Big Texas Love - an essay from the heart

I have not been in love with Texas my whole life; at least that’s what I thought. Regardless, I was born and homegrown here and – with only a brief, and icy, six-year stint in Chicago – have happily remained here. Texas has grown on me like honey-suckle on a rusted barbed wire fence; slow, sweet and tangled. I find myself pleasantly intertwined with my big Texas roots to the point that they sometimes trip me, leaving me sprawled and giggling, with buttercup pollen caked on the tip of my freckled nose.

My love affair with Texas began, unbeknownst to me, as a young girl. We lived in Houston, where my mother’s family sprang from, but my dad was from Hochheim (yes, that’s two H’s), Texas. Dad grew up picking cotton and corn on his father’s farm, helping with the cattle and driving the family pickup at too young an age to mention.

Hochheim sits nestled in a triangle formed by Shiner, Yoakum and Cuero, and is about eighty-five miles southeast of the Alamo. It has one church with one graveyard, where you can get baptized, married or buried – it’s a full service church. There are giant bales of rolled hay in many of the fields and gentle mooing beasts with large brown eyes munching hay or loafing under shade trees. And it has one, two-lane road that runs through the shriveled heart of what’s left.

More interesting to me is what Hochheim used to have; one country store where you could buy a Big Red soda and enjoy it in a rusted metal chair out front, while the grown folks chewed the fat, chewed the cud or gossiped like little old ladies. There was one post office where you could mail letters to large cities that sounded important and faraway, like New York and Chicago, or even more intriguing, Dallas and San Antonio. And cotton fields overflowing with sharply pricked boles exploding with fluffy cloud-like fibers. But Hochheim also had something more memorable.
Mama Daisy and Daddy Joe were my dad’s parents and they were hardcore Texas farming stock. Tales from my daddy’s childhood painted a canvas of a hard farming life that I am certain, to this day, I’m better off to have escaped. However, my relation to them, being the grandchild and not the child, was less stressful.

I remember sitting on the front porch of their farmhouse late at night and looking up at the big Texas sky filled with zillions of gleaming Texas-sized stars. The grown folks would sit around and tell stories of breedin’ heifers, fire ants invadin’ the west corner of the cotton field and rattlesnakes the size of a man’s arm. I sat there, big-eyed and listening, as I watched daddy-longlegs scamper about the porch and lightning bugs blink a silent message out in the yard. Cicadas would hum out a song that supplied a natural soundtrack for the porch stories and the Texas moon would add just enough light to make the road at the hilltop glow like a silver thread.

My mother would inevitably fetch me from the front porch for a bath. In the rear of the house the kitchen – turned “bathing” room by night – was ready to pull double duty. A large metal tub was brought in and filled up with buckets of water, some from the sink, some steaming hot from the stovetop. It always seemed odd bathing in the kitchen like that, naked and soapy in a room where only a couple of hours ago you’d consumed roast beef and potatoes. But it was even odder sitting out in the wooden outhouse with the daddy-longlegs – and watch out for the scorpions – to pee…or not to pee. Frankly, sometimes it’s hard to pee when you hear cattle munching grass just beyond the gate and you’re worried about getting stung by a scorpion!

The next day the kitchen would revert to its normal daily duties of churning out homemade provisions for all those who ventured into its hot fragrant air. Mama Daisy could cook up the branch of a dead pecan tree and bless it with delectable qualities beyond human comprehension.

Mornings brought scrambled eggs dripping with butter and bacon grease, crisp salty bacon and the smell of black coffee. By the afternoon, she was taking buttermilk soaked chicken, dipping it in flour and frying it up to crunchy perfection – the drumsticks were heaven on a bone! Mashed potatoes were not mashed, so much as whipped into passionate peaks of perfection. Gravy was studded with the leftover peppery bits from the fried chicken.

Oh, but the desserts! Miraculously crafted country confections that could turn the head of the most dedicated dieter! The kitchen counter seemed to be endlessly piled with a carnival of desserts. Frosted cherry cake, pecan pie, chocolate pie, and apple pie with the ever so slightly but intentionally over-browned crust, just the way I liked it – all sat ready to be gobbled. And, the queen mother of all Texas desserts…Lemon Meringue Pie! All hail the queen!

