A Return to Georgia
When I returned to Georgia after two decades out West, I thought I was simply coming home to be closer to family. To look after my aging father, play with the grandkids. To live more simply. I didn’t yet know that I was also coming home to myself.
Not the self shaped by boardrooms and deadlines. But the self that bloomed barefoot in red dirt, fought gnats over chicken and dumplings, and watched fireflies blink like signals from another world. The self who remembers watermelons cooling in Sugar Creek, fried catfish on Fridays, and the way a pine forest breathes in summer heat. That self was still here, waiting.
I found her in a house on the edge of town. A white country house with 11-foot ceilings, built in 1895 with wavy glass windows and a screen door that sings in the breeze. The floors creak like they remember stories. And maybe they do—after all, for seventy years, Joyce and L.A. Oakes lived and raised four sons within these walls. She played piano at the Methodist church two blocks away and likely walked these same floorboards with flour on her apron and hymns in her heart. He was a WWII vet, a survivor of the Bataan Death march, a prisoner of war for 3 years who used all that back pay from the U.S. and Japanese governments to buy 471 Oak Avenue and screened the porch for neighborly sittin’ and gospel sings.
Miss Janell, a senior neighbor and one of the first to visit with a homemade sour cream pound cake and a welcome to town, told me how Mr. L.A. would yell out, “don’t slam that screen door,” and now I wonder if it might have an echo of his war years. That same wooden screen door, the joints reinforced with metal brackets, is still on the back.
This house echoing with the Oakes voices became my refuge. A place where I could rest, write, and listen. And also renovate with my own hands.
Pinehurst Speaks
Slowly, Pinehurst began to speak to me—not loudly, but steadily, like a neighbor leaning in across the fence. Like Mayor Connie Christmas stopping by on the day we moved in to walk me down the street and introduce me to Thomas Mitchell, plumber, who could help stop the leaking pipes under the house. It spoke through the local farmers heading to their fields in morning fog. Through the distant hum of the old Griggs cotton gin cranking up in November across from our only retail establishment: The Pinehurst Diner in the remodeled train depot.
Through those old railroad lines and family names that show up again and again: Horne, Fullington, Dupree, Davis. It spoke through Linda Bowden, my neighbor, who once worked at the Vienna News and now hand-builds miniature furniture, just like I do. We discovered, over time and sweet tea, that we had more in common than we could count.
Pinehurst, Georgia, is a village in the truest sense. A few hundred souls, one red light* in the whole of Dooly county, and fields of cotton that stretch white as snow under a blue fall sky. A town with Pecan Groves, the occasional gator, a multi-generational family of law enforcement leaders, and a rhythm all its own. A rhythm suggested by the train moving through the center of town, and by farm equipment rolling through our streets as much as cars and trucks.
There’s no rush here—just the slow return of seasons, the smell of rain on tilled soil, and the occasional sound of two 20-foot graders moving from fields on the south side of town to the north.
A View from my Porch
What I’ve come to believe is this: Pinehurst didn’t just offer me shelter. It’s people offered me a warm welcome. And a cadence. It called me back to an older pace, an older knowing. A porch-light way of seeing the world—where things don’t have to be flashy or fast to be meaningful.
Which suits me best. There’s nothing flashy about me.
Here, I’m learning that storytelling is sacred. That our people, our land, our rituals—Sunday suppers, seed catalogs, Wednesday’s Noon-time testing of the civil defense siren, a yellow plane buzzing town every Thursday for mosquitoes, the square dance of cicadas and crickets—deserve to be named and preserved.
This is the first of many essays about this place, its people, and the way they keep time. I hope to honor them. I hope to honor this soil.
Because when I came home to Georgia and moved to Pinehurst, I didn’t just return to my home place, the region that raised me. I returned to a self I thought I’d left behind.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with the creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. She’s working on a book called Blood on a Southern Road about the ghosts we carry and the songs they leave behind. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, and the wild gospel that lives in red clay soil, you can find her listening for the next thing worth saying.
