Winder, GA

While house-sitting in the foggy mountains in January, I decided to drive into the city my mom grew up in, the city of Dacula, Ga. I wanted to visit my mom’s sister. For 13 years we lived an hour from them, yet managed to see my mom’s side of the family less often than my dad’s family 600 miles closer to Canada.

    Forty-five minutes after asking my aunt, Doreen if I could stop by, I pulled the car into a gravel driveway, unsure if I had found the right one, until I saw the cracked and crusted hole that was once a pond. It was one of my Uncle Glen’s ideas nearly a decade ago. After digging a hole the size of a minivan with a backhoe, he filled it with water and fish. The fishing hole didn’t last long before all the fish died or ate each other and the water evaporated away into the heat  of the humid South.
With a new confidence in having chosen the correct driveway, knowing no one else would have the same swimming hole in their front yard, I drove on and up to the house and parked behind my cousin’s old, green Camry. It used to belong to my sister before my mom gave it to our younger cousin, Dakota, to give him a way to escape from his turbulent home life as often as he needed to. His mom, my Aunt Raye, lives with her lazy boyfriend and without electricity or water most of the time.

I remember that when the radio in the Camry stopped working, my sister drilled two screws into the dashboard and hung a white, Sony radio from them. And when my other sister side swiped a car in our driveway, she Duck-Taped the Camry's side mirror back on and hoped that no one would notice. It took three people to put up the passenger window if anyone ever accidentally hit the button to roll it down.

    Dakota and my Aunt Doreen sat on two bar stools on her narrow front porch that stretched across the middle of the blue, one level house. They were waving as I drove up the driveway.
    An old bathtub leaned against the front of the house, propped up and waiting for use, or waiting to be forgotten. Across the dusty front yard, on the other side of the house, a fenced-in area housed big cages full of gamecocks. It was the most recent project of my uncle’s and had, so far, been a bigger success than the pond.

Other animals also roamed around within the boundaries of the fence. My aunt bought a calf a couple years earlier and two goats. They walked around the yard like a clique of middle school kids, acting as if they were too cool to be friends with anyone else. The goats followed the brown cow around like they wanted to hear everything he had to say while copying everything he did. My aunt loved that cow. She also couldn't wait to eat him.

“Look at you!” my aunt called to me as we met in the driveway. “Aren’t you dressed so California right now,” she said when she gave me a tight hug. Then she took a sip from the beer bottle wrapped in a Koozie she held in her hand. It was the beginning of January and 70 degrees outside, but Doreen still wore a sweatshirt. Living in San Francisco, I missed the Georgia heat and I missed believing any temperature at or below 70 was chilly enough for more than one layer of clothing.

My aunt was in her forties and she had always been a beautiful woman. Every time I saw her, she would be older. Yet, every time I saw her, she’s would be more beautiful. Her hair was dirty blond and straight and her eyes were bright blue. She looked healthier then I remembered her looking when I was a kid.

When we walked back to the porch, I hugged Dakota and asked him how the Camry was treating him. He excitedly told me how great it had been having the car, while he pressed his palms into his knees and shook his head with a smile. He still called it Beethoven, like my sister had. 
Doreen ran in the front door to get me a chair and when she came back, the three of us sat looking out over her front yard and talking like we were close family. It felt right and natural, considering I’ve never known them well and the last time I saw them was six months earlier and before that, it had been years.

I asked Dakota about school and his family. He was 18 and graduating soon and I hoped for him always that he’d get out of that town and go to college. He had always been intelligent and Duke University showed interested in him when he was only in middle school. In a family of loud, angry, unhappy people, Dakota was always the sweet and quiet one. I felt the need to help him- to help him get out and escape the fate of being trapped in a town and a life with no opportunities and constant struggles that no one was in a hurry to put an end to.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a piece of PVC pipe tied to a rope and hanging from the tree twenty feet beyond the porch railing. It had the shape an upside down “T” and it hung seven feet above the ground.

