Home Grown

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Life, personal, culture, Journal, writing, the writing process, the creative process, writers, reflection, southern culture, writi

Writers in The South grow slowly and organically like garden vegetables, about one row back from the tomatoes (a.k.a “tomatas”).  We soak up about as much sunlight as we can, but grow the most on our rainy days.  We dare not cover the scuffs or rough marks on our skins, because it shows where we once laid on the ground until somebody came along to pick us up.

I’ve always emphasized my connection to my atmosphere.  I always say this as if I’m the only one who operates that way.  On occasion I like to prance around in self-indulgent thoughts when my ego has hit a little drought.  However, I’ve realized a lot of people are conjoined, like a Siamese twin, to his or her atmosphere.  After all, that’s how we develop different cultures.  Culture is born from an atmosphere rubbing off on everyone in it.  Writers come from all different backgrounds, but often display trends rooting back to the region they come from.  We Southern writers are no exception to the rule.

I’ve written on many occasions about the unexplainable energy that pumps through that Bible-quoting, front-porch-sitting, humidity-expelling, artistic cess pool below the Mason-Dixon line.  That energy is what fertilizes Southern American writers.  It’s our miracle grow.  We are emotional, romantic, hopeful, wishful, and always starved for something.  Those things are the connective tissues formed between us.  That’s what makes Southern literature incredible, and is why I want so badly to be a part of it. We are all home grown, sprouting up with seeds inside spicier than a hot banana pepper’s.  I know that fire, and it’s a blood thirsty flame that can only be controlled for fleeting moments at a time when my hand and the page connect and make sense for that minute.  Whenever that beautiful event occurs, I just look around me to quickly find where it came from.  When I read other Southern authors like, Sue Monk Kidd, Nicholas Sparks, Barbara Kingsolver, or the great Thomas Wolfe I recognize something.  I recognize a community pulsing the same heartbeat, a sweet Southern song, performed by a chorus of crickets and summer afternoon thunder.  I see all of the writers speckled about the lower right side of the map writing out those passions bred by an amazing culture, and I realize I belong there, and I am home.

Creative Writing teacher Natalie Goldberg says, “Often when a southerner reads [an original piece], the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can’t write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.”

I can almost hear all the Southern writers sigh, in different variations of the accent, a collective, “Amen.”

The Heat

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art, culture, Journal, Life, Music, people, personal, places, reflection, travel, writing

I’ve recently noticed certain areas of the country seem to be artistic hot spots, with an “it” factor bubbling beneath the surface.  Because of the juice radiating out, they become meccas for artists, musicians, and writers.  I started pondering what creates these locations that the arts orbit around like the sun.  They cannot be chosen at random; it can’t be a matter of chance when it comes to such greatness.  I started thinking about the places that make me feel that energy, and they have one thing in common…heat.

When I say a place has heat, I don’t necessarily mean temperature, though a warm climate usually is the case.  I mean the place radiates a fusion of controversy, history, hurt, love, and soul. That’s why many of these places are southern cities.  I’m thinking of two places in particular:  Asheville, North Carolina and Austin, Texas.

I was born and raised in Asheville, a place that was once only a patch of dirt in a misty valley marking the crossroads of two Cherokee Indian trails.  The Europeans checked it out, along with the rest of The South in the 16th century, but the Appalachian town wasn’t born until the late 1700′s.  Soon enough the new settlers pointed the natives towards the trail of tears to Oklahoma and took the land for themselves after being drawn to the scenic landscape.  I would say Asheville’s first heartache was the day of its birth when it was pried out of the hands of it’s inhabitants.

After becoming a hub for 19th century sanitariums and wellness centers, the area attracted a little more attention.  However, it wasn’t enough, and the city suffered.  When the stock market crashed in ’29, Asheville had the most debt per capita of any city in America.  Therefore, the beautiful art deco buildings, mostly built after the Civil War, were preserved because the town couldn’t afford upgrades.  On accident, and due to poor financial management, the buildings themselves became art, and are now a rarity in the United States.  There came the architects, artists, and tourists.  There came the livelihood.  Art.

