Taking it back home

Uncle Kneel bought four of Miss Delia Harbinger’s hanging plants down at the Saturday Flea Market every two weeks, rain or shine. Two weeks was the amount of time, give or take a few days, that it took for the hanging plants that he bought the previous time to die. It became the obsession of my grandmother, who we called Ziggy, to find out why this was. She sat on her porch whenever she could, just so she could look across the street and spy on Uncle Kneel. Of course it wasn’t really spying. He could see her plain as day looking over at him, and it wasn’t in Ziggy’s nature to be discrete about anything. He did his best to ignore her. Which is something I could relate to. Ziggy was his older sister, just like Annelle was my older sister, and I made it a point throughout my life to disregard every word that came out of her mouth.
But to understand this, you also have to understand that if you were born a Foster, you didn’t stray far from Foster Drive, and you certainly didn’t wander out of Seven Mile, Tennessee, or if you did, you’d better have a real good reason. Like Ziggy’s youngest son, my uncle Winston, who had aspirations to be a country singer and moved to Nashville. Nobody could understand that when there was already a perfectly presentable band right there in Seven Mile that needed a new lead singer after Harlan Foster Thomas, who was in some way related to me, lost his wife to cancer. But Winston said he wasn't up to singing "Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown" at tent revivals. And my cousin Billy had gone to college in New York, and he might as well have fallen off the face of the earth for all that my aunt Yolanda heard from him. When he came home for Christmases everybody acted real proud of him, but none of them could understand what had been wrong with UT. And then there was my mother’s cousin, Jacinda, who moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her good friend Alice. And nobody talked about her, and when I asked Ziggy why, she said it was because Jacinda was a Lebanese.
But all that is just beside the point. The point is Uncle Kneel didn't water those plants because he liked to watch them die and said so to me one hot afternoon the July I had just turned twelve. Ziggy had never thought to ask him straight out what his intentions were with those plants, in fact all summer she had it in her head that he and Miss Delia were in a secret love affair. But no, that afternoon he peered over his newspaper at those plants, already starting to brown at the edges, and then at me, and he said, "I reckon I like to watch them trying."