By Jennifer Savage
Laundry is drying all over our house. It’s piled in a giant heap on the bathroom floor, it’s on the kitchen table and all over Eliza and Lucille’s room. We’ve been folding, choosing shorts and dresses, packing sandals and flip flops. Eliza has a suitcase filled with markers, a bathing suit and her Spiderman shoes waiting by the front door.
We’re leaving.
We’re headed to the Carolinas.
We’re going to see the grandparents.
And my two little girls couldn’t be more excited. Even at three and one they know grandparent visits mean candy, movies, toys. My dad has absolutely no qualms about going through the McDonald’s drive thru at 9:30 a.m. for an ice cream and my daughters know this. They can’t wait.
I asked Eliza if she wanted to bring a baby doll with her. She took my face in her hands as if to say, silly mommy. She might as well have shaken her head when she uttered her next sentence.
“Mamaw Ginger is going to buy me a brown baby with brown clothes,” she said of her grandmother.
“Oh, really?” I said. “Did she tell you this on the phone?”
“No, she just always buys me a baby,” Eliza said. Then she ran off to find more things to stuff in her carry on.
For the last week Lucille has been running around saying, “Jet plane! Jet plane!” We read a book about jet planes and talked about how we would be taking one to see her grandparents. Now, it’s all she can say when we talk about the trip.
I watch their excitement and get taken away on a wave of it.
But for me, it’s about something else.
My daughters are from Montana but I am from the South. Even though I choose not to live there, I have a deep and abiding love for the place even with its imperfections and complicated history. It’s where I was born. It’s where I grew up. It’s where my family still lives. On a fundamental level, it’s home.
I want to take my daughters there. I want to them to walk barefoot across my grandmother’s kitchen. I want them to feel balmy spring breezes on their faces. I want to see their curls in the damp air and catch with them lightening bugs in a jar at night. I want them to let my aunt’s sweet drawl roll over them like the healing tonic that it is. I want to sit on the screened-in porch with my dad and watch him as he listens to his grandchildren learn to stretch their vowel sounds.
I want Eliza and Lucille to know that their names come from a long family line of such names that help form a connected web of which they are a part. If I had ten children I would name them all names like Josephine, Ruby, Ava and Ida. But, I’m not going to have ten children. (“God willing and the creek don’t rise,” as my grandmother would say.) I’m going to have these two children and I want them stand ankle deep in the Atlantic on a South Carolina beach.
I want, when one day they read Faulkner and O’Connor, Dickey and Welty, them to remember some distant summer, their toes digging in the sand and their great grandmother calling for them “to come on in for supper.”
I want them to know that this, too, is a part of who they are.
Jennifer Savage is a writer and mama of Eliza and Lucille. Lately, she’s learning to be a city girl. She writes from her home in Missoula, Montana. She is also one of Mamalode’s favorite writers and you can fall in love with her too at Savagemama.com Read more of Jennifer’s mamalode articles here
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This is beautiful! Have a great trip!
Extremely interesting post thanks for sharing I have added your blog to my favorites and will check back
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