Lottie Trude

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My Daddy didn’t dowse water. He drummed up advertising clients for that local news weekly. Mrs. Lottie Trude, that little old lady from Texas who helped raise me when I was a little boy could. She kept a black widow in a jar for us to recognize, too, warned us to beware of snakes, not to eat the red berries and she'd wield a fly swatter ‘cross my backside when I was bad.

She carved "little" people's faces out of green apples, set them aside to dry, wrinkled and wizened, made lifelike with age, bodies clad in overalls and house frocks handmade. There were entire little families fashioned out of that county's namesake clay in Missouri, too. All her subjects were country people, folk art, from before the war, some of it, some as far back as the Depression, an America depicted of rural people who relied on the land. She had a statue of liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Popeye, Olive Oil, and Sweet Pea, too.

She had a garden patch in the back of her acre lot, and a small, ramshackle house built into the hill before the city got big. We rented upstairs, she preferring the lower level's cool confines. I walked a mile every day to school. We'd go to a country store for supplies and she always bought me some kind of a treat. I fell off the deck once, got stuck by a nail. Mrs. Trude fixed me up. Other times we'd run around the house a few laps until the hurt wore off. Sometimes the blue jays would chase us, or the chiggers would catch us rolling in the grass, sweaty from play. In the height of summer the earth would crack, it was so hot. In some places, the fissures so deep, we'd drop a pebble in and wonder if it fell all the way to China.

A pair of black walnuts flourished in that ground, with deep roots, strong enough to withstand tornadoes that roared through. Late in the season, their unripened fruit lay all about, emitting an aroma piercing as the katydid's call. We would gather them, sticky and cloying, fingers stained the same as a grasshopper would trying to get away. Those days, so long, they seemed never to end. At least until your name was called and you'd run, dodging lightening bugs, into your bath and your bed to dream of things that had gone before.



so very long ago
` in language meant for a child
I can hear their voices,
` the tang of green walnuts
the depth of red clay




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