Homesick (16 page)

Me being me, I would normally have looked around as I walked down the aisle to make sure everybody was in place, that all was well, that Mama was doing fine. But I didn’t. I never took my eyes off Howard. We stood there before God and our families and friends, and pledged our lives to each other. It was perfect. We didn’t have a formal recessional; rather, everyone went straightaway to a black-and-white checkered dance floor we’d set up, and started dancing to the Motown band. Sweet soul music was one of the joys of my life as a girl, so it seemed right that the curtain would come down on my youth with such an exuberant fanfare. Marvin, Aretha, Al, Smokey, and the rest had seen me through so much joy and heartache. It was only right that they should be there to serenade me as I stepped into the next act of my life.

I think about that happy, happy woman, dancing in the strong arms of her new husband on that warm spring day under the California sky, and I smile. She did not know, she could not have known, that her long flight from her homeland was ending that day. She knew she was no longer a jet-setter, that she was a wife now. And she hoped she would soon be a mother. What would that mean to her? She could only guess.

But she was also a Southerner—and soon she would want to be one in more than name only. You know those birds you send off, the ones that always find their way back? The bride had been out flying high for many, many years, and she was about to learn that it was time to head home to rest.

6

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They say that once you marry and start a family, you start to return to your own childhood, consciously or not. And that’s what happened for me, in a big way. Our wedding was in May, and by December we’d already begun digging our toes back into the Southern soil.

That first summer as husband and wife, Howard and I were still living
la vida loca,
traveling a lot, eating dinner out every night, making the most of our newlywed life. But we were also in our midthirties, and the urge to make life a nonstop romantic adventure was something we’d both gotten pretty much out of our system. We were both ready to start building something solid and lasting. Before long I was telling Howard that it would be nice if we could give our kids (
Kids!
We’d been married a month!) a taste of home down South.

At first Howard just listened, a little bemused. “It was like that six-month honeymoon period new presidents have, where Congress gives them the leeway to pass new legislation,” he told me recently. “I just thought, ‘Sure, honey, whatever you want.’ I was determined for you to think you’d married the greatest guy in the world. I didn’t want you to have buyer’s remorse. It seemed to me that you had this
Field of Dreams
fantasy: if we built the farm, everything else would come.”

By “building the farm,” what Howard meant was a dream I’d been quietly cultivating for years, mostly unawares, but which now was breaking happily through to the surface. I wanted to go back to Meridian, at last. To take my husband and our children there, to expose us all to the fresh air and soil and good people of the land where I’d been raised.

I hadn’t realized, until I was married, how powerful this impulse within me had grown to be. But I know that for years I had always loved the idea of a family compound—not so much a lavish, Kennedy-style family seat, but a decent parcel of land where my family could gather and enjoy the countryside together. I’d grown tired of vacation spots; I wanted not just a place to get away from it all, but a place that was a destination all its own. I’d been to the home of one of Berry’s friends, whose family had a kind of enclave in the country outside of Meridian; I remembered our riding horses down a dirt road there, under the canopy of oak trees, and just thinking,
This is perfect.
And that image stayed with me long enough that eventually I realized it wasn’t just an idle whim—it was something I needed.

“What I didn’t know was that once we found a place, you’d want to go there every time you had ten minutes away from work,” Howard says, laughing. “If I’d known we’d be spending 80 percent of our vacations in one spot, I might have suggested a flat in Paris.”

But he never got the chance. Right away I enlisted Daddy’s help as a land scout, and before we knew it he’d found the perfect tract of land, a hilly spread that had once been a dairy farm. “This real estate man showed me all over the country outside of Meridian,” Daddy says. “As soon as we came upon this place, it looked like heaven, almost. The minute I saw it, I said, ‘You don’t have to go anywhere else, I’m going to call her and tell her I found the place.’ “ We call it Honeysuckle Farms.

As soon as we’d made it ours, we started planning. One ideal building site on the land was already occupied, by a dilapidated old fishing shack next to one of the ponds; the building itself wasn’t really worth saving, but it had a gorgeous old redbrick chimney, and we decided to rescue it so that we could build our new home around an old hearth. Interior design is a passion of mine, so the chance to design our new cottage from scratch was a dream come true. But what kind of place did I want? It needed to be practical enough to house the family Howard and I wanted to have, but also dreamy enough to fulfill my desire for a serene country retreat, a sacred space where I could soothe my city-battered soul. I wanted this little house to feel embracing and comforting, to be not just a spare vacation cabin but a home that expressed my personality. What’s more, I wanted the décor to be visibly Southern, so my guests from points north and west would be swept away by the sense of place—and, for that matter, so would I.

Just as soon as we’d gotten started, of course, our wish list got away from us. We wanted a master bedroom; we wanted a suite for Mama and Daddy; we wanted a suite for Jenna to use when she came home. We wanted sleeping porches for kids, once we had them. We wanted a gym, a study that could double as a screening room, and a great room for entertaining. But when an architect friend drew up some plans that accommodated all our wishes, we saw with astonishment that our little starter home had mushroomed to ten thousand square feet—hardly the cozy cottage of our dreams. So we shelved those plans for the time being, and decided to start small.

