All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  There were so many people missing in my life. Mom’s decision to run to California triggered an estrangement with Nana that would last a full seven years, when they finally buried the hatchet. We rarely saw her, even when Sister and I visited Kentucky, and almost never heard from her. I missed her, I loved her, and I loved her home. When we were living in Forest Knolls, Sister and I received a small box from her, full of mismatched pieces of costume jewelry that had been leftover inventory at Pollock’s, the jewelry store in Ashland where Nana now worked. I sat on the floor in the closet, holding one earring that said “Aquarius” and another that said “Sagittarius,” marveling, “She knows I am alive, she sent me mail, what is she trying to tell me?” Maybe, just maybe, she was letting me know she loved me, too.

  We stayed in Marin County for two years, and I honestly don’t have any memories of my dad from that time. I don’t recall receiving a birthday gift from him or sending him a card on his birthday; I wasn’t even confident of the date. I did not have a photograph of him. There were no calls, no Christmas presents (Dad later claimed that he had sent us presents and checks—that Mom had signed and cashed—but we certainly never saw any of them). I only recall snippets of secretive sharing with other kids whose parents were divorced, whispering, “My mom and dad hate each other.” Otherwise, I guess I made myself stop thinking about him because it was too painful. Other than as a figure my mother loathed, he disappeared from my life.

  Meanwhile, Mom and Sister were starting to be serious about becoming a musical duo—or at least Mom was. My sister just loved to play; with a guitar in her hands, her sense of peace was palpable. The broken and ever-changing home and troubled relationships around her faded, enabling a talented, funny, endearing young teen to emerge. It was when she could shine, be fully herself, perhaps with a rose placed behind her ear or a garland of flowers on her head, without all the other crap going on around her to distort things. But Mom had bigger dreams, and she required my sister’s cooperation. Mom began accusing my sister of being lazy, and she was always after her to practice. She gave her lists of things to work on, lyrics to learn, chords to master by their next at-home rehearsal.

  Whenever they were practicing together in the bedroom, I was sternly instructed never to interrupt on pain of severe grounding, no matter what the reason. It was a pattern that would continue as they built their musical careers. Sometimes I needed help with something, maybe homework, or had a question that felt important. Sometimes my ride was waiting, some kid whose family has agreed to take me for the weekend or the week, and I needed $5, because I was so ashamed of not bringing money when I went over to a friend’s house. Instead of knocking, I would stand at the doorway, listening to their ethereal harmonies with my arms limp by my sides, unsure what to do.

  My mother and sister’s increasing enmeshment only reinforced the feeling that I was a stranger in my own family. I remember so clearly sitting on a plane with Sister, bound for a summer with my grandparents in Kentucky. Sister was weeping, forlorn, looking out the window at Mom, who was waving goodbye from the tarmac below.

  “Yeah, I’ll miss her, too,” I said.

  Without taking her eyes off Mom, she snapped, “You have no idea what it’s like for Mom and me.”

  I thought to myself: Apparently not. And I don’t want to know. I am going to stay one hundred percent out of that deal.

  I spent every summer of my otherwise chaotic childhood with our grandparents in Ashland, and I believe they are the reason I am alive today.

  Sister and I visited together until she was about ten, when Mamaw decided it was too much to handle both of us at once; after that we would switch between the Judds and the Ciminellas. But the summers we spent together when we were little are my most precious memories with my big sister.

  Mamaw and Papaw’s house at 1515 Morningside Drive is an address I still equate with peace and stability. It was the safest, most fun place in all the world. After living all year with a sense of dislocation, a haunting tentativeness and uncertainty, often unsure where my mother and my sister were, always scrounging for a meal, I found the gentle routine at the Ciminella house intensely comforting. In the mornings Mamaw fixed us buttered toast with raspberry jam, cut into squares, and cranberry juice served in elegant little glasses with stems. Papaw was already at work, out early to beat the heat, and I loved to look at his newspaper and see his print on the crossword puzzle, which he left for Mamaw to finish. I considered it my job to read the comics and Dear Abby and ask Mamaw about any interesting dreams she may have had.

