Washerwoman – Jacki Kellum Watercolor Painting

All of her life, my grandmother both washed and rinsed her laundry in galvanized tubs. My grandmother’s wash tubs rested on a small sun porch attached to the back of her house [No, not THAT kind of sun porch–just a space with windows to wash her clothes]. My grandmother also sewed on that porch and made blue calico skirts she draped around her tubs. Because my grandmother dried her clothes on an outside line, those calico skirts always smelled like rays of raw sunshine and blustering wind on crystal clear days. I loved walking onto my grandmother’s back porch, and when I was a child, I did that often.

You see, my dear grandmother’s house was almost directly in front of my childhood home. While I was living at home, I visited her at least once every day, and to get there, I usually cut across an alley between our houses, and afterward, I would walk through my grandmother’s garden. First, I swished through a forest of tall, swaying hollyhocks and after that, I floated beneath a huge trellis covered with sky blue morning glories. When I was about five, a neighbor boy and I got married beneath that blue-mounded altar. My wedding dress was one of my grandfather’s white work shirts, and my veil was a piece of my grandmother’s delicate crochet. All the other neighborhood kids were our children, and to celebrate our honeymoon, the entire bunch ran around in circles–in and out of the flower beds–in my grandparents’ backyard.

But back to my daily trip to see my grandmother–From the morning glories, I meandered along a line that ran between strawberries and masses of flowers. That path connected me to my grandmother’s back door which opened into her sunny porch. Keep all this in mind when you read the poem: Calico Cotton

Calico Cotton

I’ve reached the shore
Of my grandmother’s door—
The one from the garden, inside.

Oh, sunny, sweet backroom
Of my grandmother’s loom—
The place in the dirt
Of my grandmother’s skirt—

In the lounge of her lap,
Hold me tight, I will nap,
On my grandmother’s porch,
Let me hide.

---

Just to be clear, the calico refers to the skirts on my grandmother’s washtubs, and the cotton refers to the fabric from which they were sewn, as well as to the fact that I grew up in cotton country. I tell everyone  I grew up in the middle of a cotton patch, and that is only a tiny exaggeration.

A bridge that is about 1 mile from my childhood home:

This is one of a bezillion farm road bridges in the Bootheel of Southeast Missouri, where I grew up. Over 50 years ago, one of my boyfriends or another and I would drive up next to one of these bridges and turn the car radio on loud. Then we would stand on the top of the bridge and dance. We would say that we were going to a bridge dance. The waterways near my home were spillways to carry away the flows if the Mississippi River overflowed again. As a mass, the local people called these waterways the Floodways. Individually, they were called One Ditch, Two Ditch, Three Ditch, etc.

One Ditch – Jacki Kellum Watercolor Painting
A Waterway that Carries Me Home

In my previous garden, I had a wooden fence that helped me create privacy.

My Garden Wall in My Previous Garden

But within that fenced area, I built another garden wall — to create an intimate garden room–or small home.

A Sense of Home is Important to Me:

Bring Me Home – An Overarching Theme in Literature – in Jacki Kellum Looking at Lit Club

I have not built a wooden wall in my current garden yet, but I am creating a sense of an intimate home in other ways. In my 2024 garden, my morning glory vines are doing the heavy lifting:

Heirloom Heavenly Blue Morning Glory Growing in My Previous Garden

My morning glories will not bloom this year until much later this summer, but this morning, as I stood in the arms of my morning glory vines, an old, familiar feeling washed over me. Once again, I was a child, standing beneath my grandmother’s massive morning glory vines, and once again, I was  sheltering in place. The vines  had reminded me of the times of my childhood when the crystal blue morning glories had fully consumed my grandmother’s arbor and had created a glorious sight. But more than the appearance of my grandmother’s morning glory vines, I loved the way that they made me feel when I was a tiny girl. Today, when I was standing amidst the ever-reaching, ever-entangling vines in my current garden,  I felt that once more, I was being held and cradled and protected from the world beyond my sheltered, little spot. As I look back now, I realize that my grandmother’s morning glory arbor is the way that I feel about my grandmother herself. My Morning Glory Vines Bring Me Home.

P.S. The weedy ivyleaf morning glory and my Heavenly Heirlooms are not the same plant.