Now the heat pumps out of Ashevlle from the inside out.  It pulls in abstract thinkers like an insatiable magnet, thirsty to connect with everything around it.  It’s a vibe, and I swear it’s stronger on hot summer days…

Now there is Austin, Texas.  I visited there for the first time just last week.  I’d heard so much about the city’s music scene and was anxious to check it out.  Home to artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the blues is a staple of the musical society.  I knew it would be interesting, but I didn’t know that whatever that presence was down there, would be so tangible.  I did know however that the blues is something a little more regal than other music, because it literally gnaws its way out of the soul.  I should have known there would be something surreal there, caught in that beautiful area that lives somewhere in the middle of happy and sad.

It was 90 degrees at eight o’clock at night of 6th Street.  People were hustling and bustling, and something sweet in the air was sticking to my skin.  Maybe that’s what humidity in The South is…it’s the magic in the air reaching out to grab us, not letting us go.  It was in the air that night.

I walked down the cracked sidewalks, staring at old buildings that made me forget I wasn’t in Asheville, hearing different brands of blues pulsing from every street corner.  Smoke came out of every bar, but I didn’t smell one cigarette.  I’d almost swear on all that’s holy that it was the music floating out like an apparition, but I won’t go that far.  Whatever it was; it was mysterious.  It stirred up feelings that don’t really have words, which is why I suppose, not all artists write.  Some of them just have to slide their fingers up and down the seductive neck of a six string to convey the whisperings in the air around them.  It can only be felt, not retold.  It was all over Austin, and had me sweating it out of my skin.

That feeling is what makes art so intriguing.  It’s why the heat is better than the cold.  Heat makes us lose our minds, stir up emotions that most have the good sense to leave untouched, strip naked, and make something real cry out of us in some art form or another.  It’s hot because it’s always moving, always picking up steam, and is so far gone that it will never cool down.

Raw

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Journal, Life, literature, love, personal, reflection, sexuality, the writing process, writers, writing

There are certain universal truths that hold all people common.  Whether a person lives in a small fishing village on the coast of Indonesia or in a high-rise condo in the financial district of Manhattan, certain things connect them.  When it comes to human nature, circumstance has little to do with who we innately are.  We all need the big three: food, clothing, and shelter.  We all work for those things.  Granted some work for bread, while others work for caviar, but that’s just a matter of opulence and means.  That becomes a social or financial phenomenon.  The thing I am talking about is raw human nature.  Another big one not so broadcasted?  Sex.  Red, yellow, black, or white, we all do it.  Therefore, I have to write about it…

When writing a novel, certain elements must be present to make the subject relatable to people from all walks of life.  My latest project, a southern period piece, is very regional in nature.  However, I’ve used certain tools to bring out the humanity in my characters so hopefully anyone can relate to them. The romance in the novel is between a white boy and black girl in 1950-something Charleston, South Carolina.  I needed the energy between these two characters, who were caught up in the Jim Crow South, to feel real, and I needed people of any race or background to identify.  It’s simple. I needed to write a sex scene.  I needed to convey the ideas of longing, passion, fear, love, newness, and bona fide forces of nature to a blended audience.  I needed my readers to feel the magnetic pull between my characters.  I had to recreate in words, the most naked part of human nature, the most carnal part of human nature, the most profound connection between two beings…and frankly, I was a little shy about it.

I’ve never been a person uncomfortable with sexuality.  I don’t believe in whispering around about it and pretending it doesn’t exist.  That would be denying a fundamental part of our make-up, as well as an actual gift from God.  Writing about it however, knowing that other people would read it, was surprisingly hard for me.  I mean, I’m a female with a notoriously crude sense of humor who will say just about anything for shock value in certain situations, but I couldn’t write a sex scene? I was perplexed, and considered avoiding it entirely.