  After breakfast, I would play outside and maybe sweep the walk while Mamaw dressed for the day. She always looked simple and utterly beautiful. After errands or shopping for school clothes, we’d often have lunch at the Chimney Corner downtown or at the country club. Papaw would pop out of the men’s grill (there was a lot of card playing going on!) to greet us with big hugs and kisses. After the interminable fifteen minutes to allow lunch to safely digest, we would be carefree and in the pool—it was total and complete heaven. I would do daring dives off the high board, and Papaw would wave to me from the golf course as I sought to impress him. We could even order treats at the poolside snack hut and simply sign our grandparents’ club membership for payment! Afterward, Sister and I would shower and compare the sizes of our mosquito bites and the deepness of our tans: Sister was a golden brown; I was the color of Papaw’s morning coffee.

  Mamaw served supper at home every night at five fifteen sharp—fresh summer food, much of it grown in the back garden, served by candlelight, on good china with a beautifully set table. Papaw washed up, and everyone looked and smelled so fresh and clean. Having played hard all day, and feeling so wonderfully safe, I was usually famished; my appetite was enormous for my size, and I was always given my fill, serving after serving, to admiring statements about the hollow leg I was surely trying to fill. Supper was followed by the greatest dessert in the world: chocolate pudding, which I still love; and I’d snack before bed, too, just as I do today, often using Mamaw’s china and having what we would share in the small booth in their wonderful kitchen. After we were allowed to snuff out the candles, the magic hour began. We’d play in the yard with sparklers or bat pitches Papaw tossed. Or sometimes Sister and I did elaborate dances wrapped in floral towels we imagined were exotic fabrics from faraway lands, performing in the sunken living room to a rapt, captive audience of two. Often when there was a Cincinnati Reds game on television, I’d lie in bed with Papaw, watching it on a black-and-white TV with the sound turned down so we could listen to the radio broadcast, while also perusing yesterday’s box score in the evening paper. At bedtime we would be slyly told to “skin a rat,” and our adoring grandmother would devotedly bathe, dry, powder, swaddle, comb, and pamper us.

  Best of all was when Mamaw and I would gather up all the soft pillows from the bedrooms and make a nest on her bed. She would cut off the air-conditioning and open all the windows—mountain all the way, she despised air-conditioning, as do I today. Cuddling on her bed, we would play cards, giggle, sing ditties, or just listen to the katydids chirping in the Kentucky twilight. That downy, soft bed was the high altar of my childhood.

  Until Nana and Papaw Judd divorced when I was eight, they lived together in the beautiful, classic American house that was filled with generations of smells, love, and comfort. It was roomy and broad, with a front porch complete with a swing I loved, beveled glass windows, a fascinating attic, an alluring basement, and secret places for imaginative children to play. The drawers were still filled with report cards, marbles, toys, and drawings belonging to Mom and her siblings, their books on the shelves. The yard was enthralling, and I often spent hours under the low-hanging limbs of soft evergreens, making a world under there. There was an air of sadness in the house as well, because of the lingering memory of Uncle Brian and the terrible wound his death left in the family, a wound that Nana and Papaw Judd’s marriage ultimately did not survive. Nevertheless, I have wonderful memories of th
at house, which I regard practically as a member of the family.

  The most fun was when Papaw Judd took us way out to the country to visit his family’s home place or to spend time with his sister, Pauline. I worshipped Great-Aunt Pauline, who was a sophisticated, educated woman with a sensitive nature who chose, for love, to live an old-fashioned lifestyle on a poor farm in rural Kentucky. She and Great-Uncle Landon lived in what was to me a gorgeous mountain farmhouse filled with practical furniture that today would be rustic collectibles and decorated with delightful old flowered wallpaper. By the 1970s they had some electricity and one big black telephone in the kitchen, but they still used an outhouse and drew water from a well that had to be boiled on an iron wood-burning stove for cooking and bathing. (It is this home that the press has often conflated with my other homes, writing that I grew up dirt poor without electricity and plumbing.) Great-Aunt Pauline always had at least a dozen dogs on the property, all named after Democrats. She was an amazing cook; everything was raised on the farm or traded for. I remember the oilcloth tablecloth on her kitchen table and the incredible dinners (that’s the noon meal) she would put out. If I could magically have any meal in the world, it would be her fried chicken dinner, buttermilk biscuits, and homemade blackberry jam. She worked from sunup until sundown, completely present in the life she chose. I spent my afternoons on her screened-in porch, just watching, and content by proxy, seeing how much Papaw Judd clearly loved being there, using his pocketknife to cut fresh cucumbers into slices he would salt and share with me.

