"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.

* * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * *

"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.