I think it was that I felt so exposed.  This is a subject considered to be taboo, except in secret.  This isn’t in order to keep it intimate and sacred (which it should be), but instead to protect the insecurities bred from social scrutiny.  I couldn’t help it…while I was writing this scene I felt naked, as if I were showing a part of me that could incriminate me.  My moment of revelation came when I realized that was exactly what I was supposed to be feeling.  In the fifties, society said this white boy and black girl couldn’t, because of their nature, because of their race, feel those feelings that are just human.  There was a shame to it.  I had to convey that as well.  When the shame left was when the passion stepped in.  That’s the point when our inhibitions leave and we let those tiny connections make contact.  We surrender to loneliness, euphoria, pain, intrigue, or in beautifully rare cases, actual love.  We let the animal in us decide, and it makes so much more sense than the lies we wear on our judgemental faces when the endorphins wear off.

At that point, it flowed.  It flowed out of me, onto the keyboard, and right through my characters.  I stopped thinking about how to handle it and just wrote what is real.  I wrote what they would really be feeling, doing, and exploring.  During that scene that I had considered omitting, my characters sprang to life.  Their souls were stripped naked, and they were ready to attach themselves to readers from any demographic.  They were just acting out a hunger, a color blind hunger, we all know but are told repetitively to hold at bay and only speak about in embarrassed whispers.  I decided not to “handle” this scene, but to embrace it, and do it some justice.  This was my opportunity to let my characters to reach out and grab people at their cores, maybe make them blush a little, but certainly make them feel something real.

I once read that Barbara Kingsolver, author of the wonderful book, The Poisonwood Bible, had a terrible time writing sex scenes.  She hated it and tried to avoid it herself at times.  Now, as my own writing matures, I get it.  We writers have a responsibility to write truth.  Writers have the ability to make people feel less alone by finding the things that foster camaraderie between all mankind.  We have to somehow illustrate, by using words we’re told we shouldn’t, what being mortal means.  It isn’t always pretty, graceful, and tasteful.  It’s sometimes ugly, awkward, and crass.  But, if we write, we write it all…the good, the bad, and the bumpin’ ugly’s.

The Magic in the Grass

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culture, Journal, Life, memoir, personal, reflection

Watching time pass and the rites of youth change hands is a strange phenomenon.  In part, it’s a nice thing to experience.  It brings back the smiles and the laughter, and reminds us of what once was.  If we can’t relive it, we can watch with a knowing joy, how those who go after us laugh at the same things we once did.  On the other hand, it reminds us, that in many ways we can never go home again.  We may stand in a yard that we know better than the backs of our hands, steeped in nothing but memories, and feel a little bit like strangers.  It’s like remembering a house that someone else lives in now.  It’s a little bit consoling to see it from afar on lonely days, but on other days, it’s very presence is excruciating.

This weekend my best friends were in town.  We all gathered at one of the friend’s grandmother’s house for a cookout.  When I stepped foot on those 13 some odd acres, the smell hit me first.  It was the smell of what late Spring nights meant at sixteen years old.  It was a smell that meant ten girls in half-filled bikinis were riding over the hills in a John Deere Gator as if they were owning the power of a Lamborghini.  The smell meant we were fresh out of the neighbor’s pool plotting which of the nearby boys’ cars we would roll.  Except this time, I was an adult.  I was bringing plastic picnic items, because I was old enough to contribute to the party.  That Gator stayed parked in the dusty garage, lonely from years without companionship.

We eventually decided to dust off the old Gator, and go for a ride for old times sake.  We threw the potatos out of the back, and climbed in.  However this time, we had a new member for our club:  the daughter of my friend.  She is two and a half, and taking her first ride.  Instead of speeding up and down the hills, we take them slowly, in an effort to keep the toddler safe.  We drive her to see the horses grazing in the pasture, before bringing the farming vehicle to a stop beside the hammock we once broke from piling into all at once.

Our time in that field had passed, and the torch was in a new hand.  We were now four women watching from afar, two pregnant, and the other two pondering when we might be.  Life has new, more profound excitements, and maybe slightly less magic.  The absence of magic isn’t a tragic death. It’s only one brand of magic, and there are others.  It’s the niave magic though, the one that can’t be recaptured.  That’s what nostalgia is for.  However when it made its appropriate exit, it made room for real things, things we can hold onto.  It made room for our marriages, births, homes, goals that were once only dreams, and strength.  There’s a reason it all ends.  It’s actually the way we get to keep the magic in a box to look at from time to time for smiles on days where grown-up life gets too real.  If it wasn’t another time, long gone, to escape to in our heads, it would have served no purpose to begin with.  We would never have known it was truly magical.  This way, we keep forever the things only that field grass knows, and graciously gift it again and again…the magic in that grass.

