All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [21]
These are my most precious memories, and I have dreams about them to this day. All children deserve to be cherished in this way. I was lucky to have this reserve of memories to cling to during the rest of the year, of a place where there was no neglect, no fighting, no drug and alcohol abuse to witness, no worries about being anything but a child, where it was okay to be vulnerable and have little-girl needs. Those recollections sustained me and probably saved my life when I was in so much despair that, even as a young child, the only way I could think to make the ache in my heart lessen was to die. They are also why I understand profoundly that every child needs a safe person and a haven. I continue to draw on the unconditional love I was given during those times, both as an essential resource for myself and as a source of love that I am able, when I am at my best, to give away in incredible abundance.
Chapter 3
BUTTERMILK AND MORNING GLORIES
Our wedding day at Skibo Castle in the Scottish Highlands.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
—EMILY DICKINSON, “Time and Eternity, XVII”
he two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where my husband and I live in rural Williamson County, Tennessee, pays homage to the spirit of safety and graceful domesticity that I remember from the beloved sanctuaries of my childhood. The countryside where we live is impossibly lovely, with green rolling hills, open pastures, creek-cut hollows, artesian springs, and beguiling examples of American farm and cottage architecture set along the winding roads. It’s real, not kitschy and packaged, with old farming families and hillbillies living alongside music-business money, poverty mixed with comfort.
When I began to dream of making myself a home I could live in for the rest of my life, a home that would shelter me longer than anywhere I had ever lived before, this was the place the fates seemed to choose for me. In 1993, after the house I was renting in Malibu was destroyed in a wildfire, leaving me stranded, my sister gave me a fabulous fixer-upper of a farmhouse on a piece of her land. I was grateful for her kindness and thought nothing of forgoing Los Angeles to settle into the rural, bucolic life I so dearly love. The property was the original homestead of the Meacham family, who once owned the large farm from which my mother and my sister bought acreage whenever they could afford it. My sister and her kids live within walking distance of my back door, while our mother and her husband of twenty-five years, Larry Strickland, whom we call Pop, live down the road. My father now comes for long visits with his creative, lovely wife, Mollie Whitelaw. Even though I’d spent so much time apart from my family when I was growing up—the chaotic, painful separations of my childhood continued long after the Judds settled in Nashville and became stars—we’re still in one another’s lives, for better or worse. Mostly better. Along the way, these bountiful Tennessee hills have seeped into my soul and given me a home where my heart can finally be safe and find some rest.
It took years to restore the old Meacham place to its former beauty. I pulled from deep memories of comfort, associations of unconditional love, rural living, and elegance. To begin, I jotted down simple notes that became my guiding document, things like “Great-Aunt Pauline and Great-Uncle Landon’s farm; the old home place on South Shore; Nana’s small print floral sheets; quilts; soft, faded velvet, old-fashioned flowery wallpaper; chenille blankets; Mamaw and Papaw’s dining room table; beautiful trims; crafts from Berea.” I had my work cut out for me. The house had only one small bathroom, put in during the 1960s by a local vocational school’s student project. I uncovered and restored five fireplaces