I am One Fourth Guava Loving

Guavas are an interesting fruit, some people love them and some people hate them. I’ve heard it’s genetic, that you can’t control it because it’s determined by your chemical make-up.

I don’t care much for guavas myself.

My family genealogy and history has never mattered very much to me – mostly because I don’t know it. My parental grandparents were from Ohio. They moved to Oregon to raise my father where he met my mother and they moved to Seattle to raise me. My mother’s father was from Idaho, and my grandmother was Florida.

My grandmother loves guavas.

 

In August, as the first leg of my four month trip to Cuba, I got to visit the state where my grandmother grew up – drive down her childhood roads, see the house where she used to live, and meet relatives I didn’t even know existed. I learned so much about her, and a little about me through the process.

The stories she told me, of church baptisms on the banks of the Alafia River as water moccasins floated by; of swamp cabbage and roasting  hot dogs on palm fronds; of a family killed at a railroad crossing and the vision of the 10 coffins lined up at the front of the church; these stories seem incredible to me.

I walked the land my great-grandfather used to raise cattle on, now a part of Alderman’s Ford county park. I drove by my grandmother’s childhood home and listened to her reminisce about walking through the drooping trees to her grandmother’s house. I saw her elementary school, her church, and the sight of the old Shell gas station and corner store where her grandfather would give her a paper bag and tell her to fill it with candy. I saw the graves of my relatives, years and years past.

 

We swam in Lithia Springs and she told me she hadn’t been there since she went as a teenager with the preacher’s son, her childhood crush. She talked about the preacher, her father’s favorite, who would sweat through his shirt and gather spittle in the corners of his mouth. He and his son went shooting once and were separated in the woods. Mistaking the rustling of his son for a bird in the bush, the preacher shot him. From then on the son was blind in one eye, which my grandmother said only intensified her crush.

We visited the beach at Anna Maria Island and she told me about the cover-up her mother had sewn for herself with a matching swimsuit for my grandmother’s younger sister. Her sister was only a baby at the time, and fussy in the warm sun. So my great-grandfather put her on his shoulder and waded out into the swells and let the ocean rock her to sleep. Grandmother says she still remembers the tranquility of watching her father and her sister and that little floral print swimsuit bobbing in the waves.

She told me stories of fishing, and cattle herding and of the tailless lizard which used to visit her in her white sandbox. Her father built her that sandbox, collecting the brilliant white sand from the banks of the Alafia River. When the moved to Georgia he was discussed with the grey dirt which passed for white sand there.

I wanted to write a biographical piece on my grandmother and her life. I had planned to write as an outside observer gaining a glimpse into a long gone world. But with every story told, every place visited, every time I begged her to stop the car and reached for my camera, I realized this was as much my history as it is hers. I am after all only one generation removed from the mossy trees, the humid air, the country roads, and the river that looks like iced tea.