southern culture

Damn, it’s hot outside . . . and a visual found poem

No Telling


The high today was an unbearable 104 degrees. My favorite thing is when the Weather Channel also give us the “Feels Like” temperature as well, because when that bad-boy reaches 111, like it did today, I’m not leaving the house. Enough, I say.

I know, I know. I’m actually old enough to remember when scads of people had no AC at all down here in Arkansas. In the evening, the attic fan would suck the living room curtains right up to the ceiling. People spent more time outside than in because the inside of a late-July Arkansas house was a steam bath. At least you could get a little breeze on the porch, even if it did smell like bubbling road tar.

I remember once watching my grandmother’s black hair rinse sweating all around her face in little back rivers from this kind of heat. She was also deathly afraid of rain and that made perfect sense. I use permanent color deftly and regularly applied at Athena’s Salon, and so have no fear of melting.

This heat is making me wander off-topic.

And since I’m whining about the weather, I guess I’ll indulge myself a bit and whine about mosquitos as well. They are numerous and biting. Sooner or later we’re going to have to experience Winter down here just to put a dent in the mosquito lifecycle. We could sure use a break on that.

For your summer viewing pleasure, a visual/found poem I call Skeeters. I couldn’t add music, so you’ll have to just hum something while you watch it. Just let me know what song came to mind.

Itsy Bitsy Spiders and Capturing Arkansas

No Telling

Let me begin by saying this is NOT the spider I found crawling out of my shoe last night. No. The one I found was black and fast and leggy and THIS big. With fangs and such. If a diamond spider had wriggled willy nilly across my floor, I’d have killed myself to snatch it. I wasn’t so inclined last night when the creepy one came calling. And it haunted me all night, because an unkilled spider in the bedroom is the stuff nightmares are made of.

I know there are some who understand spiders to be Ecologically Important and such, but I’m not one of them. In England, it appears folks go to great and expensive lengths to catch and release their little in-house arachnid friends. Can you imagine? This little contraption from Eurocosm swears spiders will be snagged unharmed so they can then be released out into the garden where they become Quite Beneficial.
Are they kidding me? I can still remember a few Sherman, Texas tarantulas capable not only of wrestling the business end of that catcher away from a grown man, but also chasing him around the house with it.

I’ll admit the spider that climbed out of my shoe and into God Knows Where last night wasn’t a tarantula. It was big, though, and alive and crawled hastily under my antique dressing table. Like any good Southern woman, I blindly blasted hairspray under there. Laugh all you want, but it works. I’ve killed many a creeping and flying varmit with aerosol hairspray and they drop in their tracks, as I’m assuming this one did.

Not knowing for sure made for some uneasy sleeping last night, though. A woman can get tired of killing her own spiders.

On a more positive and self-promoting note, there’s a little photography contest going on right now called Capture Arkansas. The winners are chosen in a variety of ways, but mostly by viewer votes and I’ve decided to play. Winning photos will be published in a coffee-table book, so you’ve got to take a minute or two to vote and look at some of the pictures. Anyone out there unfamiliar with Arkansas will find this an interesting visual vacation. Those of you from around here need to throw your own pictures onto the heap. It’s just good clean fun, folks.

You can either click on one of the photos over <——there, or click HERE to vote and admire. Note: my girlfriends from the Branson Trip have no idea I’ve done this, so sshhhhhhh…

A Bunch of Writers, a Pot of Coffee, and a Box of Donuts walk into a bar . . .

No Telling

The month-long Writing Project Summer Institute is over. I’m still overwhelmed by the stunning teachers who came, who wrote, who conquered. We began as a class and ended as a writing family. Sandra, Becky, Carolyn, Verlyn, Renee’, Janice, Barabara, Nan, Jennifer, Janet, Stephanie, Jane, and Mary have all become my sisters and favorite aunts. Mike, bless your only-man-in-the-room heart, you’re the scribbling brother I never had.
That’s what the NWP Summer Institute does. It wears us out, it makes us dig and find our words. It makes us forever connected as teachers and writers. We’re scribbling kin now.
It also makes us eat food we shouldn’t. Good Lord. I’ve got four weeks until classes begin and it’ll take every last day of that to undo the Sugary-Donut Damage. And then some. I suspect there are only a couple of us – the strong ones – who came out on the other side unscathed.

