to the mirrored marble sidewalks of her Crabtree Valley Main Street offers little more than peeling paint and crumbling buildings. There are no khaki-clad mannequins artfully backlit, no sidewalk vendors selling the latest styles of silver jewelry, no clusters of teenagers sharing the latest gossip.

But my eyes see home. There is the old Pittman’s Department Store where I bought my first two-piece bathing suit and worked wrapping presents on Christmas Eve. Though it stood empty for a time, in what used to be the men’s department, waitresses now serve the breakfast crowd hot coffee and homemade biscuits.

I can still hear the creak of the Roses floor as we rushed to buy notebooks and pencils for school, recall the smell of the Post Office when I pulled mail from my father’s box, see the audience staring back at me as the curtain opened for my dance recital, feel the touch of newsprint between my fingers as I read my first byline in the Commonwealth.

Scotland Neck. The place with the funny name like the country and the body part. Folks new to North Carolina have never heard of it, but anyone who grew up east of Raleigh most likely knows someone or is kin to someone from  there. And that’s saying a lot for a town of just 2,500 people.

Sure it was the cliché, a mix of Mayberry and Maycomb, with a cast of characters no less colorful than Barney or Boo Radley. There were a couple of old houses we swore were haunted, a handicapped man who used to walk down Main Street on his knees, and every now and then, a murder or two, just to keep our attention.

We picked flowers for our teachers in a neighbor’s back yard without fear of a scolding, saw first-run movies at the Dixie Theater Saturday matinee, crunched on frozen Cokes like popsicles between Sunday School and church. And if your dog wandered the school hallways looking for you, nobody thought a thing about it, though you might be asked to take him home.

It was the kind of home town my city-bred kids will never know. Where everybody knows who you belong to, and where you ought to be. Where they know you had prickly heat, watched you ride your bike down Church Street to school, believed in you until you finally made a name for yourself. And they weren’t the least bit surprised. Folks from Scotland Neck have always done that.

We never had stoplight (still don’t) much less a GAP, but the eastern North Carolina town where I was born, raised a governor and a Congressman, doctors, lawyers and farmers, even a writer or two. Not so long ago, our former mayor was president of the National League of Cities. Imagine that, a sleepy little town in the southeastern end of Halifax County, one of the poorest counties in the state.

The population has remained stable most of my life. When I was 11, the headcount did swell for awhile, when over 11 million blackbirds roosted there. Each evening at dusk “The Birds” converged on the woods behind my house, circling for hours like a stationary tornado, until each one found a spot to perch for the night. They woke us each morning as they headed out, turning the sky black.  Their annual infestation brought some notoriety and national media attention, but it didn’t last. The birds, like many of the young people, found little opportunity in Scotland Neck, so they moved on.

For those of us who’ve left, there has always been a difference between “where do you live?” and “where are you from?” — we are always “from” Scotland Neck. Ask us about “home” and our first thoughts won’t be of the places we live now. Instead, we’ll tell you about the pink Crape Myrtles blooming in the middle of the street in July, or learning that All Have Sin from the Biblical alphabet Miss Lucy Wells taught us all in public school, or of baring our arms for Typhoid shots so we could swim all summer at the murky waters of the Scout Pond. It is a life I would go home to in a second, if it were still there.

Since I moved away from  “The Neck.” as those who grew up there call it, I’ve found fellow natives in the least likely places. Like Atlanta Braves games in the old Fulton County Stadium, sitting 10 rows behind me. Or as the contact for my very first interview as a new reporter in Augusta, Georgia. Be it on Sunday morning, the first time I attended my new Raleigh church 10 years ago, on an escalator at the mall, in the hallway of a Wake County elementary school, no doubt somebody besides me will be from The Neck.

World traveler that he is, my Atlanta-born husband has never  had a similar encounter. I moved to his hometown, and wouldn’t you know it, I soon found a friend from Scotland Neck. In time, Rick began seeing people he knows from Scotland Neck in his travels around the country. But not once has he run across anyone he knew in Atlanta.

I never thought myself disadvantaged because of my small town beginnings. The town limit sign may have separated me from the rest of the world, defined me as being “from” someplace, but it was never a boundary keeping me from discovering what was best in me.

Though I have lived in five cities since I left home 20 years ago, this tiny speck on the map is the one place I’ve always known I belonged. And it is in belonging that we define ourselves, know who we are and where we fit. I could not be who I am if I didn’t hail from this place, couldn’t look at the world the way I do without the growing I did there with the help of all the people who nudged me.

There are dozens of Scotland Necks in this largely forgotten corner of the state, in the “other North Carolina.”  Some are growing, some, like Scotland Neck, could use a coat or two of fresh paint. Not one will ever have a GAP.

But my friends who’ve stayed there are making it a good place, though different, for their children to grow up in. They’ve built a new town hall and a new hospital, and they keep nurturing the Crape Myrtles, their pink blossoms becoming more beautiful with each year.

And as they watch the communities around them fading, they’ve loosened the boundaries that once separated Scotland Neck from the towns nearby, their citizens mingling at work, church and school, in hopes of keeping the sense of community they used to know.

And they always welcome me back, proud of the freckle-faced daughter who likes to see her name in the paper. I hope they know how much credit the town that raised me deserves.

Of Sons

This morning, my heart was heavy as I headed to church. A former neighbor of mine, I learned yesterday, was mourning the loss of her 19-year-old nephew, killed the night before in a car crash near his home. The son of one of my best friends from childhood is in his seventh week at boot camp at Parris Island. He wants to drive a tank. Another friend tries to work through her son's drug addiction. My own son just turned 21 a few weeks ago; already he's lost two friends, one to a wreck, the other to drugs. Good boys, good families all, families who have brought their sons up to have faith in God and  hope for making a mark on the world.

I knelt in prayer for all of these sons of ours, some whose lives are so filled with promise, others cut short of knowing what that promise could be. Praying that God wrap his arms around all of these parents, comforting them in their losses, in their worries, and providing them with hope for their sons in the middle of all their uncertainties.

Then I sat, opening the bulletin to find that for our prelude, we would have guest bell ringers, a group of moms and dads, all of whom have lost children, but who have used their commonality to seek solace in the music, and in reaching others as they perform.

Among them was a member of our parish who lost her son 11 years ago at 21, in a college fire that is now legendary in North Carolina. She has channeled her grief into a crusade for sprinkler systems in college residences, traveling around the country, speaking before Congress. And she rings the bells.

I wept as she and the other parents rang their beautiful notes, their arrangement of "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," filling them — and the church — with such joy, as they honored the children who no longer sit at their supper tables. Two families who had lost two children each — two — a situation incomprehensible to me. My friend — pregnant with her third child due in a month — sat next to me and wept, too, the quiet grief of mothers who know that our tether to our children is so tenuous. We watched, as the mothers and fathers in our midst drew themselves through their grief and into that joy that surpasses all understanding, drawing us with them, until our hearts felt full, too.

Later, when my son called home for his weekly check-in, I found myself wanting to reach through the phone, tighten the tether, as close as he would allow. wtmch