What is it about people from Texas? It's like they get a double fistful of Texas shoved up their butts at birth and we get to listen to it squeak out the other end for the rest of their lives.

Mother used to say people from Texas were naturally open and honest, because the land is so open and everybody can see what everybody else is up to. Whereas people from Tennessee, where the land is all rolling hills and little hidden valleys, are furtive and sneaky and paranoid.

Pff! Texas can bite me. Horrible place.

Mother was born in Hackberry, Texas on Christmas Day, 1930 (well, I bet she was born in a hospital Dallas). Problemo numero uno: she grew up thinking the whole freaking world celebrated her birthday.

A hackberry is a tree, incidentally. Mother pronounced it rather like I'd expect Elvis to ("uhHackburrah. Thank yew vurrah much.") Mapquest lists five towns named Hackberry in Texas, all of them clustered around Dallas. I'm pretty sure it's Number Two in the picture. Because Mother said Dallas ate her hometown, and because Idlewild jumped out at me. I think her house was on Idlewild.

Jesus, look at it! Desolation. And that's today, slap up on the edge of metropolitan Dallas and seventy six years later. Population in 2000: 622.

 

The whole family visited Hackberry one Summer, I think it was in 1968, and Mother took a picture of my brother and me standing behind the white picket fence at her old house, in exactly the same pose as a photo of Mother and my Uncle Bill from twenty years before. I've lost both those photos now.

It was mostly farmland when they were kids. Theirs wasn't a full working farm, I guess, but they kept some chickens and cows and grew crops for their own table. They lived there during the Depression, after all. Here's one of Mother's memories of Hackberry:

One night, the old man on the farm next door died in his sleep. Everybody found out about it when his two grown (and gigantically obese) daughters shot out the door and rolled around in the yard whipping up great clouds of dust, howling and crying and generally running out of control.

Someone (probably my grandmother; she was a nurse) went over to see to the old man. He'd died lying on his back with his feet propped up on the foot of the bed. Rigor mortis had good and set in overnight. She'd push his legs down and slowly his torso would rise up. So she'd push his torso down, and his legs would pop up. So she'd push on both ends at once, but that didn't look right at all. The story is properly told with a bit of pantomime, but I'm sure you can imagine.

And that's what Texas means to me. A little sad, a little funny. Dusty. Plenty of hollering fat girls.