by Ward, Sela
Just as soon as we’d gotten started, of course, our wish list got away from us. We wanted a master bedroom; we wanted a suite for Mama and Daddy; we wanted a suite for Jenna to use when she came home. We wanted sleeping porches for kids, once we had them. We wanted a gym, a study that could double as a screening room, and a great room for entertaining. But when an architect friend drew up some plans that accommodated all our wishes, we saw with astonishment that our little starter home had mushroomed to ten thousand square feet—hardly the cozy cottage of our dreams. So we shelved those plans for the time being, and decided to start small.
The design Howard and I finally settled on could hardly have been more simple. Our little shingled cottage is essentially a one-room structure, modeled after the San Ysidro Ranch cottage where we spent our honeymoon night. It’s dominated by our brick hearth, with a little bathroom off the back, and a nook-size children’s bedroom as well. The kitchen wraps around behind the hearth. We gave it a big screen porch, deep enough to host dinner parties on; fronted it with a creaky screen door; bookended it with porch swings; and filled it with rocking chairs looking out over the pond. And we garlanded the front with a lush, flowering English garden full of azaleas, gardenias, and roses. We Southerners have always had a soft spot for all things English. At the time I was reading a romantic novel (by Rosamunde Pilcher, I think), in which the author described an English countryside manor where each bedroom was named after a different flower. I was so taken by the romance of the idea that I decided our getaway place would be called the Rose Cottage.
For the interior I cobbled together a look that was floral and feminine. I spent weekends in New Orleans buying art objects, antique furniture, and other Victoriana from auction galleries. I kept my eye out for special pieces that were historically faithful to the antebellum South. And I had some lucky finds: four-poster canopy beds and music stands to use as end tables, nineteenth-century botanical prints (roses, of course) to line the walls, and rose-shaped iron finials to crown the posts at the base of the cottage stoop. A pair of highly polished men’s riding boots I fell in love with sit beside a venerable-looking writing desk, with an antique chair I found in L.A. (The dealer swore he’d bought it from Elliott Gould, and that it had belonged to him and Barbra Streisand; I guess I just needed a little taste of Hollywood, even here.)
And as we finished off the inside of the cottage, we also added a few homey amenities to the grounds: hammocks and Adirondack chairs scattered about near the house, birdhouses in the trees, and a fishing pier on the pond. We even built a little island in the pond for the waterfowl, covered it with azalea bushes and a gazebo, and joined it to the bank with a white wooden arched bridge. Every evening we spent down there in those early days, we repaired to the porch to gaze out at our slice of heaven: weeping willows frame the view of the pond, and lazy ducks, swans, and geese glide on the pond till darkness falls.
Two years after we finished the Rose Cottage, we completed
a second cabin nearby. Less ornamented, more rustic, this two-bedroom cottage was dubbed the Cotton Patch, after a charming country restaurant outside Tuscaloosa I’d loved during my college years. We planted a real cotton patch out front by the gravel road, and now my children love picking it and taking it back to school in Los Angeles for show-and-tell.
I still look forward to building a big house here one day; as a hopeless romantic, I think of it as my Tara. But for now we’re deliriously happy in this pair of pocket-size dwellings. The Rose Cottage and the Cotton Patch: together they’re a home away from home, a sanctuary, a nurturing space where I can be still and at rest and one with the land. It took a lot of patience and introspection to pull together the elements of this physical environment, and I took no end of pleasure in the process. But it takes more than just interior decoration to make a sacred space like this. The magic I feel when we arrive at the cottages after a long stretch in the city, I think, has less to do with what Howard and I have built here physically than with what we want to build here spiritually. It takes in so many deeper wishes of mine: to carve out a safe and sane place to raise my family. To immerse us all in surroundings that are quieter, gentler, more natural and unhurried. To maintain a connection with the people I love, and the land of my raising. And above all to have a place, as Ellis Peters wrote, “where I put my feet up and thank God.”
It was in 1993, while we were building the Rose Cottage, that Howard and I decided we should try to have a baby. It was the most frightening decision I had ever made, because it was so fraught with responsibility, and so irrevocable. How did I know I would be a good mother? I didn’t; nobody does. I was terrified about how our life together would change. Remember, I was thirty-five when I got married, and I’d been used to living carefree, able to stay as late as I wanted at dinner or take off on a last-minute vacation if the yen struck. Once you have kids, all that freedom evaporates in a flurry of diapers and tiny shoes.
But any concerns about my freedom paled in the face of that much stronger, more visceral urge—to start a family. I thank God I had the courage to make that decision, for if I hadn’t I would have missed out on the most incredible journey of my life. There’s an enigmatic Tamil saying that speaks to my feelings: “Children tie their mother’s feet down.” The ambiguity is the key: though its message can seem like a curse (My children hold me back; I’ll never fly again), for me the truer meaning is that children anchor you more firmly to the earth. For this mother, who spent so many years floating wherever the winds of whim would take her, children have been nothing but a blessing.