Swinging from the Brush

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golf, Journal, Life, personal, pop culture, reflections, sports, writing

I have written about, on several occasions, the special brand of joy I get from watching people’s dreams come true.  Somehow when I see others taking their dreams by the hand for the first time, I think if I get close enough to them, that some of the energy will splash onto me.  It’s like getting close to a waterfall…You know you can’t stand underneath it, but as you near it, the mist finds you for a little taste.

The Masters is my favorite sporting event of the year to watch, partly because of its homage to southern tradition, and partly because it is a breeding ground for impossible dreams coming true.  With 150 some odd contenders, anything could happen.  There’s always some guy out there, in that sea of plaid-wearing men, hoping for his first time to wear that green jacket beside the greats to come.  He knows it’s about as likely as seeing a shooting star, but that the right number of swings will put that shooting star in his lap, and that jacket around his shoulders.

This year’s winner was Bubba Watson, and he let his dream do a victory lap down his cheeks when that last little putt sealed the deal.  However, when he hit the ball off the tee in the second round of his sudden death match, it wasn’t looking good.  He swung that self-expressive pink driver with incredible speed as usual, but it landed him deep in the woods, without that coveted short grass in sight.  At some point or another, in the ninth hour, every human has taken that shot in some way.  To twist the knife, though his opponent didn’t hit a perfect shot, his position was much better.  Some people thought Bubba might have just kissed his victory goodbye.  He was, for that moment, the underdog.

However, the man who had never even taken a golf lesson or watched himself swing on camera, waded into that thick brush with a steady hand, and catapulted that ball out of the heavily staggered trees that were begging to keep his ball away from the green.  He was unmoved.  With an emotionless expression, he shot his dream living in that little white ball all the way to the place the waving flag beckoned him.  Two putts later he was a champion.  He pursed his lips together and looked into the sky, for a moment too spiritual to recount.  Then the tears flowed, paying respect to his dream for clawing its way out of that thicket, and riding the force from his club out of the gates of hell to freedom again.

I can only thank Bubba Watson.  I tip my hat to dreamers who still pursue their dreams when they wake up, when it hurts to fail, and when real eyes are watching all around.  It was beyond inspiring, and was like catnip to me.  I craved what he was feeling, and the writer in me grew thirsty. If he can hit a wild shot from the bowels of Augusta National, I can surely keep throwing my words at literary agents in New York City.  One of those wild swings will, against all odds, land on the right desk.  If I keep knockin’ the hell out of it, with my unique driver and rugged swing, I WILL wear my jacket too one day.  It will just wrap itself around my words instead of my body.  It will have my name on front, under the title of my novel, and it will sit on a shelf next to the ones who have already earned their jackets. It will be my moment of greatness that teases me now from afar.  I just have to remember, I’ve gotten far enough to stand in the hazard.  I’ve written the novel.  I swung the club from the brush.  Now its up to me to sink that putt.

We weren’t meant to live in the brush…we don’t belong there.  We are fashioned by nature to inevitably find the hazard, but we are equally fashioned to rise from it.  We have arms made to keep swinging.  However, we are mortals, not magicians.  We have to organically, with sweat, blood, and tears continue to swing.  Whatever we do, no matter how deeply in the woods our balls are buried we MUST swing over and over.  We were built with a driver inside begging and battling with us, to make it to the green.

What if?

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Journal, Life, observations, personal, pop culture, reflections

Last week, when the Mega Millions Lottery reached the largest amount in history, I bought a few tickets.  I’d never bought a lottery ticket before, but this time I had to.  First of all, I liked the camaraderie.  There was a general buzz of excitement all around.  This was probably nation wide, but I assume was even more scintillating in The South.  When the idea of “what if”" infiltrates a small southern town people start scrambling around like ants after a single drop of honey…and frankly, it’s damned enjoyable.

