The farm was just off the Oakland Road exit to Sweetwater on I-75. There really wasn't much off the exit, just farmland, the Dinner Bell Restaurant where no one ever orders anything but the buffet, and a fireworks store that someone tried to turn into an arcade for a while. The road wides around a bit past the exit, and there it was on the right with the little white sign that read, "Happy Hollow Farm." The farm seemed like its own tiny, perfect universe. The little barn, the silo, and the white farm house. The gently rolling field that was alive and rich green in the spring and summer, quiet brown straw in the winter. The way the foothills of the smokey mountains cradled all of it. I imagined life on the farm was full of simple beauty, and I peeked inside it every time I drove by. A few years ago, a "For Sale" sign was put up in front of the farm. Someone bulldozed it and turned it into an auto scrap yard.
Photo: The Parlor, Sweetwater, TN
The house in Sweetwater looked a gingerbread house, my mother said. It was a big, yellow Victorian built in the late 1800's with a wraparound porch, a porch swing, and a little balcony on the second floor. The house inspector warned my parents not to buy it, that there were too many things to fix, but my mother was in love with the house. I picked the bedroom right next to the little balcony where I could sit high above the street and watch everything. My parents planted crepe myrtles that grew into an archway over the walkway to the front porch. Just off the entryway with the antique crystal chandelier and screen door that always slammed shut was the parlor. It was a Norman Rockwell room, with an old gas fireplace with a big white mantle, pocket doors, and the window where the light streamed in so gently in the morning through the lace curtains. The gas fireplace never worked, of course. The pocket doors were off their tracks and never worked properly, and my father once had to hunt down a squirrel that moved into the wall behind them. But it was the room where you could curl up on the couch and read and forget the world. It was the Christmas room, the window seemed like it was put there for the sole purpose of framing a Christmas tree. It was always cold and drafty in the parlor, but we wrapped ourselved in blankets on Christmas morning and my brother and I fought over who had to sit on the cold floor and pass out presents.
I don't remember the last days in that house, with the boxes packed and the rooms empty. I had already moved away, but leaving that place was too hard, even though it was never close to how perfect it looked from the outside. My father and my brother lived in that house for almost two years after he was forced out of the church he pastored two blocks away. My mother moved to Atlanta to get a better job, my brother stayed to finish high school, and they waited there until the house sold. I imagine it must have been lonely in that big house. A retiree couple bought the house, and a few months later, they cut down the beautiful crepe myrtle archway, but left the stumps of the six trees all lined up on each side of the walkway, the front of the house bare.
I still go back sometimes, to visit friends from high school or to stop by on my way to see my brother at school. I take the Oakland road exit, and I drive by the yellow gingerbread house. I remember once that an old woman at church told me that someone birthed a stillborn child there many years ago. The house was its own story, the walls full of the laughter and tears of the people who have lived there. In some way, it will always be ours.