The Writing Project, Canasta, and Donuts

No Telling

I’ve been one busy gal. Just finished up week one of the Writing Project here at UCA after spending the glorious week before In Ozark doing the same thing – writing with public school teachers from Arkansas. This past week has been a scribbly one indeed, and the writing is good. I’ve almost filled a brand new Apica notebook already.

Because the National Writing Project isn’t about talking-head workshops, and IS about writing with your students, I’ve got quite a few pages of “starts” to work on after the last donut is gone in mid-July. I’ve fiddled around with the idea of a National Floating Rewrite Month (NaFloReMo), and it looks like I’ll need to implement that just as soon as this Summer Institute comes to a close. I’d love to rewrite as I go, but directing the SI tends to put a cramp in my rewrite style – there simply isn’t world and time to do it all. So keep your ears to the ground, because come July 18 (ish) there’s going to be a rewrite frenzy. Paper will fly, printers will eat ink, and no one can stop me.

I’ve included a snippet from a morning warm-up scribble below that needs a little dedicated time. I’d better go now and order some more Apicas, because – while aestheically delightful – they are mighty thin for what I’m throwing down right now.

canasta

Oh! Tick-tock, and such. The next Ultimate Self-Cleaning Book Giveaway drawing for three free books is Monday night. Be sure to put your name in the salad bowl, because I’ve got more books coming in here at a fairly fast clip. Please enter before I reach critical mass.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

No Telling

Poisoned produce is nothing to joke about, especially when the poison has spread to Arkansas. There are a few things we get excited about down here. Watermelons, for instance. Hope, Arkansas is the Watermelon Capitol of the World, infamous for growing the tastiest and largest melons anywhere. We also grew a U.S. President down there, and another fellow who’d like to be one.

As excited as we get about watermelons, it’s nothing compared to the religion surrounding Arkansas home-grown tomatoes. Almost everyone has at least one plant growing in a sunny part of the yard. Folks with more than a 5′ x 5′ square of unused land usually tuck at least one tomato plant in among the marigolds. Those out in the county grow enough tomatoes to feed a small country. These are always for sale at sweltering roadside stands or out of the back of a pick-up truck. There are people, I tell you, whose sole commerce is to sell those tomatoes.

You can always buy them at a chain grocery store, and a lot of people do. A lot of people, I might add, who are checking their temperatures and waiting to feel queasy right about now. While we’ve been reassured that the Recent Tomato Unpleasantness (salmonella) involves only store-bought tomatoes, just the thought of dire illness has many wondering how to complete their summer without freshly salted and peppered tomatoes on a plate. It’s a little like telling us not to eat devilled eggs. We don’t know how to behave.

My daughter hit the drive-thru at Burger King the other day and came back with ominous tales of posted “no tomatoes here” signs. Same thing at McDonald’s. I reminded her that 1) she’s never eaten a tomato in her life, and 2) in the end, fast food is just as deadly as salmonella tomatoes, but I don’t think she cares. She spent her formative years listening to the Bush administration and is afraid of damn near everything, even tomatoes she doesn’t eat. I did my best, I really did.

No government agency seems to be able to explain why exactly all those store-bought tomatoes are tainted. I find that scarier than the actual salmonella.

In the meantime, it looks like the roadside stands, farmer’s markets, and pick-up trucks are going to be our only safe sources. Unless, of course, you’ve got a staked plant or two in a tub out back. If you have any extras, bring them over to me.

Women’s Wear

No Telling

I love reading other people’s blogs. There’s always something out there that trips a writing or remembering switch in me. These little moments from other posts would be my antidote to writer’s block – if I believed in it. I don’t, you know, and neither should you. I have a whole litany of blog subscriptions that I read every single day. One of these is The New Charm School: Jennifer Warwick’s Blog for Recovering Type A Types. The latest blog post on her grandmother’s dresses inspired me. And that’s a good thing, because this is the last official day for NaFloScribMo.

