Author: Hugh Hollowell

My Dad

In October of 2020, my dad died from COVID. Dad was the Emergency Management Director of his county, and so he was constantly on the front lines, getting his rural community what they needed to get through this pandemic.

Back in February, I was told the Chamber of Commerce of his hometown was considering him for a posthumous award as the “Pandemic Hero” of 2020 in their annual award celebration. I was asked to write his official nomination submission, and it’s as close as I have come to writing his eulogy.

Here is my nomination letter in full, written by a grateful son who, when all is said and done, just misses his Daddy something fierce. Thanks for indulging me for putting it here.

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To the nominating committee:

My father, Hugh Hollowell, died on October 22nd of 2020, from COVID. He had lived and worked in Marshall County his entire life, barring four years in the Air Force. He raised three boys on the land he himself had grown up on, and he taught them about what it means to belong to a place and its people.

His main teaching method was his example. He served for more than 7 years as the chief of the Watson Volunteer Fire Department, coming home from long days crawling under houses as a gas company repairman to wolf down a sandwich and go back out to attend some class that would teach him how to make his community safer.

In 1989, he began a career transition to Emergency Management, when he became the first Fire Coordinator for Marshall County, and began to work for the County full time as their Emergency Management Coordinator in 1996. It was then, at 45 years old, that my dad began to flourish.

My dad had an almost superhuman ability to remain calm when everyone else was losing their head. He could diffuse anger and had the ability to make everyone feel heard, an important skill as he navigated the world of politicians, EMS frontline workers, volunteers, and career civil servants.

He was set to retire in June of 2020. He was at our house Christmas of 2019, and it was a topic he talked a lot about. He had long dreamed of travelling, but budget constraints and the responsibilities of his work and family had prevented it. He and my mom would buy a camper and drive out west and see the wide open spaces of my mother’s childhood and my father’s dreams.

When the pandemic hit, I was glad he was set to retire. I saw the way in those early days it made this 68-year-old man tired, and the fatigue in his voice was obvious over the phone. He had long been able to handle a crisis – tornados, fires, storms, bad wrecks – but this was a crisis that did not stop, and he was the person who was responsible for making sure people were protected.

He felt that responsibility heavily.

That is another thing he taught us – what it means to be responsible: To your family, to your job, to your community. So I was saddened but not surprised when he told me that he had chosen to not retire in June as he had planned.

“I can’t do it to them. I can’t leave the county in a lurch. I’m going to get them through this year, and then retire in January.”

The pandemic got worse, of course. When I would call, he would be in the truck, on his way to pick up some PPE or just coming back from delivering it to the hospital or one of the fire departments. His emails came at odd hours – 4AM, or 11:30PM, as he grabbed snatches to time from a packed day. He lamented the weight of the boxes, saying that it bothered him that he wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and he was really, really looking forward to next year, when he could finally retire.

“I’m just tired,” he said. “I’m really, really tired.”

To those of us who knew him, it wasn’t a shock he would give up his own comfort and pleasure, that he would postpone his rest if it let him make sure the community he loved was safe. When he called me on October 17th to tell me he had tested positive for COVID, he tried to keep the focus off himself and on his concern for who would do the work of making sure the county had what it needed to stay safe while he was out.

I last spoke to him on the 20th. Predictably, he spent perhaps 2 minutes talking about his own condition and 10 minutes talking about how the virus had affected others and the county.

“You know,” he said, “I always joked that I would rest when I was dead. As much sleep as I’m getting right now because of this virus, I have to tell you, I am tired of resting. I want to get back to work!”.

He died around lunchtime on the 22nd.

My father was not perfect, and as a child I often resented the ways that his love for and sense of responsibility to this community took him away from me. The Thanksgiving he missed because of a shooting, the Christmas he missed because of the house fire, the evenings spent away from us to be in the company of others where he could take yet another class instead of spending time with me, the endless fundraisers for the little fire department that was all that protected my community.

But as I told a friend after his death, the hardest part of it is that there is no one to be mad at in this. I wish there was. It would make it all easier. But he died protecting the community that had raised and protected him when he was the child of a middle-aged single mom, who had made sure they had enough when that was far from certain, who had given him the means to earn a living, to raise a family, had given his life meaning and purpose, and that taught him along the way that your community contains all the things you need to have a good life. It is the only way his story could possibly end that would have made sense, given who he was and how he lived.

He was not a demonstratively emotional man, but he loved this town, this county, and the people who lived there. He would not want to be called a hero – he would maintain he was just doing his job. But one of the roles community plays is to tell us the things we cannot know or admit about ourselves, and those of us who knew and loved him know the truth.

