From a distance, the woman’s figure in jeans and sand-colored sweater looks like that of a little girl running, almost out of breath with the excitement of something to tell.
Closer, the figure is easy to make out. It’s Dori Sanders, the Southern farmer-turned-writer who penned her first novel after passing 60. She is excited–brimming with stories about the folks here in her hometown, her siblings, peach farming and, most of all, about her family’s 150 acres of farmland. It is the place that is more home to Sanders than any house standing.
“For me, home is best described as a familiar place, a place that gives me a sense of belonging. I have that feeling of belonging when I’m on this land,” says the “60 something” Sanders, who still farms and divides her time between two homes.
“This land defines me. Houses don’t,” she says, picking up shiny rocks among the keepsakes that tell stones about and holding them against her fingers as if they were gems. (She keeps two for herself and gives a luminous one to a visitor.)
When Sanders says the farmland is really her home, it sounds a bit romantic, a sentimental notion you’d expect from one of the characters in her novels, “Clover” or “Her Own Place.”
But Sanders, whose homespun writing has been compared to that of fellow Southerner Willa Cather, is not speaking for effect. What comes off as colorful is genuine.
Even with no house on it, this farm, which has been in the Sanders family since 1915, is as much home to the writer as was the 13-room, two-story house in which she and her nine siblings grew up.
Walking across the farm with her and seeing her pluck weeds as she inspects a row of corn is like witnessing the unconscious housekeeping of someone who plumps pillows as they pass through a room.
The farm also is more home to her than her writing “cottage,” a five-room house with cream-colored siding in a Charlotte, N.C., subdivision. Forty miles from Filbert, this is the house that “Clover” bought. It’s where Sanders comes to write during farming’s off-season.
While its structure may not mean as much to Sanders as the land that nurtured her family’s roots, there are signs of her sentimental spirit scattered throughout this house.
Rocks that Sanders has collected through the years sit on the fireplace hearth, along with an iron that was once used in her family’s Filbert home.
On a small mahogany table by the door are round, horn-rimmed spectacles that remind her of her Daddy’s glasses. (“These are not his glasses, but they remind me of him because he loved books, and I love books to this day,” says Sanders, whose modest collection includes a first edition of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.”)
There also are peaches–not real ones, but faux peaches of all kinds–nestled in baskets in her kitchen and serving as visual reminders of her roots.
And in the bedroom that she’s turned into an office, papers and ledgers that go back to the years when her father ran the family farm lie atop the furniture–a still-life tribute to the man who led her to writing.
Sister to sister
Four miles from the farm in Filbert is Sanders’ second home, an eight-room brick house in York, S.C., that she shares with her sister, Virginia Malone.
“My sister designed this house,” Sanders says of the place Malone built and bought after retiring from the admissions department at American University in Washington, D.C. Malone, the eldest of the 10 Sanders kids, smiles as a visitor tours the sunlit rooms filled with antique furnishings and black Southern belle dolls she has made.
The Georgian-style home, which overlooks a sister-in-law’s kitchen garden, also is filled with laughter and talk.
The sisters’ conversation is like watching an intricate dance, one practiced over a lifetime.
“She has always been a talker,” says Malone.
“Oh, oh, oh,” says Sanders, bursting with a thought she can barely suppress until her sister finishes.
Malone looks at her and smiles.
“She talks her stories before you ever get a chance to read them,” says Malone. “I wanted to read them, but she tells you the whole story while telling you that she wants you to read it.”
Telling tales
Sanders’ uncontrollable desire to tell stories has a lot to do with why the farm has such a special place in her heart.
At the farm, funny and touching stories from her youth grew as easily as the watermelons, cantaloupes, mule corn, okra, tomatoes, turnips, mustard greens and peaches. All kinds of peaches–Georgia Belles to Sanders’ favorite, Sunhighs.
“We were all storytellers growing up and still are,” Sanders says as she takes a visitor to The Storytelling Rock. At the base of this massive, 15-foot-tall cliff without a coast, each of the Sanders children used to take refuge from the sun and their chores. Nestled in the Rock’s curved indentations, they would tease, chastise one another and tell stories about love, horrors and mysteries.
“I tell stories, but Reck told the best stories of all of us,” Sanders says, referring to brother Orestus, who still farms with her, Malone and brother Jarvis (everyone calls him “Jack”). “Ooh, Reck could tell stories so scary we would be afraid to go back home in the dark.”
At her parents’ farmhouse, which was destroyed in a fire in the ’60s, little Dori (short for Dorinda) overheard “grown-up talk” when her mother entertained and “listened as much as I talked.”
All of it seemed to go toward feeding the fertile imagination that eventually created “Clover” (Algonquin Books, $10), the endearing story told by a 10-year-old black girl named Clover about life with her white stepmother, Sara Kate. Two years later came “Her Own Place” (Algonquin Books, $9), which takes on a different voice in the telling of Mae Lee Barnes’ story of raising five children alone on her farm.
Sanders, who has never had a writing class and admits she didn’t do well when she attended community colleges in Maryland, says her father, Marion Sylvester Sanders, a school principal and peach farmer, like Clover’s daddy, may have set the stage for her to be a writer.
“I’ve always read everything I could get my hands on. I love reading, but as a child I couldn’t wait until my father came home so I could tell him everything that happened in the day.
“If you’re around me five seconds you can see how much I truly talk. So imagine what it was like when I was the first person to meet him at the door with, `Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I did this and I did that.’ . . . My father would just look at me. He was a most patient man. And then he would say to me, `Write it down, little honey. Put it on my desk.’ “
Sanders wrote it down. “I’d tell all about me and my brothers and sisters, and everyone else too. I probably wrote more than I should have.”
Today, Sanders says she doesn’t believe her father, who died in 1970, read the many pages she filled with her account of the goings-on of the day, but she says it was her father’s way to get her to calm down as a child.
“It taught me to get over things and to move on to something else,” she says.
On the move
For Sanders, moving on to something else means having the freedom to be where she wants to be. Today, that means sometimes being at her writing cottage, other times in York with Malone, enjoying their sisterly togetherness, and most importantly being close to her beloved family farm.
Riding by on his tractor, her brother Reck waves to Sanders as she shows off the farm.
“She still works here at the farm and at the peach shed,” he says. “She has a lot of stories in her that she’s been talking about for a long time. How you see her is really how she is.
“The only thing is sometimes it’s hard to keep track of where she is and what’s she going to do next,” says Reck, whose grin is as infectious as his sister’s.
Her latest book, “Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking” (Algonquin Books, $18.95), was published last year. It’s part autobiography and part cookbook. She’s working on another novel set in a town like Filbert that will be a mix of intrigue and romance.
Walking across the last stretch of the farm, Sanders finds a particularly shiny rock that glimmers even without the sun’s touch. Like The Storytelling Rock, the rocks she collects remind her of times, people and places, and keep her tied to the earth. This one she stashes under some twigs.
“I’m going to hide this one here so my brother Reck won’t find it,” she says in a mischievous whisper, and suddenly she looks a lot like the girl you first mistake her for off in the distance.
