In Memory and Stillness

The Store at McCants Mill Pond
Highway 19N
Butler, Georgia

Recently I drove Highway 19 south from Atlanta to Ellaville to attend the funeral of a dear uncle. It was the second time inside a month that I made this trip; three weeks earlier I had attended my grandmother's funeral in the same small town. Funerals and trips back home are ripe with emotion and can quickly get one thinking about the way things used to be. I slowed well below the speed limit as I entered Taylor County, the place where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life. Highway 19 used to be a lightly traveled two-lane route, but for years now "they" have been expanding it to a divided 4-lane. Miles and miles of a lonely, sparsely traveled four-lane through the heart of rural south Georgia. I wish they had left it like it was. Like it was back when as far I as knew it took you from my home in Butler to Grandma's house to the south and occasionally Aunt Minnie's house to the north. Later as a teenager I learned from my business education teacher, Mrs. Guy that you could take it all the way to the big city of Atlanta. It was on those trips that I got a glimpse of my future and the possibilities available to me.

Highway 19 dissects McCants Mill Pond on the north side of the county before you enter Butler. When I was 3 years old, we rented a house just up the hill from the pond, just a few paces past the country store where you could buy fish bait, co-colas, salted peanuts, and potted meat. My earliest memories are of this home. Faint, vague memories of french doors, hardwood floors, an outbuilding with a dirt floor, and the country store next door. The house is long gone, but the building that was the store still stands. I must have driven by it a hundred times or more in the years since I left home. But on this day, I slowed for a long look. Then decided to circle back and stop to honor this monument from my childhood. I stood for a while in the late morning sun, in memory and stillness. I thought of my little hands on the store's door handle nearly 50 years earlier. I looked up the hill where our house once stood and thought I heard my laughter echo through the pines.

The Door to the McCants Country Store

"I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age; I am not your destination

I am clinging to my ways . . ."

From "I am a Town" by Mary Chapin Carpenter