Not once in the 34 years prior did I EVER deem the previous years of my life memoir-able...that is, until a well-meaning creative writing professor gave us a graded assignment :-) It was at this point that my inexorably boring childhood became of acute interest to me. That's right: I decided to use those precious, sacred, dull-as-crap snippets in time for filthy-lucrative purposes.
Never made any money off of it though, but I did get a good grade. One day I'll blog something about why grades matter to me so friggin' much (and why nobody else I've know in recent years ever gave a rip about them). It's deeply psychological, I assure you. At any rate, ripped from the years before, during, and after the red Ford Galaxy, the Rebel Alliance is proud to present: Windows of My World *intelligible Ewok grunts of approval*
It was always easy to turn my potentially-boring Central Texas farm girl existence into "Chronicles from Fairyland." For example, my Grandma had a jungle in her living room. I used to sit in my Papa's falling-apart recliner and stare into the mass of green, imagining who or what lived in between the leaves. One of the potted plants had huge elephant-ear leaves reaching up from sturdy stems and spreading wide into the air around them. Another plant looked like a massive, bushy carrot top except there was no crispy orange goodness hiding beneath the layers of soil. I know this for a fact. I once dug part of it up hoping that my Grandma was wrong about it not being a giant carrot plant. I even ate some of the leaves to see if somewhere, somehow I could discover carrot flavor. Obviously that never happened.
There were additional multi-sized plant pots, all in varying stages of age, height, and health. All worked together to create a mini-world in which my imagination romped freely. Tigers blended stealthily in with my would-be carrot leaves, though as far as I know, the tigers were never dumb enough to either eat the leaves or deny their non-carrot status. Panthers tracked the movements of all creatures from the base of a high-flying elephant ear. Countless adventures were happily enacted in and around this indoor
plastic-and-terra-cotta wilderness. All of it made sense to my brain. Of course I knew none of it was real, easily balancing the line between reality and fantasy. One foot lived among those forest "trees" while the other remained firmly sat-upon in my Papa's disintegrating comfy chair.
Exiting the farm house's dilapidated screen door mean entering an entirely new realm of imaginings within the rural outdoors. Little pill bugs always left conical depressions in the black dirt next to the shed where farm tools were kept. These waterless whirlpool formations clearly indicated where the bugs had burrowed into the soil for warmth, coolness, dryness, whatever was necessary for survival during that particular season. The cone-shaped alcoves were everywhere too, frequently appearing in neighborhoods. I would plop my barefoot, childhood self down in the dirt next to them and stare for several minutes at a time simply hoping to catch a glimpse of one leaving its place of protection…not to hurt them, of course. They were just excessively fun playthings. Looking back, I'm astounded that my attention span would last even that length of time without gratification of whatever senses needed gratifying, but last it did. There were a few times, however, when my patience struck pay dirt. I'd see a little segmented bug crawling tenaciously up from loose dirt that seemed determined to suffocate the ascent. I could never understand why the dirt didn't fall in on top of the bug consequently wrecking its subterranean home, but apparently it never did. The bugs must be magical, I thought. Any critter that could realign itself into a tight little ball then roll so smoothly around in my palm despite what should have been a painful contortion had to have mastered some small area of the supernatural.
My Great-Grandma made us cloth dolls to play with at bath time. The faces, arms, and legs were made of white cotton cloth, and the main torso area was always
covered with a brightly-colored material indicating the existence of a swimsuit. They had black, brown, and yellow yarn hair which was sometimes pulled back in pigtails. Their faces were carefully drawn on with an indelible black marker. When it wasn't bath time and I'd be in the bathroom for other necessary reasons, I'd imagine the dolls scaling the fiberglass walls of the tub, balancing their way to the center of the shower curtain rod, and then performing twisting, writhing dives into the tub below. The same doll always won. In time I came to suspect that the competition was rigged.
There was something mesmerizing about the movements of our Johnson's and Johnson's Baby Shampoo. When you turned it upside down, it made the most fascinating drop shapes as--rapidly, at first, before gradually slowing its descent--globules of deep amber liquid fell from bottom to top. The gravity-induced movement had a Cirque du Soleil-ish appearance as the drops formed, lengthened, and finally stretched themselves downward, melding once more with the cohesive whole. I remember counting how many drops would fall before there was too little liquid left upon which gravity could exert its pull…until it was no longer heavy enough to fall. It was a game that, for whatever reason, kept me thoroughly entertained. My reverie, however, was often interrupted by Mom yelling for me to get the heck out of our one and only bathroom.