  These are my most precious memories, and I have dreams about them to this day. All children deserve to be cherished in this way. I was lucky to have this reserve of memories to cling to during the rest of the year, of a place where there was no neglect, no fighting, no drug and alcohol abuse to witness, no worries about being anything but a child, where it was okay to be vulnerable and have little-girl needs. Those recollections sustained me and probably saved my life when I was in so much despair that, even as a young child, the only way I could think to make the ache in my heart lessen was to die. They are also why I understand profoundly that every child needs a safe person and a haven. I continue to draw on the unconditional love I was given during those times, both as an essential resource for myself and as a source of love that I am able, when I am at my best, to give away in incredible abundance.

  Chapter 3

  BUTTERMILK AND MORNING GLORIES

  Our wedding day at Skibo Castle in the Scottish Highlands.

  I never spoke with God,

  Nor visited in heaven;

  Yet certain am I of the spot

  As if the chart were given.

  —EMILY DICKINSON, “Time and Eternity, XVII”

  he two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where my husband and I live in rural Williamson County, Tennessee, pays homage to the spirit of safety and graceful domesticity that I remember from the beloved sanctuaries of my childhood. The countryside where we live is impossibly lovely, with green rolling hills, open pastures, creek-cut hollows, artesian springs, and beguiling examples of American farm and cottage architecture set along the winding roads. It’s real, not kitschy and packaged, with old farming families and hillbillies living alongside music-business money, poverty mixed with comfort.

  When I began to dream of making myself a home I could live in for the rest of my life, a home that would shelter me longer than anywhere I had ever lived before, this was the place the fates seemed to choose for me. In 1993, after the house I was renting in Malibu was destroyed in a wildfire, leaving me stranded, my sister gave me a fabulous fixer-upper of a farmhouse on a piece of her land. I was grateful for her kindness and thought nothing of forgoing Los Angeles to settle into the rural, bucolic life I so dearly love. The property was the original homestead of the Meacham family, who once owned the large farm from which my mother and my sister bought acreage whenever they could afford it. My sister and her kids live within walking distance of my back door, while our mother and her husband of twenty-five years, Larry Strickland, whom we call Pop, live down the road. My father now comes for long visits with his creative, lovely wife, Mollie Whitelaw. Even though I’d spent so much time apart from my family when I was growing up—the chaotic, painful separations of my childhood continued long after the Judds settled in Nashville and became stars—we’re still in one another’s lives, for better or worse. Mostly better. Along the way, these bountiful Tennessee hills have seeped into my soul and given me a home where my heart can finally be safe and find some rest.

  It took years to restore the old Meacham place to its former beauty. I pulled from deep memories of comfort, associations of unconditional love, rural living, and elegance. To begin, I jotted down simple notes that became my guiding document, things like “Great-Aunt Pauline and Great-Uncle Landon’s farm; the old home place on South Shore; Nana’s small print floral sheets; quilts; soft, faded velvet, old-fashioned flowery wallpaper; chenille blankets; Mamaw and Papaw’s dining room table; beautiful trims; crafts from Berea.” I had my work cut out for me. The house had only one small bathroom, put in during the 1960s by a local vocational school’s student project. I uncovered and restored five fireplaces and other old-fashioned features that made it so wonderfully period. I salvaged beaded board, leaving splotchy layers of beautiful old hand-painted wallpaper exposed. The onetime smokehouse was converted into a ridiculously charming guesthouse.