Mama Daisy’s lemon meringue pie was good for whatever ails a person! Bad mood? Lemon meringue pie! Tummy ache? Lemon meringue pie! Swollen feet from wearin’ yur boots a might too tight? Lemon Meringue Pie, my friend, lemon meringue pie! If it hurt, burned or was ‘all swelled up’, Mama Daisy’s lemon meringue pie could heal it, soothe it, or take the swellin’ out!

This was serious therapy and not to be taken lightly. Any Texas woman that’s ever had the good intention to make a lemon meringue pie knows about the tears involved. We are talking meringue tears, folks. Those syrupy dots of sugar that form on the tips of meringue peaks are nearly impossible to eradicate. It takes a master baker to make a proper meringue for a lemon meringue pie. Mama Daisy was a master baker.

Now Daddy Joe had his own ways about him. I remember him as a gentleman – though at such a tender age I was unaware of what a gentleman was – with a big brimmed hat. Not really a cowboy hat so to speak, but a farmer’s hat. At least I think that’s what it was. I remember him looking out at me from under the wide brim of that hat as the Texas sun beat down upon the crown of his straw covered head. I’ll always remember his eyes looking out from that hat, large and soulful. Funny thing is, I can’t remember what color his eyes were, but I do remember the deep soul that lived there. It was a caring soul. It was a hard working soul. It was a soul that understood life.

Daddy Joe died when I was young, but there were tales about him that were larger than the brim of his big Texas hat. There was the time he picked up a big Texas rattler by the tail and swung it around and around his head like a bullwhip! A reptile bullwhip! Whoopa-whoopa-whoopa, the rotating snake swished through the air over Daddy Joe’s head until, POP! The rattler’s head exploded off its body and flew through the air, leaving Daddy Joe standing there holding a bullwhip-like snake body, one end dripping reptile blood onto the hot Texas dirt. My dad told me this tale over and over, to my delight. I always wondered what that snake’s last thoughts were, if indeed a snake has thoughts. It probably thought he was caught up in some sort of magic whirlpool to hell….and at the hands of a man wearing a large brimmed hat, no less!

There was another story about Daddy Joe that I always think about when I hear the news about Iraq. He served in both WWI and WWII, a twenty-one year span between the two. I’m sure as a farm boy, he never imagined he would travel to such faraway places to shoot men he didn’t know. My dad remembers being a young boy and watching Daddy Joe change a light bulb when the radio announced that the US was joining the war in Europe. My dad recalls his father looking down at him from the height of the ladder and saying, “Well son, I s’pose I’ll be goin’ off to war, if they’ll still have me.” Daddy Joe did go off to war again.

One time he steered a ship through the Panama Canal with a gun to his head. He nervously gripped the ship’s wheel and carefully steered through the narrow canal. I can just imagine the sweat – from Panama heat or the hot metal of that gun against his scalp – sliding down the back of his sunburned Texas neck. Apparently he asked the guy to remove the gun, said the gun was making him nervous and he didn’t want to make a mistake and run the ship against the canal. From what my dad says, the soldier removed the gun, and they got safely through the canal.
Daddy Joe was blessed to make it back home to his family and his farm. And although he passed away while I was still knee-high to a grasshopper, his presence hung about the old place like sweet hay.

Mama Daisy stopped farming cotton, but continued with a hay field or two and some cattle. They loved her like Labradors! I remember her driving us down to the ‘bottom’ in her old, green, nineteen-forty-something Chevy, or perhaps it was a Ford. Whatever it was, it reminded me of a tank! The ‘bottom’ was where the land sloped down to the Guadalupe River, which curved through their land. Mesquite thorns would scrape along the side of the green car: scraping like witches fingernails on a dry chalkboard. The cows would hustle to be near the car, near her, for they knew from experience she’d brought salt licks and food cubes to munch. Sometimes, she’d even haul a square bale of hay in the trunk of that marvelous green tank!

I have strong memories of making the two hour drive from Houston to Hochheim, mesmerized by the orderly rows of cornfields, cotton, and whatever else farmers had a mind to grow. I was always captivated by the tidy rows flicking past, flick-flick-flick, until I was sick, causing an unscheduled stop for a good roadside vomit. I remember the smell of hay, as it was freshly cut and drying in the sun. I recall the hearty smell of cows and horses being towed in trailers just ahead of our car. I remember the excitement of being caught behind farmers riding their tractors up to this field, or that field. And I remember traveling behind large farming equipment – hay balers, corn harvesters – being delivered to someone’s farm. They were often too hard to overtake on the curling, slightly pregnant hills and required patience until the next opportunity to pass. Sometimes you couldn’t pass until after the next small town.