Respectfully submitted,

Hugh L. Hollowell, Jr.

Pass-along plants

As a gardener, I love plants. All sorts, really, but especially pass along plants – plants given you by a friend or a neighbor, plants that have traveled a ways and that have stories behind them.

I now live in Central Mississippi, but for 13 years lived in Raleigh, NC.

I didn’t know anyone when I moved there. I mean, no one. My parents and brothers and all my friends were 12 hours away by car. This was in the very early days of social media, and to say I was feeling isolated is true, and yet a serious understatement. Eventually, though, I would get married, build friendships, and meet some of the nicest people I have ever known. Some of those people were Karen and Toney.

They took us in: Metaphorically, anyway. They were about 10 years older than my parents, and served a sort of dual role as both parents and grandparents for us while we were there. The holidays we couldn’t afford to go home we spent at Karen and Toney’s. We were invited to all their family celebrations – when their grandkids had birthday parties, or when Toney (who was a musician) would have a local gig, for example, and they threw their lot in with us as well by bringing us food when we were sick or fundraising for the nonprofit I had founded. We were and are, in every sense of the word except biology, family.

Their daughter, Allison is my age, and she too is a gardener. And every spring, she would hold a plant swap at her house. You were encouraged to bring anything you had to share (either plants or food), and she would share anything she had extras of, and everyone went home with plants and with their bellies full.

And one of the things I went home with were these Purple Bearded Iris.

These are the old heirloom Iris germanica, but my grandmother, like all old southern women, would have called them Flags. These Iris were given to Allison by her grandmother (Toney’s mother), and they were given to the grandmother when Toney was a boy by their neighbor who had had them “forever”. As Toney is now in his 80’s, these flowers can be tracked back at least 100 years.

So I got them from Allison, and planted them in my crazy cottage garden in Raleigh. When we sold that house, I dug some (but not all) of the Iris up and put them in a paper bag, where they sat for 7 months in a storage unit until we moved into our new house in Mississippi, and then I stuck then in a corner of our front yard, where they would get lots of sun and I would walk by them every day.

And now they look like the picture at the top of the page when they bloom, which is from the middle of February to the end of March.

This summer I divided mine up and gave some to two neighbors and a friend in the suburbs. They have, under my watch, went from my house in Raleigh (where some still are) to my house in Mississippi, to three other houses here, and the story lives on, as do the plants.

I think one of the things I love most about pass-along plants is that they go against the very concept of our modern economic story: There is no scarcity, no money changes hands, their only currency is joy, and rather than becoming scarcer when they are given away, they become not just more plentiful, but safer as well. Because if I hoarded them and kept them all for myself, one bad freeze or a wetter than average year could kill them and then they are gone. But this way they are spread out in at least two different states and in many different yards, all increasing the odds of their survival.

I think there is a lesson in there for us all.

As an aside, if you like the idea of pass along plants and want to know more, I highly recommend this book by Felder Rushing and Steve Bender. You get a list of plants that “share well”, as well as the story behind them. It’s good for your garden, but also good for your soul,

Do you have any pass-along plants that are meaningful to you? I would love to hear that story in the comments.

Designing for Hospitality

When we were looking for houses to buy, we had a hard time explaining to the Realtor what we wanted. It wasn’t as simple as “We need a three bedroom with two baths in a good neighborhood.”

No, our descriptions always revolve around large yards, shade trees, guest rooms, large dining rooms, guest bathrooms, room for bookshelves and a central kitchen. We will, when we see a house, remark on traffic flow patterns, the suitability for porch sitting and neighbor conversations, whether a house is in a real neighborhood, or whether these people just happen to live next to each other.

In fact, one of the reasons we picked here to move to rather than Nashville or Atlanta or Memphis had to do with the large amount of affordable housing inventory available here, so we could afford a house that would let us live the way we want to live – hospitably.

See, hospitality is not just a matter of inviting people to dinner: It’s also about having room for a table big enough to have them over for dinner. It is easier to have guests spend the night when they can have their own room (or at least a room that can be repurposed on short notice) and don’t have to fight the cats for a slice of the couch. If you have a pantry, you can store food for the times your friends are doing without, and if you have room for a garden, you can grow some of that food yourself.

And it isn’t just about being able to, but being likely to. You are more likely to meet your neighbors when there is not a large fence or hedge between your front yard and theirs. You are more likely to invite your friends from church over for dinner if it won’t be cramped, and if you have room to cook for 12 folks. You are more likely to be the house where your kid’s friends hang out if you have room for the hanging out.

