LINDA CARROLL BARNES
PHOTO BY JASON TAYLOR
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In the turbulent shadow of the Vietnam war, a young mother keeps vigil in the still quiet of a front porch worn and smooth under her feet, the sultry air of pecan groves heavy with waiting – waiting for a letter, that fragile link to her husband, a helicopter pilot flying through the smoke filled carnage of battlefields a world away, reachable now only in memories.
As he takes his place among the armies of other soldiers bravely facing death daily, she begins her own relentless, invisible war against enemies she cannot see – fear, loneliness and despair, colliding with violent social unrest descending on her from the perimeters of an unforgiving and changing culture.
In the circular, monotonous sameness of hours and days so well known to soldiers wives, she explores who she is and finds courage, endurance and hope all around her in the forests and country roads, the church pews and kitchens of her simple corner of the world.
There is comfort here among the small town people long accustomed to leaning on each other. Their conversations are no longer idle things, and their letters to each other are the distilled footprints that will later be called history. Fontaine is her town, and theirs – and perhaps they are all here "for such a time as this."
The Mississippi Gulf Coast, the luminous world of the 1960’s, was there waiting for me. I came a long way to find it. I knew the scent of orange groves, moving trains, the sultry air of the New Orleans French Quarter and morning mist on long green fairways. And, I was very familiar with generous doors to new beginnings that appeared often and unexpectedly in some remarkable places. The light of the young, incandescent Mississippi days was like that, glittering on a crescent sliver of white sand filled with night fires, adolescent dreams and incomparable friends. It took charge of my life from the very first, revealing an invisible world that defined who I was and who I would be. But long before that, my small, fragmented history unfolded in other inconspicuous places that were worlds away from Mississippi. It was the colorless road of a portable past and a shifting, unknowable future. Then something extraordinary happened, something I could have never anticipated. And, it was as if a beneficent jailor had swung a cell door wide open to a world of crisp air, startling and blue.
Available from Amazon
and bookstores
Portait by Jason Ulsrud
About the Author
Southern writer Linda Carroll Barnes is the author behind “ The Last Good Light : A Southern Memoir.”
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She lives with her husband on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