There was an energy floating around in its purest form.  It was salt of the Earth, fundamental hope.  Somebody was going to win the pot, and for at least a day, that idea reminded people,vastly diverse people, that we’re all human.  We like the idea of hope.  We like the idea of maybe.  We like the idea of dreams coming true.  It is practically written into the human genome, but it’s one of those factors that don’t show up on the scientific map.

At first glance, winning the lottery doesn’t exactly appeal to deep thinkers as a vessel leading to some kind of universal truth about the human condition, but my single day of studying this matter proved the contrary.  It doesn’t matter how seemingly superficial, not to mention unlikely, winning the lottery is.  It was a reason to feed that place in the pit of our stomachs that whispers to us all the time.  It gave us a reason for a “What if.”  We need that…if we knew there was no possibility of an unknown greatness, slumbering somewhere in our lifelines begging to be woken up, why would we care to keep living?  Hope, no matter how big or small, serious or playful takes up at least half of the substance flowing through our veins.  Maybe it’s what makes our blood turn red when it meets oxygen, when it is released from our bodies into the world.  It’s a red-hot excitement for what’s next.  Even people who wallow in their own methods self-preservation, proclaiming hopelessness really have it deep down.  They are just the ones who don’t tell anyone.  It is innate to hope, wired in us to ask, with unrivaled yearning, “What if?”

Star-Crossed Lovers

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Journal, Life, novels, personal, reflection, writers, writing

A writer and a new idea are like two star-crossed lovers who meet every once in a while, when the tide is just right for an explosive union.  It is an unplanned rendezvous dictated completely in the throes of the universe.  It is a love affair that comes upon as rarely as leap year and rocks the Earth off its axis.

Ideas cannot be created…they are bits of matter that ignite whenever they come into contact with other particles.  When they ignite in the same vicinity of the person with the pen, it’s magic.  It happened to me today…

I’m a real sucker for the chance to exercise my love for historical fiction.  Oh, how I love a good period piece!  Lately I’ve been looking to shake things up a bit and focus on a more modern story…and just like that,  something I read about the Gulf War sparked a beautiful father-son tale stretching over a twenty year period from the pre-persian gulf conflict to post War on Terror (with a little love in the mix).  Somehow my story and I crossed paths through a memoir George W. Bush wrote about his decision points during his presidency.  I never thought old “George Dubya” would have anything to do with my next piece of fiction, but he did.  He happened to be that bit of unsuspecting matter in the air that led to the spontaneous combustion of inspiration.  Who knew?

Now, on an ordinary Sunday in early Spring, something great was born.  Perhaps my third novel?  Time will tell…but the rush of getting to splatter some more ink into my “ideas” journal was enough to call it a successful day in the world of writing.  I never know when my lover may call, but he did today and we spent some time hashing out the logistics of a new masterpiece.  I’ll ride the waves of this meeting for sometime probably, until he beckons again through some other unsuspecting object.  It’s like getting into Narnia…it’s never the same way twice, and it’s impossible to plan a trip.  However, I know if I’ve been once it will summon me again.  And, as always I will sit on my porch with nothing but the gentle breeze beside me, like a lonely teenager waiting for a soldier stationed in a far away port to return to her…I will wait for my star-crossed lover to find me again.

The Someone I Am

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Journal, Life, memoir, personal, reflections, the writing process, writers, writing

I found a box in my father’s basement.  I was looking for a Christmas card of mine he’d accidentally packed up with the decorations.  I was darting my eyes around the musty dark crannies of the room when I caught a familiar smell.  It was a smell that hadn’t graced my nose in close to ten years…it was nothing fancy, only a candle in a broken glass holder.  However, the smell triggered so many memories that I couldn’t help but follow it just to see what archives it might unearth.  Suddenly I time-warped to 16 years old, listening to something like Audiovent or Finch (which no one would recognize today), pining over whichever boy I was denying I liked, but couldn’t get out of my head.  With the scent of the candle came the fantom smell of a spring breeze infiltrating the porous lace sheers that covered my two bedroom windows.  I was in another place…a young, raw place with many of my beginnings.