It’s about having values and then finding a house that meets those values. And while every house is a compromise, when there are literally a hundred options at any given time, you can pretty much find something that fits. The point isn’t that we could afford to buy a house that fit our needs, it was that we moved to a place where we could afford to buy a house that fit our needs. The list of needs came first, then we built a life (and bought a house) around them.

We couldn’t have had that house in a different city. So we found a city where we could have that house, and moved there.

Hospitality is one of my key values. Had I had different ones, I would have made other choices. But either way, the point is that I made a decision in keeping with the values I have, and the sort of life I wanted to live. If your decisions don’t support your values, you can’t be surprised when your values don’t get lived out.

Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash

Invest in your joy

A friend who is between jobs told me the other day that she had really curtailed her discretionary spending.

“Well, except for the pajamas.”

“The pajamas?”

“They are adorable”, she said. My (11year old) daughter and I got matching pajamas, and I love them so much. But I wonder if I should have spent that money.”

I told her I didn’t think a pair of $20 pajamas was going to be what put her on the streets. “Besides, I think there is a difference between spending and investing. And you made an investment in your joy.”

I hate to spend money, but love to invest in my joy. Let me explain the difference.

If I buy a six pack of beer, well, I may enjoy the beer, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. I will never get that $12 back. I will, in all likelihood, never think of those beers again. That is a cost.

But if I spent that $12 on a coffee mug that makes me smile when I see it, or that reminds me of the mug my grandfather drank out of, well, every time I use that mug for the rest of my life, I will feel a spark of joy. I just invested $12 in my future joy.

As much as possible, I want to own things that help me feel good. That’s it. Is it beautiful? Is it useful? And finally, even if it is one of those things, does it make me feel good? Not, “does it make me feel good when I buy it?”, but, “does it make me feel good that I own it?”.

Like I own this lamp. It’s ugly as sin. I hide it in a closet most of the year. But it emits a spectrum of light that is helpful to me around winter solstice when my seasonal depression kicks in. So, the lamp helps me feel good, and thus we keep it.

Or coffee cups. If the goal is to drink coffee, then practically any cup will do. Practically any coffee cup would be useful. But some coffee cups make me feel better than others. Having spent an awful lot of my life in diners, I love to drink coffee from a thick, heavy china mug. It keeps the coffee warm, it feels good in my hand, and when I drink from one, I feel safe and comfortable.

I drink coffee every day, multiple times a day. Let’s say, on average, four cups of coffee a day, times 360 days a year, equals 1440 cups of coffee. And let’s say that every time I drink coffee from a thick, heavy porcelain cup, I feel just a small shot of comfort, of happiness, of peace and belonging.

That means that by the one-time act of buying myself a good coffee cup that costs at most $8, I am going to make myself feel good 1440 times next year.

Why in the hell would I not do that?

When I was growing up, we owned Corelle dishes. Like these. I hated them. They are break-resistant, chip resistant, and, in my opinion, joy resistant. They are thin and feel weird to me. And every meal, we ate off of them.

Now I am a grown-ass man and can buy my own plates, so we own Fiestaware. They cost more. But they are heavy and sturdy, and when I eat off of them, I feel good. Because they cost more, we have bought them over time, slowly, and rely heavily on thrift stores and estate sales. But every single plate was worth it to me, because I believe them to be beautiful, and owning (and using) them makes me feel good.

If I wake up in the sheets that make me feel good, and I drink the brand of coffee that makes me feel good, and I drink it out of the coffee cup that makes me feel good, and I drink it at the table that has happy memories attached to it, under the wall of shelves I built that hold the bowls and platters we bought together at flea markets and antique stores (and thus are filled with happy memories) and all of which I believe are beautiful – why, I have had a wonderful morning just by waking up and drinking coffee.

Just imagine if your whole day was like that.

Planting as resistance

I went tree shopping today.

We live on half an acre, in a former suburb. The house was outside the city limits when my neighborhood was built, but it would be annexed just five years later while the Korean War was smoldering.

It was nearly a blank slate when we bought it nearly three years ago, with a beautiful southern magnolia in the front yard and seven pine trees scattered around the lot and not much else. It was a great house with good bones, not looking its seventy years. It had been a church parsonage for its whole life before we bought it, which meant it had been cared for but never loved. We decided to love it.