The design Howard and I finally settled on could hardly have been more simple. Our little shingled cottage is essentially a one-room structure, modeled after the San Ysidro Ranch cottage where we spent our honeymoon night. It’s dominated by our brick hearth, with a little bathroom off the back, and a nook-size children’s bedroom as well. The kitchen wraps around behind the hearth. We gave it a big screen porch, deep enough to host dinner parties on; fronted it with a creaky screen door; bookended it with porch swings; and filled it with rocking chairs looking out over the pond. And we garlanded the front with a lush, flowering English garden full of azaleas, gardenias, and roses. We Southerners have always had a soft spot for all things English. At the time I was reading a romantic novel (by Rosamunde Pilcher, I think), in which the author described an English countryside manor where each bedroom was named after a different flower. I was so taken by the romance of the idea that I decided our getaway place would be called the Rose Cottage.

For the interior I cobbled together a look that was floral and feminine. I spent weekends in New Orleans buying art objects, antique furniture, and other Victoriana from auction galleries. I kept my eye out for special pieces that were historically faithful to the antebellum South. And I had some lucky finds: four-poster canopy beds and music stands to use as end tables, nineteenth-century botanical prints (roses, of course) to line the walls, and rose-shaped iron finials to crown the posts at the base of the cottage stoop. A pair of highly polished men’s riding boots I fell in love with sit beside a venerable-looking writing desk, with an antique chair I found in L.A. (The dealer swore he’d bought it from Elliott Gould, and that it had belonged to him and Barbra Streisand; I guess I just needed a little taste of Hollywood, even here.)

And as we finished off the inside of the cottage, we also added a few homey amenities to the grounds: hammocks and Adirondack chairs scattered about near the house, birdhouses in the trees, and a fishing pier on the pond. We even built a little island in the pond for the waterfowl, covered it with azalea bushes and a gazebo, and joined it to the bank with a white wooden arched bridge. Every evening we spent down there in those early days, we repaired to the porch to gaze out at our slice of heaven: weeping willows frame the view of the pond, and lazy ducks, swans, and geese glide on the pond till darkness falls.

Two years after we finished the Rose Cottage, we completed
a second cabin nearby. Less ornamented, more rustic, this two-bedroom cottage was dubbed the Cotton Patch, after a charming country restaurant outside Tuscaloosa I’d loved during my college years. We planted a real cotton patch out front by the gravel road, and now my children love picking it and taking it back to school in Los Angeles for show-and-tell.

I still look forward to building a big house here one day; as a hopeless romantic, I think of it as my Tara. But for now we’re deliriously happy in this pair of pocket-size dwellings. The Rose Cottage and the Cotton Patch: together they’re a home away from home, a sanctuary, a nurturing space where I can be still and at rest and one with the land. It took a lot of patience and introspection to pull together the elements of this physical environment, and I took no end of pleasure in the process. But it takes more than just interior decoration to make a sacred space like this. The magic I feel when we arrive at the cottages after a long stretch in the city, I think, has less to do with what Howard and I have built here physically than with what we want to build here spiritually. It takes in so many deeper wishes of mine: to carve out a safe and sane place to raise my family. To immerse us all in surroundings that are quieter, gentler, more natural and unhurried. To maintain a connection with the people I love, and the land of my raising. And above all to have a place, as Ellis Peters wrote, “where I put my feet up and thank God.”

It was in 1993, while we were building the Rose Cottage, that Howard and I decided we should try to have a baby. It was the most frightening decision I had ever made, because it was so fraught with responsibility, and so irrevocable. How did I know I would be a good mother? I didn’t; nobody does. I was terrified about how our life together would change. Remember, I was thirty-five when I got married, and I’d been used to living carefree, able to stay as late as I wanted at dinner or take off on a last-minute vacation if the yen struck. Once you have kids, all that freedom evaporates in a flurry of diapers and tiny shoes.

But any concerns about my freedom paled in the face of that much stronger, more visceral urge—to start a family. I thank God I had the courage to make that decision, for if I hadn’t I would have missed out on the most incredible journey of my life. There’s an enigmatic Tamil saying that speaks to my feelings: “Children tie their mother’s feet down.” The ambiguity is the key: though its message can seem like a curse (
My children hold me back; I’ll never fly again
), for me the truer meaning is that children anchor you more firmly to the earth. For this mother, who spent so many years floating wherever the winds of whim would take her, children have been nothing but a blessing.

Childbearing opened my heart in a way I had never imagined. During Austin’s birth I don’t remember sobbing the way I expected to; I just remember being stunned and mesmerized by the miracle of the experience. In the days thereafter, everyday life took on the vividness of Technicolor. I began having intense emotional reactions to everything; even sappy television commercials seemed so moving I couldn’t keep from crying. It was as though a light had just been turned on in my life.

Aside from the gaga moments, there were some pretty absurd times, too. Howard and I had both reached early middle age without ever changing a diaper. As we strapped Austin’s car seat into the back of the car at the hospital, we looked at each other and said, “Can you believe they’re letting us take this kid home?!”