Terrae Cognito

This an old essay, one that Stephanie G'Schwind of "The Colorado Review" was kind enough to take after offering some much needed suggestions resulting in many, many revisions. It is in the CR 2004 Summer Issue XXXI. Check them out at http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/.



Terrae Cognito



Lately I’ve been digging up parts of my family. I’ve returned after an absence of many years to my father’s homeplace, a hundred acre farm/ranch in the southernmost section of Collin County, Texas where my grandparents lived until they died. As many of the generation who came to adulthood in the fifties, my dad—realizing there was no was no future for him there—lit out for the city as soon as he could.

The house itself was not remarkable in any architectural sense, as are some of the stone houses found in the hill country and other parts of the state settled by immigrants from the northern European countries. Aesthetically it was—and remains—little more than a two-story box, cobbled together to provide shelter from the elements, and little else. But filtered through a lifetime of memories, some mine, some provided by my ancestors, it was the axis upon which my paternal family revolved. Each Sunday we would all convene there for lunch, and my grandmother—Minnie—would try to make herself heard over the din of clattering utensils to apologize for again serving the same meal: fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, lakes of cream gravy, okra fried in cornmeal batter, homemade biscuits, corn on the cob, green beans, all washed down with sweet tea and followed by meringue pie. Unless she let us eat cake. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the tea, flour and spices, everything we ate there was produced on the farm. Thus, when in elementary school one of my teachers accused me and some accomplices of behaving in the old cliché—specifically running around like a bunch of chickens sans heads—I knew, perhaps better than she, exactly what she meant.

To the casual observer, the only thing remarkable about the house is its position relative to the road that runs into town. Unlike many of the other houses in the area—most of which are now gone—my grandparent’s house was on a dirt lane almost two miles from the main road, a fact that during rainy winters frequently necessitated prolonged periods of isolation. I’ve often heard my grandparents and others claim that the farm is on the highest point of Collin county. I don’t know if this is true or not, but standing in the yard one has an almost panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, so I guess it’s true enough to make for another curiosity: unlike most of the other houses I’ve seen in the area, theirs had no storm cellar. Perhaps after spending weeks mud-bound at the end of that long bog of a driveway, being sucked up by a tornado headed for oblivion seemed a prospect not entirely dismal.

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, life at my parent’s home was like it was for many other middle class kids growing up in a city in the late sixties and early seventies; staid, placid and predictable. We ate supper at seven and watched the Vietnam War on the news. My friends in the neighborhood