  My other guiding principle was to make the house completely open to the outdoors. Windows were enlarged, skylights installed. I added floor-to-ceiling glass to the screened sleeping porch, the most lived-in room in the house, from which we look out on wooded hills folding into pastures of native grasses (which I constantly battle my sister’s farm manager to keep from mowing!).

  All of my life I’ve drawn solace and inspiration both from wild spaces and lovingly tended gardens. Fern-shaded creeks, fields of Queen Anne’s lace, hills covered with bluegrass, dogwoods, and redbuds—a childhood landscape that imprinted on me as a pastoral ideal and stirs in me the most bittersweet longing.

  In restoring the land around my farmhouse, I wanted to re-create my own memories while honoring the history of the place. I replanted the gardens with what I knew various Meachams across the generations had grown, which meant native species that flourish. Morning glories and moon vine cover my porches. Old varieties of hollyhock lean against columns, fences, and gates. Salvia, hostas, zinnias, and pretty much everything else you could think of grow somewhere in my garden, offering riots of color. I went rose mad in London filming De-Lovely and have dozens of bushes to prove it. I planted over thirty thousand daffodils—my ongoing gift for two-year-old me, my child’s eyes filled with shy wonder in a faded photograph, admiring a daffodil in Nana and Papaw Judd’s garden forty years ago.

  I named my home Chanticleer after the lovely hilltop home in Berea where I had lived during second grade. In spite of the many painful memories associated with it, it was where, out of sheer necessity and a will to survive, my imagination took flight.

  When my husband, Dario Franchitti, and I married in Scotland in 2001, I re-created wooded scenes inspired by Chanticleer as the theme of our wedding: Moss, rock, branches dripping with lichen, daffodils, and other fragrant bulbs were our decorations. We met on a blind date in 1999, having been set up at the wedding of mutual friends. We count that date, May 17, as our anniversary. Buttermilk, my beloved hound, was with me that night, so my future husband landed both his wife and his dog in one fell swoop. I had no idea what he did. He had no idea what I did. But we sure knew we were wild about each other right away. I loved the little boy that I glimpsed in Dario, and his wholesome values, especially his kindness and fairness. I knew my soul would be safe with him. My husband is a race car driver, and of his many accomplishments, perhaps most notable is winning the Indianapolis 500 twice, and the IndyCar championships in 2007, 2009, and 2010. But in spite of our clearly public professions, we have enjoyed, by exceedingly careful intention, a discreet life togethe
r. We support each other at public appearances, such as races and red carpet events, but we do our best to keep our private lives separate. Our marriage is sacred.

  Some of Dario’s grandparents emigrated from Italy to Scotland, while other ancestors trace very old Scottish lines. He loves the Italian part of his heritage and is a Scot through and through. He muses that the passion of the Italians and the canniness of the Scots have yielded his particular character as a race car driver. We live in an eighteenth-century house in Scotland part of the year, where I especially love our time spent in the Highlands. When he’s on this side of the pond, Dario’s home is at Chanticleer. Every special occasion, he gives me trees for the farm (an especially cleverly done wedding anniversary was our seventh, for which the metal is copper, so he gave me seven copper beech trees). Our best moments are spent outdoors, walking the hills with our dogs, lying in the grass, and watching dozens of species of birds, especially the herons and hawks. Our life together here is as nourishing and restorative as any I could imagine. It is a balm.

  On summer evenings Dario and I will often sit on the back stone steps, still warm from the sun, spooning ice cream, listening to the crickets, cicadas, and frogs as they tune up for their entertaining nightly symphony. The fireflies come out, proving there is a gracious God who has made a magical, beautiful world. The cats join us, either scanning the gardens, hillsides, and valley for interesting attractions or weaving about us, wanting to be brushed. Our cockapoos, Buttermilk and Shug, engage in their nightly ritual, which we call “harassing the defenseless nocturnal creatures,” and we futilely attempt to restrain them from bounding up the hills and running the valleys. We leave food out for the feral cats we have named (having briefly trapped them to spay/neuter/inoculate and return), and I pretend I am their mama, even though they claim me only for their daily bowls of wet and dry. When one adopts us, we rejoice.