I followed the smell all the way to a dusty old box I found filled with general cheerleading paraphernalia, academic awards, school newspapers, posters the underclassmen had made me when I cheered my last game, and assorted flower petals and gummy bear wrappers from a boyfriend I had for about two months that I haven’t seen since then.  Of all the junk, that if put in a blender would produce a live teenager, I found only one thing that really made me think.  All of the things made me smile, but one thing reminded me that under all the superficial things I have always been the same person I am right now.  I was a writer then too.

It was a circular wheel-like construction divided into four parts.  When I saw it I remembered the project.  We were to make a visual representation of who we are.  In one corner were pictures of sunsets, beaches, and misty mountain mornings.  In another corner was a collage of words, written in a whimsical fashion, that I felt described me.  They were words like passion, dreamer, hunger, and dissatisfaction.  In the third corner I had a drawing, which is a little strange, because I’m a horrible artist.  However, if I ever drew one good thing, it was this.  It was a face–mine I suppose, with a hand halfway over my mouth, and only one eye showing…maybe because then I only let a little of me show to everyone else, but I was on my way to exposure and a revelation.  In the last section I only had one central phrase, “I’m a writer.”

I’m so glad the smell led me to that box.  It helped to remind me that I’ve always known what I am.  It’s been with me all along.  Now on days I have trouble finding encouragement, or consider not writing another page because I’m truly scared to pull the trigger all the way on my dream, I have something to pull out of the cobwebs of my past.  I can remind myself that a writer is not something I want to become, but is the someone I already am. It was resting comfortably in a box, but I’ve let it out.  That box called to me, with nothing but a smell connecting us.  I’m so glad I followed that smell of a cheap candle right back to myself…the someone I was, the someone I want to be, and the someone I am.

Taste Buds

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individualism, issues, Journal, Life, personal, rants

Nothing is more irksome to me than someone telling me, when they see I don’t like my food touching, that “it all goes to the same place anyway.”  First I will state the obvious; if this were true, that it doesn’t matter that all food gets mixed together, then that would be the way we eat it.  There would be no room for likes or dislikes, or separation of food at any level.  There would be no recipes, no taste buds unique to the individual.  We wouldn’t be built to differentiate.  The saying is just a way for people to disdainfully comment on someone else’s personal tastes.  It’s a chance to call a decisive person neurotic.

People who use the fore mentioned statement also tend to spout the “children should be seen and not heard” cliche`.  This one is even more maddening to me than the first.  Do people really want to raise 100% quiet and compliant children?  Do they really want to take their voices away from them, so that they grow up to be crippled by lack of individualism and principle?

I pray that I one day have a child that argues with me.  I want them to ask me why things are wrong, and why rules exist.  When they get in trouble I want to give them an account of why it happened.  I will refuse to buy them paint-by-number coloring books, or dolls that come already named.  I’m not an extremist…I don’t want to raise a nation of brats who have no respect for their elders or certain traditions, but I hope I can raise an individual, and teach that individual to think if nothing else. Like the wheel, some things don’t need to reinvented, but we have to explore to know what those things are.  There’s just a shortage of people now who ask before they are spoon fed; who or what filled that spoon?

I will again quote my beloved Fitzgerald who said, “Either think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”  So often we are condemned for being heard, or fighting the majority.  We are crucified for being unpleasant, whatever the real definition of that is.  The worst part is that these ideas, always being cool with the status quo, are molded into our malleable heads as children when we are taught over and over to blend in.  We are taught to be silent, not to disrupt, and above all to deny our taste buds, never to fuss over our mashed potatoes touching our green beans.

I love my taste buds, and I love my parent’s for letting me use them.

Hazel Poteat

Tags

Journal, Life, memoir, memories, personal, reflection

When I was a little girl every weekend we’d go visit our elderly great-uncle at an assisted living facility.  My memories of him are limited, but mostly pleasant.  He was a quiet little man, who always let me drink the Carnation Instant Breakfast he had on hand.  After I’d have a glass of the chocolate morning-time drink, I’d retire to the porch to shake his bird feeder (until he covered it with molasses to stop me).

