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The Beautiful Attitudes

The Beautiful Attitudes

Last updated on: June 2, 2015 at 1:10 am by Guest Contributor

The Beautiful Attitudes 2015-05-27T13:04:23-07:00 Guest Contributor

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By Dyana Herron

I clearly remember the last day of being nine. I stood in front of my house on the porch, its cement stained from summer, when my brother and I felt through the thick fur of our chow chows for fat ticks that we plucked, shook off, then smashed with rocks.

On the last day of being nine, I stood on the stained cement crying. I was upset because although the next day was my birthday and would bring all the extravagances of a birthday, I would be turning ten.

As in, going from a one-digit age number to a two-digit age number. And I realized I wasn’t likely to reach the three-digits.

Standing on the edge of our porch, it was as if I were standing on the edge of my grave.

Yes, I was a sensitive kid.

Luckily, as I grew older, my preoccupation with death diminished somewhat, and I began to assume a relatively normal outlook on things like birthdays. I now love birthdays. As I write this, I am two days away from turning twenty-nine, and I feel great about that.

But predisposition toward the morbid or no, birthdays invite self-reflection. They are a natural time for gauging one’s progress, for taking stock.

On the threshold of my third decade, this self-reflection takes the form of a question:

What would Juanita think of me now?

Juanita was my great-aunt, my maternal grandfather’s sister, and until I was a teen my family lived in a trailer on her land in Southeast Tennessee. The land had belonged to her husband, Earnest, who was a cook in World War II and died before I was born of a complication from diabetes.

I felt a bond with Earnest because his birthday was the day after mine. I knew this because I read the date a million times on his tombstone, which was in a small family cemetery a field away from my house.

(I know what you’re thinking. Perhaps hanging out in graveyards contributed to my nine-year-old meltdown? Okay, maybe. But to us, the small plot of land was as commonplace as the vegetable garden.)

Juanita’s tombstone was already in place beside her husband’s, and it made me sad to think how she’d lie there beside him someday. She was in many ways closer to my brother and me than our own grandmothers because she was ever-present in her large white house just across the road—a road that soon dead-ended in the woods, and on which no others lived.

She was old-fashioned, even more so than my grandparents. There was a coal-burning stove in her kitchen, and a big black coal pile outside beside the well house. She stitched quilts by hand.

She insisted my brother and I squat over a porcelain chamber pot in her bathroom if we only had to pee, even though she had working indoor plumbing. I rarely saw her eat anything richer than cornbread soaked in buttermilk. Instead of “chimney,” she said “chimley.”

One evening, during a thunderstorm, I played in front of the stove and she read to me from her Bible. “The Beatitudes,” she called the passage, although I wasn’t sure what that meant. It sounded like “the beautiful attitudes.”

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

But rest assured, Juanita had her faults, and quirks that came from a solitary life.

She once recommended that my parents build a wooden box to physically restrain my brother, a spirited-but-normal little boy.

Sitting on her screened-in porch one stifling afternoon, she said she hoped the wind would begin to blow soon, or else we would all suffocate and die—a remark that left me hyperventilating in my bedroom later, eyes glued to the trees outside, praying they would move.

Her mind left her slowly, like a forgotten piece of fruit becomes soft then loses its shape. She sold her land without telling my parents, who bought a few acres of their own a couple miles away and moved us there. Juanita lived with other relatives who cared for her until her death.

What would she think of me now, so far removed from that home where my life began and hers finished? What would she think of the choices I make, living in a large city, any manner of thing I could want at my fingertips, and so extravagant in my want, often wasteful with what I have?

And why does it matter? What indelible mark has she left on me?

In the one photograph I have of Juanita, she is walking straight toward the camera, her hair an arc of cotton. I am in the background on my bike, brown feet digging into the pedals, riding away. Her long arm stretches straight forward, and her eyes are like coal, she is so focused on what she is reaching toward.

In my dreams, we are again in the white house together, but it is empty and dark. She is speaking to me in whispers. She is reading to me from texts I’m not yet able to decipher.

Originally published in Good Letters on February 3, 2011.

Dyana Herron is a writer and teacher originally from Cleveland, TN, who currently lives in Seattle. She is a graduate of SPU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Photo above credited to Dieter Weinelt and used under a Creative Commons license.

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