I’ve spent the last hour or so writing about my Grandma Monda’s dresses and the woman who wore them. Such a woman. And such dresses. As a little girl I spent hours trying on her clothes over and over again, hoping they would someday fit me so I could become her. She was a tiny slip of a woman, under five feet tall and weighing in the double digits. I was busy growing into a body much taller and larger, so I do remember a summer or a Christmas or both when the clothes almost fit. I was eight.

Grandma Monda had a signature color – kelly green. She had many fine things in her closets, but I’ve imprinted forever on a kelly green rayon dress with white polkadots. She always left a few dresses hanging in a closet at their old family house in Stamps, Arkansas and that green dress was among them. Since my grandparents lived in San Francisco, there were times that our little family spent time in Stamps without them. One of the first things I’d do is run to the closet to make sure the green dress still hung there, still smelled like her, and that the rayon still fell from my fingers like mercury. Grandma Monda was my light – was everyone’s light – and the reassurance of that closeted dress was all I needed. I could wait, then, for the next poem, the next letter, the next visit.

When my daughter was a very little thing climbing in my lap, a little of the same happened for her. I had three waffle-weave cotton dresses – all the same style but different colors. These were the go-tos, the things I wore when I wanted the most comfort and the late 80s version, I guess, of the 50s “house dress.” At one of my infamous yard sales I finally gave up the ghost of those dresses and hung them on strung clothesline in the yard.

Emily was beside herself. A school-girl by then, she whipped those dresses off the clothesline slinging hangers and sale tags. Her tears were furious. These are the dresses I love, she said, you can’t sell them. I was struck dumb and then apologetic first because I had no idea, and then because I perfectly understood what she meant. Those dresses were hours and hours of snuggling on the couch, hems used to wipe tears. The face of her babyhood rested against that cotton and those dresses were not for sale.

There’s powerful love in the clothes of our mothers, our grandmothers. I suspect it’s the hand-me-down loving easing its way into the warp and weft of our DNA. I think of all the women who painstakingly cut up old dresses into tiny pieces to refabric the geometry of their love by making quilts. Born-again comfort objects. Mama’s blue print dress scattered across it like stars.

Dippity-Do and the Sacred Rituals of Beauty

Uncategorized

I’ve spent an entire, glorious week just goofing off. I’ve written scads of good and not-so-good pieces, travelled to a typewriter shop in North Little Rock, sang “You Are My Sunshine” endlessly to The Perfect Grandson, and read whatever the hell I felt like reading. I watched old movies – Gaslight, Toys in the Attic, Adam’s Rib, and anything I could find to stay away from CNN’s election coverage. If we’ve entered into a new war, please don’t tell me until Monday morning. I’ve still got two more days of this mindless bliss.

It’s only fitting that I rounded out the spring break week by making a leisurely trip to the salon. Now, I go to the salon for hair and nails regularly, but those trips are squeezed between very busy hours of very busy days during godawful busy weeks. It’s a delicacy to stroll into a salon, grab a cup of coffee, and just hang out until I’m transformed. That’s what I did today. No clock-watching. No knee-bouncing hurry. And I just basked in the glow of not needing to be anywhere else but Athena’s Salon.

When I was a little girl, women performed the beauty parlor ritual at least once a week. My mother did. Every Wednesday she had a standing appointment at the Jo-La-Ru Beauty Parlor, a sacred place where women shouted gossip from under noisy hood dryers. The objective, as I remember it, was to come in looking fairly haggard and leave with a beehive so manicured, so voluminous, that it was difficult to sit upright in the Plymouth without harming the teased masterpiece.

It took a long time to achieve such hair, especially before blow dryers and hot rollers. And there were hair products then that I never see now like Dippity-Do and that pink tape for bangs. It was all brush rollers and Aquanet at Jo-La-Ru on Wednesdays.

