A return to Arkansas
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
An owl hooted. Twice. Just to make sure I heard it.
I smiled and my head sank into the pillow.
This “goodnight” from the owl floated on soft Arkansas air and in through the open window at my mother’s house where Dave and I were visiting last week.
Sometimes life circles around you — the present becomes the past and the past becomes the present.
The hooting of this owl brought another Arkansas owl to mind.
When I was young, my maternal grandparents lived on 10 acres of land near Fayetteville. They had rabbits and a few head of cattle. Grandma kept a lively wildflower garden in bloom behind the house.
They built the home themselves in the early ’50s, just a small wood-frame house in the country. From the paved road, we’d turn onto gravel, drive past the shady Dowell Cemetery, then a couple of miles through the woods.
The first time that I heard the owl at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I was 5 years old and its call, passing through the dark window, spooked me.
After my mother explained that the sound was a harmless bird, its hooting became a lullaby.
Every owl I’ve heard since then has reminded me of that one on my grandparents’ farm. Some memories, I guess, stick to your brain like cat hair to a sweater.
Now, whenever I visit my mom in Arkansas, the air, the trees, the scenery, all remind me of those family trips we made long ago to see my grandparents during my first 16 years of life.
I remember Grandpa carrying me around the yard, my arm wrapped around the back of his neck. And I can still picture Grandma in her garden, pointing out plants such as Bird’s Foot Violets and Spiderwort.
A day’s entertainment in Arkansas involved taking Grandpa and Grandma for a drive through the hills.
My brother and I would see who could spot the first Gibble Gas station of the trip. Gibble Gas — as much fun to say as it was to find.
The adults would look for wildflowers in the ditches and they’d talk politics or mention how pretty Lake Wedington looked through the trees.
After my grandparents died in the ’70s, I didn’t cross the Arkansas border again until 1998 when my aunt, uncle and mother all returned to their native state.
The past becomes the present. And now it’s Dave and I who make the eight-hour drive to Arkansas. We stay with my mom and get together with my aunt and uncle who live a few miles away. Sometimes we jump in one car and drive through the hills to Hot Springs for dinner.
When Dave and my mom and I hiked on a wilderness trail the other day, she pointed out the Umbrella magnolias, the Sweet gum and hickory trees to me.
My mother and I walked through shadows, stepping over congregations of poison ivy. We sat on a bench near a laughing stream where she answered a few questions about family history.
Here, mom and I were in Arkansas again, traipsing through the woods. I realized that the constant in each of these visits — the common denominator in every Arkansas trip — is my mother.
Mom has been on all of those drives, past and present, through the Arkansas hills. She is the one who remembers what flowers Grandma grew in her yard. Mom is the one who walked me to my grandparents’ outhouse in the middle of the night. She is the one who assured me that the owl was a friend, not a foe.
Arkansas is a place that connects my mother and me to each other, in the past and in the present.
And when I heard the owl last week – well, that was more than just a hoot. It was the first evening since I was a kid that both an owl and my mother told me goodnight.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
• Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.