Every small town we rolled through brought new hope for a bathroom stop and the possibility of a Big Red for the road. Every town was different and the same. Dusty farming equipment sleepily strewn about, waiting to be useful. A gas station, sometimes two, possibly a small grocery store or a hardware store would line the main highway that cut through those graceful hamlets. Painted signs had all been uniformly faded by the hot Texas sun and drifted lazily back in forth in the occasional breeze that ebbed its way up from the coastline. Memories of driving through these towns always play back to me like an old movie from my past.

But one of my favorite memories is the parade of roadside flowers. During the springtime, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes would blanket the roadside hills in a quilt of explosive color. Lavender and white buttercups – my mother said these were weeds – stood as proud guardians of the Texas bluebonnets. Families of tourists, or maybe these were just proud Texans, would stop along the roadsides and snap pictures. Snap-click-snap-click! Babies in fields of periwinkle blues and red-orange blossoms are a happy sight! “Bluebonnet sitting,” I always thought to myself as we rolled by slowly, making our way behind another green tractor pulling a harvester. We never did stop and take our own pictures, and years later this would prompt me to stop and place my own baby son amongst the bluebonnets. That picture sits on my dresser, his bald baby head poking up soft and pink among all those periwinkle bonnets. He has a look of utter amazement on his face – an earthly cherub among blue Texas angels!

I am filled with ripe memories that spill over and splash into my present life. My pink-headed baby boy has grown into a fine nine-year old son who travels with me every summer to perform for children at Texas libraries. He’s already seen a lot of dusty Texas towns and seems to enjoy the sights as much as I do. I secretly know that he is storing up memories for his own children. He, too, gets excited about being stuck behind an occasional tractor or seeing the bluebonnets burst at the first sign of spring. He wants to stop and take another picture in the bluebonnets, but the last few dry years haven’t brought us across a field exploding in fine Texas blue.

He thinks the corroded, farming equipment will one day be valuable – I think he’s right, but only as the rusty antique of a lost farm. He thinks one day he will borrow my cousin’s big, red tractor and plow fields for all the little old ladies who have lost their families. He says he will plant corn and bluebonnets in their empty fields and this will make them happy, seeing their fields, once again alive with promise. I marvel that someone who is only nine, and a city boy to boot, has such magical plans. But then I realize with a lurch of my Texas heart, that he has Texas running through his veins like gold. His heart is tangled with the roots of bluebonnets, just as mine is with honeysuckle. He can’t believe how blue the sky can be here. I tell him it’s bluer here than in Chicago, and I know this to be completely true. He says he will one day leave Houston after he’s been an Astros player, an astronaut and the President of the United States, and move to the country where he will plow up the fields all around my parent’s and grandparent’s houses. I believe that he will and new dreams will grow.

Sometimes when visiting my parents in Hochheim, we lay on their driveway late at night, mother and son, side by side. We first shine the flashlight on the drive to make sure there are no scorpions. Then we lay back, heads together on the still hot cement, and take turns looking up at the Texas stars. A giant dome of stars stares back at us and we take turns gazing through a pair of binoculars to bring them closer. The stars cloak the sky from east to west, north to south and we feel like happy bugs under a glass dome. We are making memories.

My cousin – the one with the big, red tractor – recently wrote in an email, ironically enough, that in an age of cell phones, email, laptop computers, Jacuzzi tubs in bathrooms, professionally managed portfolios, digital cable and satellite radios in our cars, it’s really our memories of simple things that make us feel a part of something. I believe he’s hit the nail on the head with a big ole’ Texas hammer!

Texas makes me feel a part of something big. You can’t look at the vast azure sky and not feel enchanted, hopeful. A bit of my childhood leaks out each time I see bluebonnets, or stars, or cattle, or cornfields. I may travel to see other places, I may even live in other places, but there is only one place I will call home…Texas. It’s my childhood, my husband’s childhood and my son’s childhood. It leaves us filled up and in love with life. In love with each other and in love with Texas too. It’s a big love! A BIG TEXAS LOVE!

© March/2007
C.D. Duffin
Used by permission