"Red Dirt Girl"

Before I had ever heard the song "Red Dirt Girl" by Emmylou Harris, I was a red dirt girl at Andalusia, home of Flannery O'Connor,  in Milledgeville, GA.

One place I could often be found while volunteering at Andalusia was near the green bushes, in that square, black opening under the front porch.  There I would spend Friday afternoons with a tin bucket and hammer, scraping away at the red clumps of clay, meticulously filling the bottom of my bucket with the red dirt to be bottled, labeled, and sold in the gift shop.  It used to be you could buy a bottle for fifty cents, but they are no longer listed on the gift shop webpage.  Check it out, here: Andalusia Gift Shop.

Red dirt that wasn't polluted with sticks, twigs, grass, or little bits of rock were hard to find, but underneath that porch,  it was in abundance.  So on Fridays, I crawled under there, despite my fear of spiders, creepie-crawlies, lizards, and especially snakes.  And believe me, snakes have been seen there.

One afternoon, as I mined the farm for more red dirt (we had an order of 50! bottles, so I had to put in some extra digging hours), a visitor, in town for the Flannery O'Connor conference, asked me what I was doing down there on the ground.  I told him, and he asked where I was from.  He said he could tell it wasn't from around here, but it didn't matter because I was on my knees in the red dirt; "You're from the South, now."

And it wasn't until later, after I bottled up those 50 little jars of red clay, until after I moved away from Georgia, did I really know the song, "Red Dirt Girl," that name I was calling myself.  I wasn't like the two girls in that song, trying to get away from the small town southern life.  Rather, the two years I spent in Georgia was the time I proved to myself that I could leave home, that I could do something more than what I only imagined.

That experience of working the red dirt into the life lines of my hands and that song, listen here inspired a prose poem without a title.  Suggestions welcome.

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"Red Dirt Girl" plays scratchy in the airless room.  At night she feels loneliest in the red lines of the clock radio, shaping the time, the hours when no one knows her.  Red Dirt Girl isn't just Emmylou beneath the Live Oak, all babies and booze, the still innocence of freckled cheek bones.  Red Dirt Girl paints magnolia's buds like virgin legs pressed tight together--dreams a blossom of someone to be with, even as the wax leaves brown and the petals drop.

Red Dirt Girl feels loneliest at night in the red lines of time.  Tattoos sweet magnolia and scrubs girlhood freckles.  Red Dirt Girl sleeps quietest with the open window and wisteria blowing in on that wind.  The red lines of time shaping her each year.  She wears the red henna lines of dirt in her palms, each one snaking into the distant future.  Before babies and booze.  And there won't be a "mention in the news of the world," about that slow living, rabbit-shy, far-away-from-home girl.  She feels loneliest at night. In the times when no one knows her.

First, Make Your Bed

 I've been traveling all over God's green earth the past few months, from Greenville, North Carolina, up through Indiana, to good 'ol West Salem, WI, and back down the trail again.  I've stayed with various friends, family, and lrecently, in my future house in Greenville.  Unlike a hotel, every time you stay with friends, you put yourself in a position of morning bed-making (if you're a good guest, as I am). 

For me, making the bed is done first, before changing out of pajamas and showering, before the coffee and sausage gravy and biscuits, before packing up your bag.  For me, it's also a little bit of a fear.  I'll never be able to make it up exactly right again.  Where was that body pillow?  Was the top sheet folded back or pulled all the way up to the headboard?  While clearly, not everyone has the bedmaking anxiety I do, I feel like I've folded back enough duvet covers, arranged enough decorative pillows, and smoothed enough wrinkled sheets to be somewhat of an expert. 

And upon considering my expertise one morning, (while doing none other than making a bed after spending the night at a friend's) I began to ponder where and when I had first learned or been taught how to make a bed.  There were two instances that came to my mind almost immediately.  The first was how many times I had watched my mom make her bed late at night before crawling under the fresh sheets; the folding, tucking, the layers of sheet and quilts and comforters. 

The second memory that came to me was helping my grandma make her bed mornings after sleeping over.  Though it may have only happened a handful of times, each memory of my grandma and I is all the more searing since she has developed the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease and is nearing 90.  Already, some of my favorite memories of our time spent together blowing bubbles in the living room, learning to sing "America, The Beautiful," riding Big Wheels around the block and through the alley are memories that only I remember.  The need to write about them, to make them real, becomes more necessary with each passing day. 

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First, Learn to Make Your Bed

The young girl and her grandma each pick a side of the bed.  She always chooses the side nearest the windows, close to the closet with the stained glass inside.  She loves the brass headboard, it's shine, doesn't see the smudges of her fingerprints, the flakes of rust from the faux-brass finish.  She waits for grandma to bring the sheet to the bed, her pudgy fingers like clothespins, grasping the worn-soft cotton of the floral sheets.  On either side of the bed, they pull the sheet taut, then fling it upwards, front-porch air ballooning beneath it.  Sometimes, the grandma will let her scramble under the sheet as it arcs up, and let her lie until it falls down in bunches on top of her.  Then they will unpack the sheet again, pull it tight and let it parachute to the ceiling. 

When it lands safely on the bed, the grandma's big-knuckled hands will smooth away each wrinkle, bringing the sheets tight up under the two feather pillows.  A sharp crease cut with the side of her palm.  And each layer after that, another covering to protect against the loneliness of the widowed nights.  Each cover like a sigh big enough to fill all the years her husband had been gone.  The young girl watches each gentle swipe of  the hand, each fold and the cutting line of the comforter hanging just so, barely touching the hardwood floor.  She wonders if she will ever have a bed to make, a bed to share.  She wonders when she will learn to make the bed all on her own.


Then, Lie and Die In It

Twenty years later, the big-knuckled girl, who has been making her own, lonely bed, follows around her trainer on the eleven-to-seven shift at the nursing home for nuns.  At night she makes beds.  She makes beds empty, she makes beds occupied.  She makes up beds after they've been soiled, makes beds after they've been slept in.  She makes beds.  She learns how to make beds over again.  Sheets pulled tight, no billowing, no ballooning, sheets pulled heard to the hospital beds, hospital corners, clean, smooth sheets.  Nubby blankets hanging evenly on both sides.  Beds raised up to save her back.  She makes beds high, she makes beds on the floor.  Every night she makes beds.

Her big-knuckled hands turn over the pillow for the fever-flushed Sister.  She hopes it's a cool side.  She unmakes the bed when the fever breaks, throws the sheets on the floor to be picked up later.  She makes the bed with the Sister in it, folding, creasing, unwrinkling as gently as she can.  She makes beds while the Sister suffers cancer, groaning, crying.  She makes the beds they lie in.  She makes the beds they die in.  She learns to make beds, she learns to just make beds.