Gone With the Wind

The 20-something woman who cuts my hair had her baby two weeks ago, She cut my hair a few days before she gave birth to a healthy, but small baby boy. Six pounds. He’ll grow. When I asked her if she had a name picked for her baby, she smiled and said, “Yes, Rhett.” I said, “So, Rhett Butler.” She got a bigger smile on her face and said, “Yes.” Then she went on to say how “Gone With the Wind” is her favorite movie. I was surprised. I told her I was surprised. I said, “That movie came out in 1939!” “I know,” she said, “But I’ve watched it so many times I’ve lost count.” I was impressed and I told her so. I said to her, “That movie is almost four hours long,” She smiled and said it didn’t matter.

As the conversation continued, she shared that none of her friends had seen the movie, none knew about the movie, none wanted to see the movie. “Well,” I said, “I guess it is gone with the wind.” She smiled. At least, I thought to myself, it still lives for a few of us. Rhett, her little boy, will spend the rest of his life telling people that his mom named him after the smooth talking and heartbreaking and darkly handsome Rhett Butler from an old movie nobody has seen called “Gone With the Wind.” That way, at least, a few people in future generations will hear about the movie again. One or two might be interested enough to watch the movie. Okay, maybe not.

I think of “Gone With the Wind” a lot. Not just because I read the mammoth book as a young boy and then gave it to my mom to read, who was so hooked by the book that she forgot she had a houseful of kids who needed fed. That went on for several days until she finished the book. Years later, I bought the video and she and I watched it together. It’s a nice memory–the book we shared and the movie we watched together and then the many times we talked about Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler and what a mess they made of themselves. I remember my mom liked Mammy. Scarlett’s ever-protective nanny who knew Scarlett was a spoiled Southern belle, but whom she loved and watched over like a guard at Buckingham Palace. I was partial to Prissy, the vocal but sweet slave girl who oversold her know-how on birthing babies and who was known to stretch the truth more than once. But then, who hasn’t?

The fact is it’s easy for me to pull up the memory of “Gone With the Wind” whenever I drive through one of the many abandoned small towns that surrounds me like dogs that have cornered a cat in a tree. The Lone Star State is known for its size, geographically, but it has a sizable number of godforsaken, forlorn, shuttered, has been towns that look like General Sherman’s march to the sea got a redo in West Texas. I get the same feeling that showed on Scarlett’s face when she returned home to Tara after the war, only to find it literally was gone with the wind. The contrast between what these small towns were and what they are now sends shivers down my spine in the same way Scarlett went into a tailspin at the sight of the destroyed plantation that she called home.

As I drive through these West Texas towns that surely died a slow and painful death, I wonder about the many people that called the place their home. I see big empty storefronts with all the windows boarded up and where once upon a time everybody did their Saturday shopping. Almost always there is a sturdy school house still standing, more often than not with all windows shattered out of their frames. These school buildings seem to be the last to crumble. It is as if they have one final lesson to teach before they disappear forever from the face of the earth.

Like Scarlett, nobody likes to see their way of life vanish like morning dew on the grass. And like Scarlett, we can scream and shout, dig our nails into the dirt and damn the Yankees with our lips, but a way of life, like an old and broken body, also passes away. And once gone, it does not return. Nature, with its winds and rains and storms, eventually levels all the signs of old life and replaces it with weeds and heaps of trash. All that remains are a few photos tucked away in yellowed scrapbooks or sometimes in old history books that nobody takes off the shelf.

I have a pen and ink drawing of the farmhouse where my mom grew up. That’s the only thing that now remains of the house, this lifeless image that tries to speak to us from the frame in which it rests. The farmhouse was a few miles down a dirt road that my mom walked on every afternoon after school. It still is not paved. Any driver on it stirs up a whirlwind of dust, although there are few drivers on it these days. Only three houses border the road nowadays. A ninety year old woman lives in one. A couple in their eighties lives in another. One of my sisters and her husband are in a third. Their new house should put the road on life support for a few more years. In time, as we all know, even the roads disappear if there is nobody to travel upon them.