I would always start watching the sky around noon. This habit began during childhood but extended far into my teen years. My Dad coming home for lunch in between his farming and ranching chores signaled the beginning of "A Random Summer
Day, Part 2" which meant that it was time for me to start my weather-watching cycle in earnest.
Naturally I was looking for rain clouds, or rather the potential for rain clouds to form later in the afternoon.
Once we were old enough to walk, it seemed, both my brother and I were forced into child labor in the cotton fields.
We very much despised our inherited "call of duty" into the family business since spending the school-free summertime rambling up and down cotton rows looking for invasive weeds to chop up was
not our ideal definition of "summer vacation."
Have you ever tried to chop up a fully-grown sunflower from dirt that has been baked concrete-hard by the
Texas sun?
These subversive and insidious plants are not, I repeat,
are not, friendly decorative additions in some new and trendy landscape design.
They are weeds.
Granted, they are weeds with the fast-growing capability of achieving trunk-like stems and tree-deep roots in a matter of weeks, but they are still weeds nonetheless.
So do try chopping one of
those up at age 12…with a hissing rattlesnake hiding beneath the bottommost leaf layer.
These are a few of the well-founded reasons why I began staring at the sweltering sky from 12:00 p.m. onward, hoping intently that a work-ending thunderstorm would develop. All we asked was that we be allowed to go back indoors and enjoy our Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, or current movie obsession like any self-respecting school kid on summer sabbatical. I got really good at my weather predictions too. There was a special brand of blue to the horizon when storminess was on its way. By 1:00 or so you could tell for sure if there would be an afternoon cotton-chopping reprieve. By 2:00 you could see the fluffy white condensational heads forming beautifully and even begin to smell change blowing in on the breeze-driven air. By 3:00 you could look up from the nine millionth set of weed roots to see those fluffy white heads balancing atop roiling deep blue, rain-soaked thunderclouds. Once you could see jagged lightning streaking groundward, you knew that it would only be another fifteen minutes or so until lightning was raging dangerously overhead. Oh happy day, it was then time to head indoors.
From the weedless comfort of my bedroom window I would stare out at a dirty, dusty vista being washed clean. The smell of the rain on freshly-turned dirt is unforgettably sweet, indescribably satisfying. There is no peace in the world to compare with the kind I felt while staring out at my small patch of the world being made new all over again.
I've always loved to watch, to absorb, and then to reform reality within the studio that is my imagination. What was really real about my surroundings was not always real to me. What was--and what is--does not always mesh with the way I think it should be. Even as a child I felt a deeply-ingrained need to have and maintain some semblance of control over whatever reality was forced or enforced upon me by family, friends, or environment in general. The need for authority figures to create boundaries for the children in their care is something our little-kid minds can't understand. It was because of this misunderstood necessity that I inherently knew, from about age three onward, that I would never have any "real" control over the powers which sought to control my life. Ultimately real reality was going to toss--and sometimes power-serve--uncontrollable circumstances my way, and I would have to make the best I could of them. Sometimes I've been able to completely reverse said circumstances, but more often than not I've had
to simply go with the flow and hope that flow dumps me somewhere nicer than the last place.
Imagination has been my solace and my survival, not my scapegoat. I've always known the score, and now that I'm forced to operate under the influence of adulthood, such knowledge is even more invaluable. Thankfully, with the encouragement of my creatively-gifted family to develop a healthy imagination, I've also always known how to even up said score in order to maintain a sane balance. Sometimes fantasy is the only practical method for hanging onto reality; therefore I continue gazing out of many different windows, whether a window literally exists or not.
Incidentally and as a related aside, remember the cotton fields from which my brother and I painstakingly hacked up wicked weeds? Well, one of them is now a sunflower field. Irony is a heartless, unforgiving little bitch sometimes.
(that last sentence was my segue into allowing myself a few curse words now 'n then LOL)