“Oh that? That’s my fun noodle,” my aunt chuckled as she answered. Dakota and I erupted into laughter as she continued explaining, 

“Yeah, I put it up there. I sit on the porch and think about all the cool tricks and things I could do on it while I drink beer.”

          Uncle Glen and my 16-year-old cousin, David came out from the house to join us. I was happy to see them both, even though we were almost strangers. Glen and Doreen have been divorced from each other at least three times over the last couple of decades. I remember being young and hearing my mom talk about the drama of their relationship. By my visit with them in January, they were happily married to each other- again, and had grown up a lot.
           They were a good reminder that we are constantly maturing and learning; we won’t have it all figured out by the time we’re 30. We probably won’t ever have it all figured out.
           Uncle Glen proudly talked about his gamecocks as he shoved a wad of black tobacco in between his bottom lip and teeth before jokingly offering me some. He had the birds separated into different cages depending on their personalities. 
           He had the same sense of humor as my aunt and I was always entertained by their stories. I’ve never met better story tellers than Uncle Glen and Aunt Doreen.
           He told us about a bird he recently bought. When he put her in one of the cages, the other birds attacked her.  “They wanted her to know her place,” he says. 

“but she wasn’t having it. She beat them all up. And then when she was done, she chased them all down and kept kicking their asses.”

           My aunt compared this to when she was in jail and the women tried to intimidate her. When she wasn’t fazed by their threats, they backed off and moved along to pick on the woman who was freaking out in the corner. Doreen had been in and out of jail for a year because of a psycho ex-girlfriend her son had. The girl would call the cops at 2a.m. and say Doreen had driven by waving a gun at her. Twenty minutes later the cops would knock on Doreen's door to wake her up to arrest her. All it takes in a small town is one person to cry, "witch!" and the cops have the stake up and are ready to set it on fire. There was no hope for anyone: the accuser, the innocent, the guilty and the justice system that looks an awful lot like guilty until proven innocent.
           I admired my aunt. She had been through a lot and she’d handled it all as a strong woman. Nothing anyone did to her had made her any weaker or taken anything from her, it had all only made her stronger, made her wiser. Doreen is the gamecock you don’t corner.

After telling stories about the crack-addict woman next door who would run over to bother her all of the time, my aunt asked me to drive her to the store to get more beer and food for dinner. While I drove, I asked about Chris and how was doing. Chris was two years older than me and Doreen’s oldest boy. He had a baby with a sweet girl named Amber who we all liked, who wasn't psycho. As a kid, Chris had humor like his parents and he would always make us laugh. I remember my mom describing him once as a boy who would never hurt a fly.

“Chris is in prison. Did your mom not tell you?” she said as if she were telling me he was in Atlanta or at work.

Dakota, sitting opposite me in the passenger seat laughed as I poured out questions of confusion and shock. “Why?! For how long? Since when? What did he do?! WHAT?”

She told me about how he started drinking heavily and beat Amber one night after too much alcohol.

“He’s doing really well though, Michelle. He knows he messed up and he’s been working out and reading his bible. He’s taking care of himself in there.” Then, as if she is reading my mind, she says, “Amber told me not to worry. She’s not going to ever take little man out of our lives.” She was talking about her grandson, Chris’s boy, Derek Michael.

We ate well that night. Glen made Rib-eye steaks and seasoned them with a sauce I can't find anywhere other than the South. 
Getting fed at home always reminded me how badly I ate when I was on my own. I smiled as I thought about being home, recognizing that felt at home at all in that place, with those people. With my mom’s crazy side of the family. They are my family too, and I’m thankful that they always will be.

While we ate, I asked David how school was going and he told me he was being home schooled. Doreen laughed, explaining that means he dropped out. He was having trouble in school and with the teachers so they pulled him from school.
At the end of the night, they tried to get me to stay, but I had to drive back up to the mountains and They watched me from the porch, laughing as I backed out of the driveway, navigating around rusted campers and dodging dogs. I wanted to stay longer, I wanted to stay long enough to catch up on all the time I missed out on spending with them during the last 15 years. But there will be plenty of time for that in the next 15. I’m looking forward to it.