Tomorrow I leave to visit my sister in Alabama. She lives with my grandmother and aunt and uncle in a rural section of Alabama about an hour south of Anniston, near the Georgia border. My grandfather owned 440 acres of backwoods there, which he split evenly among his five children. None of the family members have sold any of the land to anyone outside the family, save for the two acres my grandmother’s house was on, which everyone agreed should be sold when she got too old to live by herself and went to live with my aunt and uncle down the road a little ways.

The land is situated a few miles outside a really small town (population 750 or so), off of the highway, and down a long, winding, bumpy dirt road, past the Hunters’ Cabin and around the corner past the spring.

The old house Grandmother and Granddaddy used to live in was a big, old, white two-story farmhouse that sat on the top of a large hill, overlooking most of the other hills and valleys in the immediate area. It was the first house you met, on the left, as the road wound past at the bottom of the hill. Now that that’s been sold, the center of the “Family Cooperative” has shifted to Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ken’s farmhouse in the hollow down the road a stretch. They have a large house that keeps getting added to, bit by bit, as the rooms keep encroaching on the wide porches that used to line the house. Now there are virtually no porches; all of them eventually claimed by the burgeoning population of the house. The house is generational now; it’s expanded in both directions to include Grandmother, as well as room for Uncle Ken and Aunt Sarah’s children and grandchildren.

It wasn’t designed for this from the beginning. It’s kind of a patchwork house. You can’t tell it from the ground, but the roof is made of sheets of tin of varying sizes, joined together in a patchwork. The local pilots refer to it as the “quilt house,” and use it as a landmark. It’s kind of symbolic of the house as a whole.

My grandmother and my sister live in the renovated basement of the house. Outside, there’s a hen coop, a pond, Aunt Sarah’s garden, a couple of sheds, and several trails leading back deeper into the woods. There’re also the ruins of a huge greenhouse, whose roof collapsed under the weight of snow some years ago, now overgrown with briars and pine trees. (It’s been quite a while ago.)

After you pass the White House on the Hill, and before you get to the Patchwork House, you see a drive on your left going up a hill. This leads to the house my dad built, back when I was one or two. He intended to live there for most of the rest of his life, but a teaching position opened up at a college in north Georgia, so we moved away when I was four. After we left, my dad sold it to my Uncle Quincy, and his family lived there for a long time. After they moved to Kentucky, my cousin Tommy bought it, and he lives there now with his family.

We like to stick together, you see.