Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

I finished reading Ecology of a Cracker Childhood a couple of weeks ago, but it is one of those reads that really sticks with you, that you keep referencing in your daily life, that seeps into your thoughts and makes you see things in a different light than you would have before reading it. It really took me that long to digest it. I knew immediately, even while reading it, that it was one of the best books I have ever read. But it becomes even more so when it sticks with you for weeks after reading it.

I can't say that this would universally be a book that people would find as amazing as I did. I told Todd that I felt like it was right up my alley. Almost as if it had been written just for me. Or at least for other readers who have an interest in the history and ecology of southeastern Georgia, or the environment at large, or plants and animals, or in families that in print seem completely dysfunctional, but in real life seem like, well, my family. And that truly are like my family in that the area this author writes about is where much of my family has lived for over 200 years.

This book put into words so many things that I think and yearn for daily. The beauty of the southern (and more specifically in this book, the longleaf) pine tree. I can't drive past any of the new McMansion developments without thinking about how the developers simply cleared the property of every pine tree, leaving only the hardwoods as sentinels to look over what remains. I think that people who have not grown up here do not appreciate the beauty of the pine tree; they find it sparse and ugly.

I know what it is to be innocent and fearless, to climb those trees and have the brown bark skin my knees and ankles. I know the sound my sneakers make as they slide down the trunk. I know what it feels like to feel a pine cone whip past me, skimming face, or arm, in a pine cone war. I remember the smell of the pine needles when they are green, and still in a tassel like a broom, and I know the stickiness of the pine sap. To me, it is the landscape of my childhood play, and the landscape of my heart. I yearn to be carefree, without the boundaries of time and schedule and responsibility, and to sit in the pines, and just . . . touch them.

Janisse Ray, the author, describes the very longing to be more at one with the world around her that I feel every day. There is a sense of nature-starved longing that I feel whenever I get out of the city, driving through the more rural areas of the Southeast, or at the Lake, or hiking or camping, or lying on the beach with my feet in the sand. Like her, I almost feel that i have been robbed of some sort of southern inheritance, something that was yanked out of my life prematurely and unnaturally by computer companies, and transfers, and suburban developments, and strip malls, and clear-cutting. I am not oblivious to the irony that without having been removed to the city, I would never have read this book, or been to college, or have the worldview that i have, the one that allows me to know what I have lost.

This is a book about Place, and how it figures in the shaping of us as Southerners. It speaks with a resigned sense of loss about family history and inheritance, about the story of who our people were, about where they came from, and where they settled, about the people and the landscape and how the two came together to make us who we are today: The modern day Southerner, a cousin once or twice removed from those whose feet were so deeply entrenched in their place.

I am a part of these people - A girl longing to belong to something that is part of her, but which is lost to her forever.