And the talk! Well, I honestly never heard much of it, no matter how loudly Mom’s womenfriends shouted from under those hair dryers. Mom was an expert at distraction and always managed to Find Something For Me To Do. I was only in it for the sweaty-cold Coca-Colas in squatty bottles from the ten-cent machine. But over my head I could hear the hoarse whispers of ruined lives and substandard medical care. I wish I could remember the particulars, but I was too busy coloring and drinking Cokes.

What I did learn was invaluable. I discovered beauty and exactly what it took for a woman to chase it down and own it. I earned my diploma in proper lipstick application and using a teasing comb. More importantly, I learned that these women – when away from their menfolk and gathered together with heads full of brush rollers – these women became themselves. It was like someone told them all to collectively exhale and they did it. They smoked Bel-Airs and sat with their ankles apart and laughed out loud. They tore casserole recipes out of magazines and told stories I wasn’t supposed to hear. They went without girdles. All afternoon.

These country club women let loose on Wednesdays at the Jo-La-Ru Beauty Salon, and it was a sight to behold.

What I did today at Athena’s Salon wasn’t quite that shocking. We live in different times and there’s a woman running for President, for God’s sake. I sat there getting my nails done anyway, continuing at least some part of the beauty ritual my mama taught me. Tina (Athena) and I laughed and gossiped a bit and I left manicured, rejuvenated.

Just so you know, there was a good five or six inches of clearance between my hair and the moon roof of the Avalon when I left.

Weather Report

Uncategorized

It’s sleeting outside this very minute. I’m serious.
Please understand that yesterday afternoon as I cruised into the typewriter shop, it was 75 wind-whipping degrees. It was January 29th and I had to turn on my AC both in the car and at my house. The wind galloped so frantically that power went out all over town and two people out in the county died from wind-related deaths. If the sky hadn’t been so clear we all would have listened for tornado sirens and stood on our front porches. I know that’s not proper Severe Weather Protocol, but that’s how we do it here in Arkansas. A tornado watch means nothing here because we’re always under one. We have to see that bad-boy touch the ground before we take cover.
That was yesterday. This morning it was an icy 26 degrees and now it’s sleeting. No one’s had a chance to run to Kroger for bread and milk, and that’s bad news. While we don’t generally panic during tornadoes, we go full-tilt when it snows or ices. All over town it’s Quick honey! Run to Wal-Mart before we’re snowed in. We get a little frantic because this is the land of 110 degree summers. There’s not a snowplow in the whole state and no one – NO ONE – knows how to drive on snow or ice.
Bread or no bread, I’m done for the night. As long as the plunkety-plunk I hear on the roof is sleet instead of hail, we’re golden. The Weather Channel says it’s supposed to be in the 60’s by the weekend. That figures.

The Miss America Pageant ..oh my

Uncategorized

Donna Axum, Miss America 1964 and an Arkansas beauty even now, must be weeping uncontrollably.

If you watched the Miss America pageant you know it’s the end of an era. Pageants are serious business here in the south, and no matter how many of us raised our perfectly manicured collective fists in the air for women’s rights over the past few decades, we still hang on. We’re not afraid to call them beauty pageants instead of “scholarship contests” because that’s exactly what they are. Ugly girls don’t become Miss America. Never will.

I’m not one of those crazy pageant moms, and I have strong feelings about those who doll their four-year-olds up like pole-dancers to win trophies. Let’s be clear about that. I also know that all those pageants a gal must win in order to slick Vaseline on her teeth at the Miss American showdown can be, well, less than a perfect feminist learning experience.

I recall with fondness attending the Faulkner County Fair Parade a few years ago, watching all the local first-tier pageant winners load up in their daddies’ mid-life crisis convertibles. All those sequins. Except for one gal sitting in the back of a torn-down Mustang. The Conway High FFA Queen was cut from another bolt. In a sea of pastel spangles, Miss FFA wore black – fingernails, hair, and all. She had a nose ring and bruise-red lipstick and a smirk. When it began to rain and widespread hairspray-panic began, Miss FFA just lifted her face to the sky and let her dark eyeliner run. I couldn’t help but admire her.