As fond as my memories of him are, it was another person I met during these visits that sticks out in my mind. I would often become quickly bored and increasingly mischievous when we’d make the trek to Highland Farms.  For a third grader, the old folks home left a lot to be desired.  I constantly looked for things to amuse myself with.  After an end was put to the bird feeder shaking, I had to find something else to get into.  I tried playing with my Uncle’s canes for a while, but it wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped.  That’s when I wandered into the nursing home section of the facility, and strolled past Hazel Poteat’s room for the first time.

Hazel’s room was the last on the right down a long, stark white hallway.  When I meandered by, peeking curiously into all the other rooms, I found they were typical…white linens, cork boards sparsely spackled with pictures, food trays, wheelchairs, old people who smelled a little bit funny.  However, when I pranced by Hazel’s room I saw something else…color.  There was a sea of red and green covering the alluring room.  I was completely enchanted. It wasn’t Christmas, but there was a vividly decorated tree with ornaments from all over the world hanging on its branches.  She had beautiful oriental rugs covering the tile floor, and vibrant curtains in the place of plain white blinds.  I kept pacing back and forth, trying to go unnoticed while I got look after look.  I almost jumped out of my skin when she motioned from underneath her bright satin gown and summoned me in.

She was letting me into her wonder world, and allowed me to not only look at, but to touch all the trinkets I found once inside.  I didn’t even hesitate.  At eight years old I wanted to be part of her eighty year old world, and all the “doodads” that came with it.  All the things in her room were so beautiful, so interesting, so much like Hazel herself. They were aged, interesting, and timeless.  Most importantly, they didn’t care where they were.  Seeing this kind of room in a nursing home was like seeing a daisy grow up out of concrete.  The beauty of Hazel’s room pushed out past the smell of rubbing alcohol, and the squeaking background noise of nurses shoes treading the hallways to reign as the king of her world.

One of the first things I ever noticed about her, besides the room, were her crooked fingers.  She suffered from terrible rheumatoid arthritis, which I of course quizzed her about in-depth.  She told me all about it as if it were no big deal.  She almost wore her bent digits with pride because they meant she had done something in her lifetime.  Her hands were gnarled into bent tree branches, but her nails were always painted the shade of pink women at the Baptist church wore on Easter weekend.  She didn’t stop decorating her nails because of her hands, just like she didn’t stop decorating her living space because she was in a nursing home.  She had a decorated spirit, that Hazel Poteat.

Over the next year or so I visited her frequently.  I’d saunter in and wait for her to offer her doll, Betty Belinda to me to play with.  I’d hold the shabby old doll while she told me stories of places she’d been and where she got certain what-knots I saw laying around.  Eventually my mother discovered my whereabouts, and came by to make sure I wasn’t bugging her.  When she realized I wasn’t, I was allowed to stay.  I think Hazel and I maybe needed each other during that time period.  I had youth and imagination.  She had nothing but time and stories.  I wanted to know the things she knew, and she needed somebody to tell them to.  We were a perfect match.

By the time Spring came back around my Uncle had passed away.  When I mourned him, I mourned Hazel too.  The home was nearly an hour from where I lived, and though my mother said we would, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back.  Even if I could just once, things would be different now.  Our time was just over. However, I knew this amazing lady for a brief season of my life, and what a season it was.  It taught me so much.  By seeing her travels, her family, and her fire on her instead of seeing the wheels of her hospital bed, opened my eyes to a different world.  Age meant something…it meant I too would see things one day and have opportunities to collect my own odds and ends.  I would grow up and have a life to be proud of just like this soul mate of a woman I stumbled upon.

When I was sixteen I learned of her death through the grapevine.  I felt a strange kind of sadness.  By then I hadn’t thought about her in quite a while, yet the news of her death seemed so close to me.  I immediately wondered what happened to all her stuff, and hoped someone somewhere appreciated it.  I thought of how much I appreciated it, and how much like her I wanted to be.  It made me want to do something great just to honor the kind of person she was.   I hope I do that…  I hope I can wear my life the way Hazel Poteat wore hers.