Along came the pandemic, and then we endured hell as foster parents (not from the kids – from the system) and then my Dad died from COVID and then we had a damn insurrection in Washington and through it all, the old house began to love us back.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize things like a house. Heck, I just did it in that last paragraph. But it did seem like the house was happier being cared for, like it liked having the perennial bed planted in the front yard, liked the new deck we put up after cutting down the overgrown wisteria crawling all over the back patio. It’s like it knew we were looking out for it when we fixed the leak in the roof and replaced the sewer pipes.

But it isn’t just because we love the house.

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” – Leonard Wolf, in Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939

So I went tree shopping today. I’m currently looking for a particular crab apple tree, one that has edible fruit and long blooms and is disease resistant and can put up with our severe summer humidity. I love crab apples – I planted three at our last house – but here I am going to try growing apples as well, and I need the crab for a pollinator, in addition to its being beautiful and a gift to the wildlife.

By next spring, we will have 2 apple trees, a crab apple, six plum trees, a peach, two figs, 10 blueberry bushes, four blackberries and two muscadine vines. The apples and crab will go in this fall, and the peach is currently sitting in the driveway waiting for me to plant it.

It’s not just the fruit. It’s that planting things that will endure are acts of resistance to a world gone mad. It’s a form of resistance against all the forces that try to harm us, that try to drag us down, that try to dehumanize us.

Growing fruit is a long-term commitment to a place. We will have figs and blueberries next year, but it will be at least 3 years before we have peaches, and perhaps five before we have apples. But they will feed people long after current politicians are long- dead, they provide us nourishment and flowers and pollen for the bees and food for the birds and perhaps most off all, they are our vote for a future that looks very different than the present.

They are living, growing monuments to hope, to the future, to a world that will long outlast the one we have now. They let me remember who I am and what I hope for in the midst of a world gone mad.And while I don’t think you have to plant trees – maybe you plant iris instead, or flowers, or raise children – I’m all in favor of planting something.

Do you have practices that sustain you in the midst of all this? If so, tell us about them in the comments below.

Photo by Jacob Farrar on Unsplash

A Good Walk Shared

I went for a walk this morning. That isn’t unusual – I walk about two and a third miles most mornings, rain or shine, and have done for more than a year.

What made it notable this morning was that I walked with a friend. Normally, my walking is a solitary pursuit, but my friend Jill is wanting to get back in the habit of exercising, and asked if she could walk with me this morning.

It’s a great walk, with gentle hills, through a midcentury neighborhood with ranch houses and mature trees and a creek, with surprises around many corners, like the airstream trailer or the bridge over the creek or the hedge of azaleas that is a wall of pink in the springtime. It is the high point of my day, this walk is, and I was glad to share it with someone else.

As we were walking along, I couldn’t help myself – I kept pointing out things that I was excited about. That live oak, the ways this house had renovated their garage, the unusual plants these people had in their side yard, the vintage car in the driveway. All things I knew to expect, because I have seen them every day for months.

I also took delight in showing her the house that really went all out for Christmas, and the house where you will see a giant inflatable bunny rabbit come Easter, and the house that put up the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag after the insurrection back in January. Sigh.

Really, it almost felt like hosting a tourist in your town – like I was the guide, giving the history of the houses, letting her know where the famous author had lived, I pointed out when we passed the home of the former governor, showed her where the city limits had been in the 50’s.

It was a lot of fun, this playing host. I had not realized how much of this walk I have internalized, how much I had soaked in, how well I knew this stretch, and how fascinated with it I was.

Some things are better when you share them.

 

Don’t do it by yourself.

One of my favorite stories:

A salesman was driving through the country on his way to his next appointment. He took a curve too fast and ended up in the ditch.

He had no cell service to call AAA, and was cursing his luck when he looked over the field next to the road and saw an old man and a mule, plowing the field.

He walked over to the man and asked for help. The farmer unhitched his mule and together they walked to the car.

The man hitched the mule to the car, told the salesman to stand back and gave a mighty holler.

“Sam – Pull! Mikey – Pull! Davey – Pull!”

And then the mule leaned in, and pulled, and with a creak and a groan the car rolled onto the road again.

As the farmer unhitched the mule, the salesman stood there in disbelief.

“I don’t understand”, he said. “You called three names out, but you only have one mule. What was that about?”

The man smiled. “Oh, that was to trick Davey here into thinking he wasn’t trying to do it alone. If he thought he had to do it by himself, he wouldn’t have even tried.”

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When we know we have a team of people with us, we can accomplish things we never would have dreamed of taking on by ourselves.

Don’t do it by yourself.