I’m certain, though, that if I’d paid closer attention I’d have noticed her mother scampering out of the rain with something over her head. It’s generational.

Look – I read The Women’s Roomand The Feminine Mystiqueand all versions of both that came after, as did every other girl who lived in Conway Hall at the University of Central Arkansas back in 1970-mumble. Southern women of a certain age have a feminist history, but it doesn’t include failing to shave under our arms or leaving the house without applying lipstick. The New and Improved Miss America pageant, understandably, leaves us gasping for that very reason.

The sudden casual air seemed to take a few of those contestants completely by surprise. And the “makeover”? I’m trying to imagine looking Miss Texas in the eye and telling her she needs to tone down that hair. Or worse, cut it. Those contest folks just told The Southern Woman that she’s not northern enough to win a beauty contest, and some will take that personally. Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas could actually secede from the union.

I guess I’m too old. I still want to watch a Miss America pageant complete with ballgowns, taped butts, and someone twirling fiery batons while singing Amazing Grace. Sorry, Donna. I guess those days are over.

Miss Dolly

Uncategorized

I did not bring a casserole. Unable to concoct to exacting specification the ooze and string of cheese gluing warm egg noodles to bits of ham, bell pepper, I chose instead to come to her empty handed. Two days earlier, catching shallow life through a mask she told me about casseroles. Don’t ever make a good one, she steamed into the plastic, it will be the only thing they remember of you.

I took her walk. I stepped her route, wanting my feet to roll and plant precisely as hers did each afternoon. I memorized each uprooted sidewalk slab, noting the angle, the lift of the foot required to navigate, where to slow, to speed, noting fragment odors she used to find her way. She began and ended here where the ginkgo drops its slippery yellows and, later, the rocky seeds that smell like five-day garbage when crushed. Half blind, she ached for strong odors.

Who was it pinched the stray hairs tight into final finger waves? Would she have cared? So many times I saw her bent hard at the middle toward some too-thick patch of irises, pausing only to remove a paperclip from an apron pocket, stuffing clip and dirt and sweat into that hair. The object was not hair, but irises. She only wanted a clearer field of vision.

Dolly liked order, but only as neatly as she could control it in the yard and kitchen. She had an eye for symmetry, pruning her life and privet hedges closely. Personally, she was discreetly unkempt, as old women with faulty eyes become when they can no longer fasten their own pearls on Sunday morning. She did her best work outside, guarding always between those flattened breasts a rag, reached for delicately, used to wipe neck sweat– or child sweat, if a loose neighbor child wandered into the yard. The small and curious and were soon put to work, paid each time with one unsquandered nickel. Those empty breasts never suckled anything except one husband, Baptist, 36 years dead. He was a man who knew how to wear a hat, she said, but still a man.

The afternoon he was put to ground they said she gave away all his suits to the young music teacher who lived alone and sang unchristian arias like a woman. Afterwards Dolly ambled – then more briskly, steadily – the two miles to the Plymouth dealership. Still dressed in unchanged mourning, graveside dust settled into the woolen bend of her arm, she told the owner, Teach me how to drive. Two hours later she placed a roll of old bills in the man’s upturned hands and eased the black-finned Plymouth home, headlights off in the dark. The following morning she became a Methodist and never went to church again.

Dolly left an expanse of small things old women leave behind. Chipped china of irreplaceable pattern, forgotten blankets, a hundred clear Kerr jars lined up like armageddon on failing pantry shelves, a pale blue initialed vanity case, locked forever and certainly never used which bounced against my leg as I opened the gate from her backyard to mine.

Back home, I found a straw hat to guard against freckles. I slipped out behind the mourners to weed her dill and took note of the crabapples beginning to fall like rose-star bombs ready for the steam and smash of the jelly pot, stretched a newspaper rubber band from my wrist and knotted my hair behind me careless as Saturday morning. When I fell to my knees, it was for work.

(I’ve been pulling out old first-draft pieces to mess with, and this is one rough one. It’s all over the place. I’ll pull it to the forefront for a bit and see if I can’t make it do what I want it to do.)