Half Way To Everywhere
Half-Way to Everywhere.
To the left, home (where Momma lives), to the right Leipers Fork who’s unpretentious charm was recognized by Southern Living—the attention blowing the sleep off of the place like split-peas in a pressure cooker and the Half-Way getting caught in the cross-fire of benign preciousness and increased property values. Coldest beer in Southall, Live Bait and Frog Legs draw in the kind of crowd you can imagine. The fried bologna air is thick with grease and a pitcher of self-serve tea sweats on a plastic checkered cloth. All the men know each other. All the women mother you.
Tomorrow the Half-Way Market shuts its doors after tonight’s curtain-closing fish fry. The community grieves for a heritage lost and others like me recount all the times they wish they’d stopped in at the Half Way instead of anywhere else. It’s the type of guilt you feel when something belongs to you. Or maybe when you belong to something. Progress would tell me its a sign of the times but I look around at the open field across the street, the tiny church on the other, and it feels more like a culling. Pulling up a flower to let a weed grow. Subdivisions will move in. A Texaco maybe.
For lunch we ordered sandwiches, my friend Natalie grabbed a six-pack and my five-year-old son sat with WWII vet Jimmy Gentry of Gentry’s Farm as he endearingly asked Faye-Faye' to bring him a “piece uh pay-puh” to draw on. His accent is as thick and southern as the Harpeth River is muddy.
We take for granted what is sacred. Our loyalty is short-sighted and greedy. Nobody came here just for the sandwiches or the egg-custard. We came for the cultural identity of slowness and sincerity. We left with a smile, a full belly, and a sense of direction we will carry with us: left, right, everywhere.
Originally posted June 21, 2019.