The myth of inevitable progress

Our species has been on the earth for more than 200,000 years. 30,000 years ago, there was a sort of explosion of art and cave paintings showing up on multiple regions and continents. 12,000 years ago we began to build settlements and plant crops. We have a long and vigorous history as a species.  But much of what we expect life to be like is based on less than 100 years of our history.

Like the idea that you can retire. Or that you will make more money as you get older. Or that children will not work to support the family. That you will have access to clean water to drink. That you will be in love with the person you marry. That home ownership is normal and expected. That working for someone else for pay is normal and expected. And my favorite: That p is inevitable.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, however. After all, my grandfather was born in 1886. His son died in 2020. Two lives, during which time we went from horse and buggy to railroad to airplanes to visiting the moon to exploring Mars. My grandfather grew up in an age where a rusty nail could kill you, and in his 30’s would live through a global flu pandemic that killed millions. By the time his son was born, there were antibiotics and then polio took out most of a generation and then there was a vaccine and nobody died from polio and rarely did they die from the flu.

If all you knew of human history was the last 150 years, you would be convinced progress was inevitable. That over the long term, optimism is the only realism. That you should always be bullish.

But history tells us otherwise.

I love to grow things, and there are natural rhythms that occur you can depend on that guide our world. Like the last frost date in the springtime, the day on which your danger of freezing is gone and thus you can put out your tomatoes. But in 1815, there was a volcanic eruption in Bali that led to global climate impacts that lasted more than a year, including frost in Virginia in August. People starved, there was massive upheaval, and Mary Shelly was driven indoors and wrote Frankenstein as a result.

Life is not ordered – it is chaotic. Sometimes, the stings of good runs last a long time – but they are still strings, and not chains. And if you think that every day in the future will be like all the days you have had before, you will be OK… until you aren’t, and then you may be wiped out.

I no longer believe in the inevitability of progress, even if our economy is predicated on it. But nothing grows forever – things get sick and sometimes things die, and eventually, everything does.

Don’t mishear me: I’m not advocating for a survival bunker in the basement full of guns and body armor. But I do think it make sense to include in your plans the probability that things will not go according to plan.

Another time, I will talk about what I think a healthy amount of preparation looks like at the household level. But more important than any individual thing you do is, I think, the mindset with which you approach it. I don’t think things are guaranteed to get better or easier, which is why I have to learn how to get stronger and more resilient.

The important people

My father and I never had one of those father-son pissing contests that so many seem to have. Growing up, I thought (and still do) that the sun rose and set upon my dad.

Mom would often go to bed early, to lay in bed and read (I got that from her) and Dad would stay up and watch the news. I would stay up with him – just to be in his presence, uninterrupted. And sometimes, not often, and you could not plan a thing so important, but sometimes, we would get into a discussion after the news that might go for hours. The best memories of my childhood are of us sitting up late at night, discussing things – the future, my hopes and plans, how things work.

He would sit in his recliner and I would lay on the floor and I felt so proud to sit at his feet, to learn from this man who showed me that true greatness comes from serving others. He seemed ancient to me, but he was actually only 36 or 37 – four years younger than I am now.

The summer I turned 16, we sat up several times to discuss my job hunt. I had been offered a job at the grocery store in the nearby small town for minimum wage ($3.35 an hour in those days) or a job on the right-of-way crew for the power company, clearing brush away from the power lines for $4.50. I had a preference, and it revolved around the money.

Dad, however, advised against it. He told me that if I took the right-of-way job, at the end of the summer, I would know the other two guys on my crew really well, but that would be it. But, he said, if I took the job at the grocery store, I would meet a wide range of people. I would make some people really happy and upset others. I would see people at their best and at their worst, and I would know a lot of people at the end of the summer that I didn’t know now, and make lots of friends.

“And the only wealth in this world is friends,” he said.

So, I took the job at the grocery store. And it was a good job, and I stayed there until I graduated high school. But none of that is the story I wanted to tell you.

See, it was near the end of that summer, and I had been working at the grocery store for a few months. I had just gotten in from work and Mom was in bed and Dad was watching the news. So I sat on the floor at his feet and watched with him. And I knew, just knew, one of those treasured conversations was about to happen.

He turned off the tv when the news was over, and he asked how work was going.

“It is going great!” I said. “I am finally at a point where I know who the important people are.”

His whole body changed – I don’t have the tools to describe it. He looked overtaken by a wave of sadness.

He got out of his recliner and sat down on the floor next to me. He looked me in the eye, put his hand on my leg and said “Son, they are all important people. Every single one of them. Don’t ever forget that.”

I never have.