The End of Innocence

My grandparents built a wonderful house out in the country.  I can distinctly remember riding over 10th Street Mountain the summer that I was five with my grandmother as we took a hot lunch to my paw paw and the laborers to eat as they paused in their work long enough to perch on upturned concrete blocks and share in a good noonday meal.  There were no sandwiches back in those hot, un-lazy days of summer for those men, no sir.  Grandmother fixed a "meat and three", wrapped it up good and set the bowls on trays along with gallons of cold, sweet iced tea for the bumpy ride that she and I took daily.  At that time the highway department was still working on the road that crossed the mountain which separated "town" from "country" and it seemed to take forever to get to where we were going (this same journey can now be made in about 10 minutes.)  The house was isolated from other homes but in reality was only a few blocks from the next one on a sleepy highway that would later see traffic greatly increase as the area built up out past my grandparent's on Choccolocco Road.

Their house became a wonderful place to spend summers; my great grandmother, "Mama Doss", (who lived in town yet still had my paw paw wrapped around her finger until the day she died as if he and my grandmother had never moved out of her home on McCoy) had the good fortune (in my opinion as a child) to have been born on the 5th of July which was certainly close enough to the 4th of July for everyone to have an excuse to celebrate in a big way.  The proverbial "fatted calf", in the form of juicy beef ribs, was smoked for hours in a homemade Bar-be-que pit that my paw paw got up and tended on the morning of the 4th before the chickens had even taken the curlers out of their hair.  Relatives came from far and wide to fete both Mama Doss and America on the 4th of July.  I, as a child, could never understand why they didn't just throw my birthday in to the big celebration mix and make homemade ice cream in my honor as well since my birthday was on the 10th of that month but I never said anything.  After all, Mama Doss was old, and I was going to have a fabulous birthday party back at home in Birmingham anyway in less than a week.

Life was good at that house.  The isolation meant that we could make all the noise we wanted, wear our pajamas on the porch if we felt like it because the distance from the house to the highway although quite visible was just enough to blur the fact that one was still in their sleeping clothes as a friendly neighbor tooted their horn as they passed by.  Once when my brother was 11 or 12 he put on an old cheerleader's outfit and a blonde "fall" that he'd gotten somewhere (I'm not even sure why he had it but I know that my sister was teaching him some sort of cheers to go along with it, probably as a prank) and they were jumping up and down out in the front yard.  Some guy came driving by blowing his horn and hollering at that long legged "sweet thang" with the pretty blonde hair and it made my brother so mad that he gave him the middle-finger salute and flounced back in the house.  The road was just far enough from the front yard so that he really did appear to be a girl.

The house on Choccolocco long outlasted both my grandparents and at some point my mother and dad became the tenants there along with my brother and sister.  It was fully remodeled so that on the inside it was only a vague resemblance of the way it looked when my grandparents lived in it.  But the one thing that had never changed was the isolation save for the one neighbor who lived on the acreage next door but who couldn't have heard you if you yelled or seen you from their porch and everyone liked it that way.  Grandchildren explored every bit of those 5 1/2 acres around that house and great-grandchildren fell in line doing the same thing, continuing to wear pajamas on the front porch if we wanted to because even though the traffic had greatly increased on the highway it was still too far away to really matter.

My brother went off and joined the Marines and then never really came back home to live again except only briefly before he married.  My sister moved to town.  My dad died several years ago and then it was only my mother.  And suddenly the isolation that we had once enjoyed there had now become a liability and I prayed hard each night for a hedge of protection to be around my mother in that house.  You can think of its location in the same way that you might think of walking down a busy street with a group of friends and you are leading the way.  You come to a corner and because you are in front for a few seconds as you turn the corner you are alone with whatever is there.  Of course in a few seconds your friends are joining you, having turned the corner too.  But that's the way my mother's house can best be described.  She is so close to neighbors but she might as well be a thousand miles away because they all live several acres away and through thick woods.  It goes without saying that cellphone service is almost non-existent there as well.

My mother's car is sitting in our driveway.  A few weeks ago she made one of her trips to visit my brother in Tampa; we take her to the airport, the flight is an hour and five minutes, and my brother meets her there.  She can get there quicker than I can drive from my house in Trussville to hers in Anniston. There was no car in her own driveway and no lights to be seen to keep the wolf from the door.  My sister called me this past Monday to tell me that Jeanne, a friend of mother's had gone by to leave some peach jam for her return and noticed when she walked up that the back door was standing ajar and a footprint imprinted on it where it had been forced open.  She immediately ran back to her car and backed out of the long driveway as fast as reverse would take her and called 911.  She couldn't reach her husband so she did the next best thing and called the preacher. He lives right down the street so it didn't take him long to get there in his flip flops and packing a pistol.  Jeanne was afraid that one of the robbers could still be in there, or even worse, my sister so Bro. Roland walked through with his gun drawn hoping to find no one but preparing for anything.  No one was there.  Whoever had broken in to my mother's home had long gone and fortunately my sister had been safe at her own place in town.  The police got there quickly and did what they could but you know that CSI is only a TV show and that real crimes are never solved in an hour nor do the perpetrators ever leave those tiny slivers of evidence that locks them up before the last commercial.

Larry and I rushed over to my mother's as quickly as we could that day.  Friends were there.  It sort of reminded me, in a sick sort of way, of the Amish building a neighbor's house.  Someone was sweeping the floor of all the debris left from the broken door.  Jeanne's sweet husband had immediately gone and bought another door, a much heavier one, and he and my son Will were working on getting it back in place.  Larry went and bought timers for the lamps.  My sister, Jeanne and her 4 children began the task of picking up the things in my mother's bedroom and in the other rooms that they had gone through.  Whoever did this was obviously looking only for jewelry and drugs because they did not take anything else.  They did not find much either, the things that they did take had more sentimental value than a dollar one although they will probably get money for their drug habit from what they did take.  I felt such a sense of violation yet a sense of relief that my mother had not been home and that these people, whoever they were, did not do anything malicious to my mother's home.  All they did was take our innocence and it's hard to pawn that for a quick high.

My mother took the news of the break-in just as you'd think that she would, with much grace yet incredible sadness for the things that had belonged to my dad that would or could never be replaced.  Once innocence is lost it can never be regained and the innocence of that house disappeared with that footprint on the back door. Whoever put it there had no regard for what they were doing and the far-reaching effects that their actions have and will cause.  I almost feel sorry for them, the losers that they are, and pray that God will be merciful and woo their hearts toward His Son Who loves them as much as He loves me.  We no longer want my mother there in that house and when she returns from the safety of Tampa we will begin to process of "the next step."  Right now we aren't exactly sure what that next step is, we just know that the house that brought such joy to so many and gave us so many wonderful memories in its isolation will never be the same.  It will be put up for sale and life will move on but this time it will be where there are neighbors for my mother.