MY BLANKET OF DEPRESSION

MY BLANKET OF DEPRESSION

My blanket of depression

is the color of mud.

Like the army blanket

my daddy brought from the war.

I creep beneath it

and gather it

around me.

The blanket is old and ragged,

The way I feel.

The sunlight comes through

in little pinpricks,

like the pinpricks of anxiety

that cover me.

I crouch beneath the blanket

like a turtle in it's shell.

The shell protects me,

Yet it is my prison.

Sometimes the depression lifts

like the edges of the blanket

when the wind blows.

Then I spread my blanket

and sit atop it,

coming untangled for a while

in the healing sunshine.

But then the fear comes again

and I pull my blanket even tighter

to smother the pain.

Someday I will take my blanket

And shake it.

Shake it free of the fear and pain

And the tear stains.

 I will make a little boat

And for a mast I will use a tall sapling.

 I will fasten my blanket for a sail

And I will sail away upon an ocean.

Please God, an ocean of joy.

 

MOVING

I didn't want to move, anymore.  I didn't want to leave the hills and hollows and the house that I had known most all my life. I didn't want to move and leave my little brother, Jr. asleep in the graveyard.

I have lived in Ft. Myers, Florida and have picked oranges right off the trees. I have smelled the orange blossoms and gone all winter without putting on a coat. But I have never moved away from home, because home is where the heart is and my heart has always been there with my mama and the little house on Chastain Hill.

MOVING ( CONT) 2

It was almost dark when I noticed the smoke rising above the hills behind our house. Old Red and I ran out of the yard and up through John Lomac's cotton field. We came out on the top of Violet Hill and away across the hollow I could see the fire.  It looked like a ruby necklace strung out along the ridge of the mountain. It lit up the sky with a crimson glow. The fire was too far away for me to hear the roar and crackle of the flames but when the wind blew toward me I could smell the hot, smothery scent of burning leaves and underbrush. I stood and watched as the fire leaped and danced among the trees. Suddenly I felt scared. I turned and ran back down toward the house with Red at my heels.

I looked down at our little house nestled, safe, underneath the hackberry trees. I saw Daddy's workshop where he let me build my playhouse and would come and visit me.  I saw the old barn where the cow stayed and our outdoor toilet with it's rusty roof. We liked to wait until our brother Gene got in there and then throw rocks on the roof and make the rust fall down on him. I could see my sister, Betty in the kitchen and my little niece standing at the kitchen door looking for me.

MOVING (CONT)

I went to school and told everybody that I was moving to Florida. They didn't believe me. Back then hardly anyone ever moved away. I had been living in the same house since I was four years old. We had swapped our old house to Aunt Johnnie for her land up on the other side of the hill. Daddy built us a house there but he made a mistake and built on another man's land instead of his. Daddy had to buy the lot where our house was from him. Anyway, I was tired of living in the same house, in the same town and wanted to move to Florida.  In Florida it never got cold and you could pick oranges off trees right in your back yard. I also wanted to see the big pink birds with long legs and black bills.

I was so disappointed when Mama wrote that Daddy couldn't find a job and that they were coming home. I went out and sat on the edge of the back porch. Our old hound dog named Red came and laid his head in my lap and looked up at me with sad eyes. Maybe he had been looking forward to moving too.

MOVING

When I was in the ninth grade my daddy got laid off at the steel plant. He waited and waited to be called back. My aunt Bertie, who had moved to Ft. Myers, Fla. wrote and said why didn't Daddy come down there. She believed he could get a job driving a bulldozer because that is what he did at the steel plant.  She said Mama could get a job working where she did, packing gladiolus for shipping to florists. So Mama and Daddy decided to go look around.

 I was very disappointed when they said my brother Fred and I couldn't go, that we didn't need to miss school.  My sister Loretta was going.  She had quit school after getting a job at the Magic Grill. Mama got my sister Betty and her husband to come stay at the house with Fred and me.

" Y'all behave and mind what Betty says," Mama told us that morning before they left. "And keep your fingers crossed that your daddy finds a job."

"Bring us back some oranges." I said. That was the main reason I wanted to go. I wanted to see the orange trees and smell the blossoms.

The Color (cont) 3

When we got home that day, the fun was forgotten when Daddy yelled at Mama for letting us go to that place with our cousins who had bad reputations all over town. He took off his belt to whip us but I slipped out the door and went and hid in the barnloft in the playhouse that my sister and I made. I sat peeking out the window towards the house. I could still hear my daddy yelling but he never came out.

There was an old, rusty tube of lipstick, discarded by Mama and saved by us, sitting on the windowsill. I took my little finger and stuck it into the tube and got out the last little bit of lipstick and smeared the bright red color on my mouth. I sat and waited until I thought my daddy had forgotten about me.

To me, anger is red, bright red and it tastes like rusted metal in your mouth and it smells like old lipstick. And it feels like a question in your mind and heart.

AND SO IT WAS

And three years later, though not in that spot, he was buried.

ME

And this is me, back then.

MAY DAY (cont)

I am over 60, my children are grown and my hair is turning gray. My old school is still standing, run down,empty and silent. But today is May 1st. The lawn is green and still slopes gracefully down to the old cedar tree and I wish, Oh! how I still wish that I could be Queen and walk down that lawn in front of my classmates. And I would have a yellow sequined dress with a big full skirt reaching down to the ground, covering my bare feet.

MAY DAY (cont)

The King and Queen came out the front door of the school and walked down a long sloping lawn to a side yard. They were seated beneath a big cedar tree and then the music and dancing began.

Oh, how I wished I could be the queen.  I never was but I was a butterfly once with yellow and orange crepe paper wings that my mama made. I danced round and around with other girls all dressed in lovely colored wings.  The day ended with the Maypole dance, girls holding bright ribbons, the colors of the rainbow, weaving in and out so that when the dance was finished the streamers were plaited around the Maypole.

MAY DAY (cont)

The second thing I loved about May 1st was the grand celebration we had at school. Each class chose a boy and girl to be prince and princess and from them a May Queen and King was chosen. The rest of the class dressed in costumes and danced for the King and Queen's pleasure. The princesses wore long evening gowns.

One girl who lived near me was chosen a princess and she wore a yellow dress with a long, full,sticking out skirt. Her grandmother made it and she had sewn big, round golden sequins all over it. They sparkled so pretty in the sunshine.

MAY DAY

MAY  DAY

When I was a little girl there were two things I loved about May 1st.  One was that on that day my mama let me go barefoot for the first time in the year.  No matter how warm it got in April or how hard I begged, she would always  say," No. It will make make you sick, you have to wait until May."

So when May 1st came around, no matter how cold it was I went barefooted and Oh, how good it felt to my winter tender feet to walk on that new spring grass.