Childbearing opened my heart in a way I had never imagined. During Austin’s birth I don’t remember sobbing the way I expected to; I just remember being stunned and mesmerized by the miracle of the experience. In the days thereafter, everyday life took on the vividness of Technicolor. I began having intense emotional reactions to everything; even sappy television commercials seemed so moving I couldn’t keep from crying. It was as though a light had just been turned on in my life.
Aside from the gaga moments, there were some pretty absurd times, too. Howard and I had both reached early middle age without ever changing a diaper. As we strapped Austin’s car seat into the back of the car at the hospital, we looked at each other and said, “Can you believe they’re letting us take this kid home?!”
To be honest, though, amid the flood of love I felt for Austin, in those first days of his life I also felt overwhelmed by another emotion: fear. Of course I had the natural instincts—to nurture him, protect him, give everything I had to this new creature. But there was a deep-seated part of me that wondered at first whether I was really fully equipped to handle the job. Every time I turned around, it seemed, there was some new challenge: What did that cry mean? Will he stop breathing? What about crib death? Will he ever learn to walk and talk? But I had eight glorious weeks to spend with Austin, uninterrupted, before I had to be back to work, and in that time I seemed to find my footing.
Three years later I was pregnant again, and not for a single moment did I doubt that this time I was going to have a girl. Something told me I was supposed to experience the mother-daughter relationship. Finally my own diagnosis was confirmed: “Well, we’ve got the tests back,” the doctor called to say, “and you should start buying pink.” I screamed! I was so happy. We named her Anabella Raye, after my cigar-smoking, fudge-making grandmother.
So from the beginning, then, my two children and my rekindled love for my small-town home have grown together. Austin’s first trip to Meridian came just weeks after he was born, and four years later Anabella followed as soon as she was old enough to travel by plane. My emotional compass has shifted southeast as they’ve grown, and I’m doing everything I can to help them find in Meridian the same home comforts their mother does.
In some ways it hasn’t really felt like a major lifestyle upheaval. Despite my eagerness to leave home at eighteen, I’d never missed a Christmas in Meridian, or a chance to meet the family for a vacation on the Gulf.
Of course, I’d done a lot of traveling in my twenties, when I had the chance—who wouldn’t? But no place else is home, and every time I returned the sight of these humble hills and red-clay hollows became dearer to me than I could possibly express.
It wasn’t only the look of the land that drew me back, of course; it was Mama and Daddy. It was my brother Berry, who stayed in Meridian to start his own family when the rest of us kids left. What had always restored me on my trips back home was the time I spent together with them. It was good, honest time: stopping by Weidmann’s for an early breakfast with Daddy; long, slow Saturday afternoons spent talking with Mama. Once Howard and I started our family, I guess my heart just reached right out to those memories. I was eager to share them with Austin and Anabella. And, I have to admit, I was anxious about the notion that if I didn’t take care, my children might never get to know this part of me—and of themselves.
My anxiety sprang, in large part, from the misgivings I’d started having about life in the city, where my children would, of necessity, spend most of their young lives.
From the start, Howard understood my concerns—despite, or perhaps because of, what he remembered from his own childhood. Howard was raised in a small Los Angeles suburb, in what sounds in some ways like an idyllic little neighborhood: lots of other kids around, basketball hoops in the yard, the works. But when he looks back on his childhood, he doesn’t feel that same warm flush of memories come over him. “Growing up here in L.A.,” he says, “you don’t feel like you have a home, or are part of anything.”
One reason may be the schedule he kept. Howard was a precocious little kid, and his parents kept him on a pretty fast treadmill; he was into sports in a big way, along with piano, painting, guitar, and Hebrew school, all while racking up a series of grades that, after third grade, never dipped lower than an A. I don’t know how he did it—I would have felt as if I were in training for an ulcer. But with the culture of play dates and after-school classes now fully entrenched around the country, of course I know that my kids’ lives won’t be too different.
My Uncle Joe marvels at this kind of social-calendar childhood. “These kids have their mamas taking ’em here, taking them there. Back when I was a kid, if we wanted to get somewhere, we had to walk there ourselves—or we had a bicycle or something, you know. Yeah, if I’d had to depend on a car I’d have been up a creek.”
Talking with Uncle Joe, you get a real picture of how small-town childhood used to be. “We lived right across the street from the fairgrounds,” he remembers, “and there was a playground down there. You know, we didn’t have organized sports in school. But we couldn’t get out of the house early enough in the morning to get our own game going. Kept it going all day long. I mean, we weren’t staying in the house and watching TV—we didn’t even have TV. We were out there playing ball all day, or playing hockey in the streets, you know, on roller skates. We didn’t even want to go in and eat lunch—Mama had to call us in. You entertained yourself. You didn’t have anybody organizing you. You did it yourself.”
Recently I came across a book called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and so much of what it had to say rang true to me as I thought about the lives children lead in a city like Los Angeles. Before I read it, I often wondered: Am I just succumbing to false nostalgia? But the author, a sociologist named Robert D. Putnam, confirmed my impression—that our communities were more . . . well, communal before and during the years of my childhood than they would become soon thereafter.
