How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [12]
Thinking about teaching, coupled with last night’s restless sleep due to some disturbing noises outside the loft bedroom’s window, does not make me ooze with excitement. From the medicine cabinet in the bathroom upstairs, I reach for my bottle of Tylenol. As I take two tablets, I wonder why the doctor wouldn’t just let me get addicted to codeine.
In the living room, I note a charcoal drawing of an Asian boy in a straw hat riding on the back of a water buffalo. The boy has one hand on the wide back of the beast and the other raised as if he’s waving to someone. Maybe his mom is standing nearby and he’s waving and telling her that he’s okay this time, unlike last time when he slipped off and fell face-first into the rice paddy.
When my cell phone rings, I rush around the cabin, trying to find where I placed it before going to bed last night. I find it on the kitchen counter and answer just before it goes to voice mail.
The familiar voice of my dad is on the line.
“Hi, Dad. How are you and how are the pigs?” I picture him in his usual attire—denim bib overalls, red shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat he bought last year at the state fair.
“Grumpy today.” Even after nearly forty years in Georgia, his accent still sounds like that of western Pennsylvania, that Yankee state, where he grew up.
“And you?” My accent is Southern, and I don’t care what people say. I’m a Georgia girl.
“Grumpier.”
This is our typical greeting. My parents are pig farmers in Tifton, which is a small town near Jimmy Carter’s Plains, Georgia. All my life I’ve been the daughter of pig farmers, and I must say, I’m surprisingly proud of this heritage. My sister finds the comments she gets when she tells people what her parents do for a living embarrassing. To avoid these comments and cackles, she has shortened the truth to, “My parents have a little farm.” Quaint, cute. Most people don’t want to know more than that.
My dad asks about my trip, and when I answer, I omit the fact that I was almost too paralyzed to continue the drive once it started to rain.
I try to sound cheery and optimistic about beginning my new life in Bryson City. I tell him that the scenery is gorgeous and that the mountain air is almost as fresh as the air in Tifton.
Dad asks if I’ve seen the train that runs through the town. “Smoky Mountain Railroad has its headquarters in Bryson City,” he informs me like a travel guide would. “The train goes to Dillsboro, and they have gourmet meals aboard some of the trips.” I know he is tossing in the gourmet meal part to try to entice me.
“Oh?” I think I recall a set of tracks near the Methodist church along the steep, windy road up to this cabin. Trains do not impress me the way they do my father. He will stop whatever he’s doing whenever he hears a train whistle or sees a train coming down the tracks. He says trains remind him of his years as a hobo, but I know he’s only teasing about that.
Then my mother is on the phone, asking how long the trip took, if I have food to eat, if I took my vitamins this morning, and would I like her to send me some pickled pig’s feet? I have never liked pig’s feet, and I don’t know why she doesn’t remember that. Perhaps she thinks that for some reason they will taste more agreeable to me at this elevation. I expect to hear her tell me to sit up straight, and as we talk, my shoulders do rise and I stick out my chest.
“Sit up straight,” my mother once told me when I was growing up. “You don’t want to become hunched over. My aunt Lavonna Dewanna was such a hunchback.”
I never heard the rest of her reminiscing because I couldn’t believe that anyone would be named Lavonna Dewanna. I asked if that really was her name, and my mother said, “Yes, but we called her La De.”
“La De!” I laughed so hard that I rolled off the bed. I was only six, but after seeing my mother’s expression, I knew that I would never joke about her aunt La De again. Apparently, Mom didn’t think there was anything funny at all about her aunt’s name.
When I was in the hospital, sitting for any length of time, especially with my