The old farmhouse that my mom called home for her first two decades of life until she married my dad was later lived in by her favorite brother and his family–at least for a few years until it was sold out from under them by another relative who showed no sentimentality, only practicality, about the old home place. As a small boy, I often went there to see my cousins. I still can draw the floor plan of the house from memory. The one thing I remember the most about the house–built in 1920 by a local carpenter who did everything in it from cabinets to windows–was the staircase that led to the second floor, where my mom’s bedroom was the first room on the left as she climbed the steps. My uncle never changed the old gray carpet that was on the floor when my mom had the room and where his daughters now shared the room. The carpet stayed, as did everything else, until the house was demolished and burned by the new owners who wanted the land, but cared little about the house. The day it disappeared was a punch in the gut for most of us in the family and, like a phantom limb, the pain never goes away.

That staircase drew me to it like the sweet smell of a blossom enthralls a honey bee. Maybe all kids are fascinated by staircases. I think back on how I devoured the book, “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” as a pre-teen. This staircase in the old farmhouse also was hidden behind a wall, although the doorway to it was visible. The other unusual thing about the staircase was the indentations in each step. The wood in the center of the step was worn down from fifty years of people going up and down them. It’s the truth. You didn’t even have to reach down to touch the wood to know that the surface of the step was no longer level. It was visible to the naked eye and it was obvious to feet walking on those stairs. Without a doubt, many feet had traversed those steps over the years.

For a pensive person such as myself walking upon those steps, I couldn’t help but think of the other people across the decades who had walked these same steps before me–my mom, her brothers and sisters, her parents, friends, visitors. All had placed their two feet on those steps as they found their way to bed at night or down those steps as they went to work in the morning. I’m no numbers person, but anybody with basic arithmetic skills knows it takes innumerable times to wear down hard wood.

But now the staircase is gone, as well as my mom and all but two of her siblings. Both of them are in their 90s. I wonder how often–if ever–they think about that staircase in the farmhouse. Surely it stays with them, stored in some part of their memories and surfaces when something in the present day provides a flashback to the old days. Any abandoned house–and especially this one on the old farm that stood empty for many years before it was burned down–makes me sad. It’s a deep down throbbing hurt, like it just shouldn’t be this way. It happens every time I see such a house. In most instances, I don’t even know who lived there. But that fact doesn’t matter. And I swear I’m not the only one saddened by the sight. I sense that the house feels a similar heavy sadness at the vacancy within its walls. If houses could cry, I believe these abandoned ones would shed tears enough to make a river flow out the front door.

I’ve heard people say that a house is not a home. I might even agree with that statement. A house becomes a home when people live in it. But I also believe that when people have lived in it, it doesn’t simply revert back to its formal status as just a house when they move out of it. Too much has happened in the interval. There are smells and sounds and footsteps that stay within those four walls–faint echoes of a former way of life. It’s as if the structure has absorbed some of the life of the people who lived there and that life lingers for years until somebody finally demolishes it or it falls down on its own because it just doesn’t have the strength to keep on standing. Like a marathon runner who runs out of breath and energy and falls to the ground, so these houses realize at some point that just they don’t have a leg left to stand on.

Whenever my Aunt Ellen would come to visit us in her later years, I’d always take her to the old farm so she could see the place. For a while, the house still was standing. Then came the time when we went there and the house was gone and the only thing left was a narrow concrete sidewalk that had led once upon a time to the front porch. We’d sit and look at that sidewalk and I tell you I could see it in her eyes–the many memories of what had been there, the sadness that so much had gone away or had been taken away, and the realization that in the end nothing stays. I would see tears in her eyes, so many they rolled down her cheeks. For her, that old, abandoned farm was a holy place. As Jacob said the morning after the angel visited him in his sleep at Bethel, “Surely the Lord is in this place.” We’re told that Jacob then placed a stone there as sign that it was the door to heaven. I’d like to think that my aunt looked at that cracked sidewalk and thought the same thing.

— Jeremy Myers