The Cedar Chest

In the process of preparing to leave the Cachagua property, my mother has been making a list of things to sell and come up with mortgage money for her house in town. One idea she has is to sell back her family cedar chest to her brother's side of our clan. According to family lore, the chest was handmade by my great-grandfather from cedar growing on his farm in Salisbury, North Carolina during the Depression.

That is unlikely the case. The legs of the chest were turned on a lathe, the rails worked with a router, and though the side-boards are warped and imperfect, they were run through a planer, not rough-sawn. The finish, though it might not be original, is pretty modern.

If I sound skeptical, it is because another family heirloom, a child's rocking chair, came to me with the same story. I never really questioned the story until I had the little oak chair in my hands and could see plainly that it was also fashioned with shop tools.

The region around Salisbury was once known for its furniture mills. There have always been outlets in the area where local folk and tourist alike shop for bargains. It's pretty likely that these were the source of my family heirlooms. Possibly my great grandfather cut the wood and had someone else do the shop work, or played some more direct role in their shaping, but that is lost in the yeast of my grandfather's rather doughy capacity for embellishment. The man was a liar; a trait sometimes heart-warming when it came to creating family myth but less romantic when it came to broken promises or anything related to money.

I find value in these heirlooms because, and not despite, I know they come swaddled in family history that has its roots in distorted notions of humbleness. My grandfather parked his butt in the little rocking chair and my son did too. I hope his grandson does one day and I don't especially care if ol' Papaw whittled it with a rusty spoon by firelight. But it got me to thinking, because my mother holds the notion that the chest is probably monetarily valuable, of how we try and sell these stories to ourselves and others.

When I was about ten, some friends were holding a big garage sale and invited me to bring a few items. Though I was loathe to part with any of them, I set out a box of books with visions of Skittles and six packs of Jolt Cola as my pay off.

The thing is, I priced the books according to whether I had enjoyed them. At some point in the day, after not having many sales, a lady came along and pulled a Hardy Boys mystery from my box.

“Ten dollars,” she asked, “for this?”

“Well, yeah. It's really good.”

“But it was only $7.50 new.”

Needless to say, she didn't buy the book and I went home with the same heavy cardboard box instead of a sugar high.

In some ways, I have been like my mother in recent months. The sense of connectedness, of emplacement I feel in these mountains is a vital, invigorating part of me. I don't want to leave this place and so I have run around trying to duct tape and bailing-wire myself into a living situation or land deal that might allow me to continue dreaming my dreams, making my stories.

I have set out my little visions on the table, sent them in to the appraiser, and have come up with no place to lay my head, no gas money to get to town and back. I have deluded myself into believing that my connection to this place, which manifests itself in the stories I tell about it, is a visible, concrete thing. I have tried to parlay my articulations into some sort of scrip for rent money.

My stories are worth what they are worth, but it is not to be measured in mortgage payments.

Beneath his sport coat and golf shirts, there was a hillbilly in my grandfather's soul. A little barefoot, redneck boy whom he trotted out to demonstrate just how far he had come in life. He was, indeed, a self made man, a successful one. And like many who rise from poverty to excess, he romanticized his meager beginnings to make for good banter out on the fairway back nine. But he still rose sometimes, early in the morning, to drive out to a country cafe where he ate biscuits and red-eye gravy with the farmers and construction workers before they set out to labor with their hands. He was a great storyteller, and I sometimes wonder which venue he really felt more at home in.

In my mom, there is a young southern girl still trying to believe her father literally. And it still hurts her when the signature on the checks he wrote turn out to be forged. In some ways, she didn't really rise in the material world, going from the leafy suburbs of Durham to scrounging for mortgage money at age sixty-two. But I love that she still loves these stories, and that she is incapable of lying.

I've only been to the South via airplane and Volkswagen bus. I have my family's love of story-telling, but I don't really know, sometimes, if I am telling mild lies based on little truths, whether I am whittling with wood from my own property or turning out reproductions. I only know that I don't know how to cash in on them either way. Maybe that's okay.