A Simple Scratch

This afternoon I scratched my left forearm against a virburnum shrub as I continued working down my mulch pile. The five yards I had delivered over a week ago is almost a memory. I noticed the burning sensation on my arm as I pushed the wheelbarrow away, but it was only after I had gone back for another load of mulch that I noticed the heavy collection of blood pooling around the scratch. “Oh,” I thought, “I’ll clean that off after I finish this load.” Shortly, I came into the house, and rinsed off my arm at the bathroom sink. I couldn’t locate the triple antibiotic, so I doused the scratch with tea tree oil, and then went outside to continue working. A smaller pool of blood continued collecting around the scratch.

When I called it an afternoon for spreading mulch—I’ve been piddling with this since my first big push on the day the mulch arrived—I went back into the house to wash the wound. A folder paper towel lying by the kitchen sink served handily as a pad to fold further and soak in water for daubing the blood. As I cleaned my wound, looking at my arm, an image of my daddy wiping a scratch on his arm in the very same way flashed through my mind. As he got older, the skin on his forearms became more vulnerable and minor trauma to the skin—a frequent occurrence working around the yard—became common. In spite of hard-earned resilience, which apparently applies only at the soul level, physically we tear and break more easily as we grow older. Tomorrow it will be 29 years that he died.

Just the other day, my oldest sister, Joan, and I were talking about how much Daddy loved the two-story barn that became my home 10 years ago. When our parents bought this place in 1973, the barn housed farm equipment, tack (although there were no horses to ride at this point), hay upstairs, and in the cool hallway, Daddy’s workshop. The bunkhouse that ran the 50-foot length of the northwest side of the building was a place for family and friends visiting Mother and Daddy in the country to spend a night or two.

Along with our middle sister, Sue, last week we went to see the man who does some investing for us, just as he did for our mother the last few years of her life. That day Sue pointed out places healing on her arm where she had scratched herself in the normal course of working around the house. She’s been taking cortisone, and I remember that Daddy took cortisone off and on. Alas, we get older.

They say that as people get older, they become more interested in where they came from. I don’t know this to be so true for the relatives from my parents and grandparents’ generation. Our mother loved to talk about her Texas German family roots—a group that landed at Galveston in 1866, when my great grandmother Louisa was only 1 year old, and settled northwest of Houston, what is now part of the great Houston octopus. Daddy didn’t know much about his family, and neither did his siblings, although they loved Hollis family get-togethers. They were a close family.

Our cousin, Marilyn, daughter of Daddy’s youngest sister, is working away on the genealogy of both our grandpa Hollis, who died in 1941—a couple of years before I was born—and our Mamaw Hollis’s family. Last October, a cousin on the Hollis side—the youngest daughter of Daddy’s youngest uncle—found me on the Internet, and we’ve been corresponding about her impressive work on the Hollis family. She’s traced us all the way back to pre-Revolutionary times in North Carolina. Our branch—going back to great-great grandfather Isaac—made their way to Alabama before the Civil War.

When our parents bought this land in Leon County Texas almost 40 years ago, we discovered a Hollis street in the nearby town of Normangee. After I moved up here 10 years ago from Houston, I found that there were Hollises in a nearby cemetery in Madison County, and through the wonders of technology and the Handbook of Texas online, found out that they had come from Cannon County Tennessee. Their youngest son (born 1834 in Tennessee) had raised his family here in Leon County, and several of their family members are buried in the historic cemetery just down the road. Yesterday, cousin Martha figured out the connection. Based on information I had given her, she connected that the ancestor father of this Madison County Texas group was the brother of my great-great-great grandfather, William C. Hollis, who was born in North Carolina.

I smile knowing that we can trace our Hollis roots back to the early 18th century American colonies. Our branch made its way from Alabama to east Texas by train just before the turn of the 19th century. Mother’s family landed here in Texas on November 26, 1866, only 17 months after news of emancipation reached Texas. Both of these historic events—one obviously much more personal to our family— occurred in Galveston.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a simple scratch in the garden—doing something that my daddy and mother enjoyed immensely—can connect so brilliantly (in my humble opinion) to a minor celebration of family. We live on in memory at the cellular level. We are blessed to know and to care and to connect the dots of our family, our humanity. On the eve of the 29th anniversary and celebration of our daddy’s life, what could be better than working in the garden, a garden no doubt upon which Tena and Russell Hollis are smiling on the first day of spring, 2010. And so it is.

A Simple Scratch—Normangee, Texas (March 20, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis