Low Point

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women, nonbinary and gender-diverse writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation. 

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the first Vodka Yonic Writing Contest, a new collaboration between the Nashville Scene and nonprofit writers’ collective The Porch. We received more than 60 submissions — and they were full of vulnerability and boldness. The range of ages, experiences, backgrounds, tones and voices represented made the selection process especially difficult. Our winning entry — “Low Point” by Kory Wells — offers an intimate look at Tennessee through the lens of family, memory and place. The fragmented essay form moves like memory itself, and the images — both tender and unflinching — stay with you long after you finish reading. We are grateful to every writer who shared their work for this contest, and we look forward to celebrating more voices in the years to come. If you are looking for a place to share your stories or hone your craft, we invite you to join a class or event at The Porch (porchtn.org)!

—Yurina Yoshikawa, director of education, The Porch

—Hannah Herner, staff reporter, Nashville Scene

—Laura Hutson Hunter, arts editor, Nashville Scene

On the first day of seventh grade, Mrs. Grubbs shut off the lights, stood in the overhead projector’s glare, and sketched our state’s three distinct regions, from Delta west to Smokies east. For our yearlong study of Tennessee history, we needed to understand the lay of the land. She marked a dot for our college town, smack in the state’s middle. Surrounded by rolling farmland, we sat at the bottom of a basin, she said — a word I’d heard only Mamaw, my grandmother, use at her bathroom sink where two faucets separated hot and cold.

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A few summers before, in East Tennessee, I’d learned from Mamaw how to save time and water by taking a “whore’s bath.” I didn’t know what a whore was, exactly, but I grasped this process: You went into the little bathroom that smelled of mint toothpaste, witch hazel and talcum powder. You turned on the sink’s left tap. You waited. When the water finally flowed hot, you plugged the porcelain drain with a rubber stopper on a chain.

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Tennessee’s Central Basin is a bowl, Mrs. Grubbs explained, drawing a flattened U shape on the map. She made a small line at the base. We lived at this lowest point, amid clouds of cedar pollen and ragweed. This was why we suffered allergies. It’s hard to rise from the bottom.

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As the bathroom basin filled with hot water, you eventually turned on the cold, then dipped and swirled your finger, checking for a comfortable temperature. Water cost money, so when there was just enough, you’d turn off the faucets. Take a washcloth from the red chest beside the sink. Smell line-dried sunshine. Soak the cloth, lather a bar of Ivory, scrub your stinky parts. Plus your neck, where granny beads — a 3D mixture of dust, humidity and sweat — accumulated on hot days and sticky nights.

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For most of my life I’ve lived in the same state as six generations before me. Though they were mountain folk, I’m always driving to reach any hills — Walter Hill, Halls Hill, Chapel Hill. Anywhere but Capitol Hill, where I’ve quit turning for hope, and where every legislative session seems to take us further back in time. Yesterday my adult daughter asked, “Do you regret staying?”

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When I was young, I was going to move to The City, any big city. But then a full scholarship at my hometown university. Then a good job at a military research base close to home. Then pheromones, a certainty in every cell of my body, a man whose roots in this state run even deeper than mine. 

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Mamaw’s middle name was Tennessee, but she was born in Georgia — one of my first lessons in contradiction. As if a grandma in a floral housedress taking a whore’s bath wasn’t contradiction enough. Waiting for her to emerge in a mist of Jungle Gardenia perfume, I’d contemplate the wooden sign above the bathroom door that read, “What the heck you looking up here for?”

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When did I first start dreaming of elsewhere? Maybe in the week after we married and everyone wanted to call me by his name. Maybe a few years later, when my kids’ nursery school teacher pulled me aside and said in the South my children needed church to fit in. Maybe one of the countless times I kept my opinion to myself. Or during our travels, in those places I’ve seen more art, more preservation of cultural and natural heritage, more recycling, more Pride displays. 

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I don’t believe in regrets. But another word for basin is depression, and another meaning of depression is hopelessness — something too many of us feel. State lawmakers have surely learned about the “least of these” in Sunday school, but new laws further weaken support for public schools, wetlands, women’s health, diversity, immigrants, the trans community and more. “So leave,” I hear you saying. But there are my parents to care for, doctors we don’t want to change. So much community to love.

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I also don’t want to regret. I want to be proud of my deep roots in one of the most beautiful, musical, friendly and biodiverse states in the nation. And I want to live in a place that makes a place for everybody. So I summon the ghost of Mrs. Grubbs to remind the good people of Tennessee: Our state’s three geographical sections are called the Grand Divisions, and can’t grand still mean wonderful? I summon those mornings Mamaw let the hot water flow until it warmed, then stoppered the drain and opened the cold. I’m saying that achieving a balance is a process, that it takes effort to hold what you want just right. I’m saying I don’t have an answer for my daughter. But I can’t deny: Eventually it’s time to pull the plug. To let it all wash away down the drain.