“The only thing that makes this old house trailer halfway bearable is the tin roof! At least when it rains, it sounds like home,” I remember my grandmother, Mama Belle, muttering in her most dejected tone, with a healthy dose of guilt thrown in for the benefit of her son who was within earshot. This was the same misguided son who, along with his five siblings, had participated in the plan for her relocation. I was about 9 years old and she was a whole lot older and sadder, having just lost her husband, an event that precipitated her move to a house trailer in her son’s front yard. She didn’t make the move because she thought it was the right thing to do; she moved because it was the only thing to do according to her adult children. She knew they meant well. She shouldn’t and really couldn’t remain in the old farmhouse, but she was miserable. I suppose she had just lost her footing and really didn’t want to also lose her independence. But that was all beside the point. She settled into trailer living and waited for it to rain so she could close her eyes and imagine she was at home.
For most of us, living under a tin roof is the stuff of history. I know the houses I’ve lived in have all been shingled. Yet, I remember the terror of experiencing a storm at Mama Belle’s, made all the more terrifying given the minimal insulation between ceiling and roof. For her, it was the melody of home and comfort. It was security and it made for good sleep. For her. For me, it was the evil chorus of uncaged demons from which there was no escape. It was just about as scarring as when they turned off all the lights in the Cumberland Caverns cave tour and began reciting the Genesis story in a deep male voice that reverberated off every surface of that underground house of horrors. They should never do that to a four-year-old.
It’s not just sound that pulls back memories and takes us home. It’s voices we remember and it’s simple rhythms of nature. Even tastes can do it. The flavor of Doritos chips is precisely that of the Royal Avenue Recreation Center’s chlorine-saturated swimming pool on a 95-degree summer afternoon, while a Bugles chip, on the other hand, is the highly-waxed linoleum-tiled hallway that led to my dad’s office to which I walked each day after school. I apparently spent too much time feeding vending machines, but it all made for good memories.
A mockingbird trills, and I’m ecstatic that school is out for summer vacation. The musical jingle of the popsicle truck gets nearer and nearer, barely giving me time to rush in for the dime that buys the orange pushup. The point is that photographs are not the only way to return home. In fact, they’re probably not even the best way. But when you listen, you can sometimes hear your way back.
“And I go back to watching summer fade to fall,
Growing up too fast and I do recall
Wishing time would stop right in its tracks.
Every time I hear that song, I go back.
I go back.”
Kenny Chesney knows a few things about sound, and how music can take us back mentally to a place or time that looks a whole lot better in retrospect than it most likely was. Mama Belle probably didn’t remember the holes in the roof that required gingerly crawling around on the slick roof to repair—for Papa, not for her—which is most likely why she wouldn’t remember them. What she would have lovingly recalled was the melody of the rain and the comfort the roof provided. The storms were most likely not what she would have cataloged. In retrospect, we do get to pick and choose, and I’m sure she did a lot of that.
Today, as we piddled around with farm chores in an open tin-covered barn, it began to rain a little. And then it rained a lot. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, while the metal roof exaggerated and amplified every drop of rain into a deafening crescendo of a spring storm. Finally, the rainfall became so steady that the sound just undulated, much like an air conditioning unit that fades into background white noise. It was familiar and comforting. And my thoughts drifted to Mama Belle’s love of a tin roof, and I know exactly what she meant. It’s the sound of home. Plain and simple. For Mama Belle, it was probably the lullaby she rocked her babies to sleep with on countless rain-soaked nights. She most likely churned butter to the rhythm of rain on the roof and it provided the backdrop to more than a few drizzly Sunday dinners and quilting parties. It grew, I’m sure, into the soundtrack of the family’s life so that in leaving that old tin-roofed farmhouse, she felt the pangs of leaving the family that no longer counted on the roof for protection—or on her. As her family aged, so did the roof, collecting rust like a middle-aged woman collects gray hair, but in the most graceful and inconspicuous way possible. Because aging gracefully is what tin roofs and well-bred women do.
Actually, there’s nothing shabby about a pock-marked, rust-speckled tin roof. It only means it has been on the job for a long while without giving up, just as almost every gray-haired family matriarch like Mama Belle has done. In fact, she had a lot in common with the old tin roof, having relied on its comfort and shelter and predictability for so many years, just as her family had counted on her. Neither one of them ever willingly called it quits.
And yet, she only knew for sure that she would miss the farm, and that the front-yard trailer was a poor substitute. But at least it had a metal roof that reminded her of home. It didn’t talk to her in the same way, but then again it wasn’t always silent. It’s the small things, I suppose. She gave it her best shot but never really settled into the new living arrangement. Soon enough she was residing in another house with a newly widowed daughter, albeit a county away from her much-loved family farmhouse, and under a shingled roof that didn’t sing to her at all in a rainstorm.
Just off the Natchez Trace in Alabama is a winding stone-stacked wall that snakes in and out of a wooded landscape. In understated fashion, it’s just called the Rock Wall, and everybody knows where it is and what it is. It was built piece by piece by a descendant of a Native American girl who was removed from her home during the Trail of Tears era. At the first opportunity, she determinedly made her way back to her native “Singing River” alone and on foot. The rock wall is a testament to her courage and fortitude and love of her native land. Her several-great grandson believes it was the sound that brought her back, as she simply longed to hear the river sing to her again.
Uncle Wayne’s attempt at rehoming his mother a quarter mile away from her beloved farmhouse was undoubtedly nowhere near the disruption felt by the Oklahoma-bound Native American teen on a 600-mile foot journey, so it’s probably a stretch to even compare the two, but where the heart is concerned, it must have been no less a loss of place. And for both women, the sounds of home are what they missed the most.
I also really don’t want to suggest that the ping of rain on a rusty tin roof is anywhere near as sacred as the siren song of a glittering river in Indian lore, but then again, maybe I do. In both cases, home is involved, and home is a pretty sacred thing. It’s just that for pure drama, a river singing a loved one home does sort of trump the creak of an old tin roof on Carolina Road. It would admittedly make a much better movie. Still, the value of home is beyond measure and it’s often the sounds or tastes or even touch that can take us back, no matter how far removed we may be in time or place.
To get positively scholarly about it, I’ve learned that for people removed from home, like international students who come to the U.S. for an education, a high percentage of them define themselves as very homesick. And they also report that for them, home is not just a location. Instead, it’s mostly sensory, with sounds being the most missed. It might be the sound of a morning city commute or maybe even rain on the roof of the pagoda, but it’s the remembered sounds that draw the deepest sense of homesickness while also providing the most solace.
We built a new farmhouse recently, and although we didn’t agree on most things related to the project, the one thing we immediately and collectively concluded was that it would have a tin roof. Not only would it be more durable and maybe require less maintenance, but it was just something that a farmhouse needed for authenticity. And as a bonus, it would sing to us during a rainstorm. And as expected, my most favorite place during a rain shower is in the sleeping loft under the eaves where the melody is the most like what I remember from Mama Belle’s little kitchen when the rain was gentle. It may not be exactly how it was, but the sound is close enough and it’ll do.
For then, just like Mama Belle, I can hear my way back.