“For the first two-thirds of the 20th century,” Putnam writes, “a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed, and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and our communities over the last third of the century.”
Americans in our parents’ and grandparents’ day, it seems, were different from us in at least one key respect: They weren’t embarrassed to belong to something. They belonged to clubs, to teams, to civic groups: to the Kiwanis, the Rotary, the Elks; to the Ladies’ Auxiliary or a church group or the local bowling league. Sometime around 1968, though—just before I became a teenager—Americans started looking elsewhere for entertainment, and I guess even for our sense of identity. We Baby Boomers were a youthful and headstrong bunch, and it seems as though many of us were more interested in our personal lives and pursuits than we were in spending our time with the older generations who populated the American Legion halls and bingo nights at church.
And it wasn’t just a matter of belonging to clubs. So many of us Boomers grew up in suburban developments, which sprang up like weeds out of any available topsoil in the years after World War II. More than half of all Americans live in the suburbs today, but they’re difficult places to become attached to, and they’re not exactly fertile ground for meaningful social relationships. As social critic James Howard Kunstler writes in his book The Geography of Nowhere, “A suburbanite could stand on her lawn for three hours on a weekday afternoon and never have the chance for a conversation.” With no ceremonial buildings nearby to lend a sense of history or community, and no mom-and-pop shops to become informal gathering spots for the neighborhood, they’re less likely to foster a sense of pride or loyalty than to breed disaffection.
In that respect, among so many others, I count myself lucky. The little Lakemont enclave of my childhood sprang up during the suburban boom, to be sure. Yet in its particulars—the shared interests with the neighbors, the access to nature, and the proximity of our extended family—I think it had more in common with that older way of life than the second- and third-generation suburbs so many of our children are growing up in today. Perhaps that’s one reason that my yearnings for home are so strong: the time I grew up was one of transition, when the old ways were still vivid, not yet fully transplanted by the new.
As Joe mentioned, childhood has changed in one other respect: Where our parents grew up playing on their parents’ porches after dinner, our children are growing up behind the picture window, watching television. A friend of mine was telling me not long ago how the coming of television changed the rural community where he grew up. His parents and their friends used to get together for barbecues and fish fries all the time, he recalls; their summer socializing often revolved around their kids’ sporting events, and fall and winter get-togethers were built around men bringing in game from the woods.
“When we kids grew up and left home, and the men slowed down on the hunting, that was pretty much it for the community,” my friend laments. “It’s so sad to see what’s happened. My folks and their friends almost never see each other anymore. Everybody’s at home watching satellite TV, which we didn’t have then. They got out of the habit of seeing each other, and finally they just lost interest.”
Los Angeles, of course, is a big city. But to me, in all these respects, it feels like the ultimate suburb. New York can be a pretty harrowing place to live, but at least it’s still a walking city—a collection of human-scale neighborhoods strung together by sidewalks and subways. Move into a new neighborhood, and before you know it you’ll recognize half the people you see on your walk to work in the morning. And, as anyone who grew up in Brooklyn can tell you, New York is still full of people who take pride in where they’re from.
In L.A., on the other hand, sometimes it seems like everyone’s a transplant. It’s an industry town, and that industry—show business—draws ambitious people in from all over the country. (By now, I’ll bet all of them were born and raised in the suburbs.) It’s a driving city; you don’t see much of anybody on the way to work—not through the tinted glass of their sports cars on the highway. And outside of a small (but noble) group of Hollywood-history buffs and L.A. boosters, there’s not much sense of community. You see big thinkers endlessly chewing over this problem in the pages of the city’s papers, but nobody seems to know what to do about it. M
ost residents’ sense of identity comes from how successful their careers are, not where they live, and the social networking they do is typically motivated by self-interest, not civic interest. And it’s not only happening in L.A.
That’s a recipe for alienation—and it’s a kind of alienation that is leaving too many of us, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, unfulfilled. “The single most common finding from a half-century’s research on the [causes of] life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world,” Robert Putnam writes, “is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s social connections.”
Los Angeles, in short, is a place of great material and creative wealth, and boundless personal freedom—but also of a certain spiritual and civic poverty. Though there are many wonderful people here, on the whole it’s an anxious, self-involved place, where roots and tradition are largely forgotten, where neighbors don’t know each other and don’t particularly want to. It’s not that L.A. people are bad, but that there’s something about the way life is structured in this sunny paradise that leaves people feeling atomized and powerless to do anything about our common condition.
I know it. I feel it myself, and had been feeling it for a long time before I realized how homesick I was. And I want better for my children.
I also want to be a better parent for them than I feel I always am back in L.A.
I think about this a lot, in part because Austin and Anabella are still young enough that I can learn to be better for them. Every hour I spend with them—Austin playing with his first basketball, Anabella basking in the delight of a new toy or some new idea she wants to share with me—is an education for me in what children are like, in what they need in life, in what they need from me.