The last of the living get to tell the stories & shape the past with their descriptions, I thought while listening to my Nana last weekend. Keeping my promises, I drove through the rural town, mourning its brown fields and dying trees due to the drought and heat, and visited my Nana, great-aunt, and great-Uncle B with my Mom and my daughters.

I had often heard stories about my family while growing up, but since last year I’ve been asking questions with the purpose of writing a novel. For my first book, Multiple Exposure, I spent most of my time like a stereotypical writer–researching, writing alone, and then asking for fact checkers and readers. This second book (Poke Sallet Queen) has been so different, and I’m more social and more intrigued by the process of talking through different scenarios and connecting with both sides of my family (maternal and paternal) to produce the stories.

First, Nana obliged me by answering my inquiries. She described the way her mother reeled quilt frames up to the ceiling so that her family of seven could have more space in their three-room house. Nana reclined in a cushioned chair and recalled carrying a lantern over the hill in the middle of the night when her mother went into labor with another brother. All of Nana’s siblings are brothers. More details ticked off the minutes until it approached midnight and I tried to keep my eyes open while writing about her parents in my notebook.

For the other side of my family, I went back to the nursing home, where my great-Uncle B’s voice has become stronger but is still strained. He laughed with delight when he saw my baby daughter and said, “Been a long time since I saw one this little.” He shared descriptions about his mother-in-law (another of my great-grandmothers), a fearful, nervous woman who looked out for her daughters with the sharp awareness of a red-tailed hawk, the same bird I saw turning in the sky over fields that once belonged to our family. He told more stories about bootlegging, and between them, he quickly went through the files in his mind, not allowing too much silence to encompass our time together. After a chuckle, he said that my grandfather had once “gotten to drinking” down at the creek with one of their friends, and my grandfather had a old Ford Thunderbird. Uncle B said, “Well, he got so mad about something that he was gonna leave and caught the gravel under his tires and flew off the road, missing the bridge, and ended up in the creek. That son of a bitch totaled the car and had to leave it there.”

After a few more stories, I asked Uncle B his exact age, he said, “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still alive, but I guess it’s so I can tell you about this, tell the stories. So I can be here for you all. For them.” He pointed to us–my great aunt, my Mom and my children.

Video from a reading of Multiple Exposure, when it was a novel-in-progress (Her Circle Ezine’s 2011 International Women’s Day Reading Event):

Shana Thornton from Her Circle Ezine on Vimeo.

To find out more about the novel, Multiple Exposure (forthcoming Sept. 2, 2012), click here.

I’ve been imagining this triple digit heat without air conditioning. Where would I go for comfort? Our ancestors didn’t have the convenience of HVAC units, so they sought the dark, moist enclosures of caves. They parked their chairs at the mouths of caves and plucked guitar strings, gossiped, brought out their checkers and playing cards. Over the past few years, I’ve toured several caves, learning about their differences and enjoying the experience of caving with friends and family members. I like watching the different ways that people respond to being in a cave. Some people feel claustrophobic, others want to sneak away from the group and explore on their own, many joke to ease their fears, and one or two imagine all the previous lives to pass through the earth’s corridors.

A grandmother said, “It’s cold enough to dance the jitterbug without breaking a sweat in the summertime.”
We were lined up, waiting to descend into the cavern, with flashlights in hand. I asked her if she’d been on a date at the cave. She giggled, said, “Now, how’d you know that?”
I shrugged, “Good guess.”
She continued, “It was so cold in there that he gave me his jacket. It was scary too. Caves make kind of creepy shapes.”
“And you want to go back inside?” I asked.
“Yeah, you always discover something new, see it in a different way.”

In one of the caves I toured, couples can have their wedding ceremony. The wet, limestone trail unevenly dips further into the earth’s interior. I consider a 21st-century bride in popular stilettos wobbling around the winding passage toward the groom. She could wear a headlamp instead of a veil. That might be a great scene for a novel.

In my novel Multiple Exposure, a cave is one of the strongest parts of the setting, but no one gets married in it for this book. I wrote about other faces of the cave–how inviting it can be, offering cool air during the heat; how frightening it can become in the darkness; how secretly it holds mysteries; how inspiring the process of discovery becomes when people explore the underground regions of the earth.

With 109 degrees pushing Middle Tennessee thermometers to extremes, caves offer a comforting embrace. Afterall, they are carving out spaces with a constancy that we forget while we scurry around up here, under the sun.