Pamphleteer

"I knew someone who made them, Mrs. Lottie Trude, a retired lady who created folk art in what they the call "primitive" style - handiwork from that kind of red earth you find in Clay County, up and across the Missouri River delta, North of Kansas City but not quite as far as Liberty.

She lived on an old plot there, over run with blue jays and katy-dids and adorned by a few walnut trees, along with a small garden flanked by a shack built around the time of the Great War. A compact house sat up the grade by a gravel drive with an approach framed between two ancient Peonies, and inside a screened porch she used for storage is where her art was displayed.

"Her work included many iconic figures, from Aunt Jemima to Orphan Annie, the Empire State Building, and Teddy Roosevelt to recollections of the New Deal. It was an early 20th century history from a humorous, small town perspective, a private museum of Americana, alongside entire little families made out of clay - little people no more than 6 inches high, incredibly life like and so expressive of good common folks, you might say, with many elderly among them."

"If not for the meager means, then their countenances bore the time so well, carved features, wrinkled and intricate on the surface denoting age, if not wisdom, each dressed smartly and ready for the out of doors - shirts and skirts, pants, bibs and bodices - hats, too - all stitched by hand."

"Their delicate faces, carefully fashioned from tiny crab apples, grew features more life like as they dried, the hair, rescued from a mockingbird's nest, or plain, dry grass, home to the roly polys and chigger bugs, close by the Widow's nest, plaited in place and once as lively as the artist's high pitched voice was amused - but for her drawl, one which was as wide as the West Texas plains she hailed from - lending it a laconic mood, like wind easing on a rocking chair, musical and sanguine, pulled and worked from the cracks and fissures in the deep, sun baked clay."

"Go on?" An interlocutory tone from his imperturbable host, gracious, yet firm. This despite the surprise his unannounced visit had caused.

"Well, sir, I've been beatin' that riff for awhile. Thought of takin' up some periods, a hyphen or two, maybe, but it's a lot to carry for a fella that travels light, ready to fight or run, unless one makes a practice of speakin' out of turn ... I stand guilty, as accused ... "

"... actually, your honor, it was your lady friend's comment that drew me, the confident air, succinct yet bearing hope both at once, a combination I find unbearable to resist, yet, some offhand sanctity has ... caused me ... to avoid further comment."

He paused, and seeing no bidding to go further, carried on despite it.

"... although it's never restrained me from circlin' back in order to see the effect of my raids, in order to apprise or amend, of course. I am, first and foremost, a pamphleteer."

"What are rules for, if not made to be broken?"






a sheet of sheer ice
suddenly makes everything still
Lake Mallalieu

More Walnuts

the crowds all gone home
sleek crows forage
through bits of bright litter -
Dandelions








stinging nettles,
young maples like weeds -
the mystery behind
your manicured lawns









trumpet vines
burst through the tarmac -
bangers on the corner
argue on their iPhones







a horn blows in traffic
the texture of twine -
high summer sun bakes
the brick wall








a dusty-red wren
perched on a pail -
heat shimmer blurring
the hot-tar roof









a musty smell from limestone
bits of broken glass -
the stain from fallen walnuts
stuck to our hands

Summer in the City

iridescence -
amidst the dandelions,
sleek crows forage
through bits of bright litter









stinging nettles,
young maples like weeds -
the mystery behind
your manicured lawns









trumpet vines
through the broken tarmac -
gangbangers on the corner
argue on their iPhones









the texture of twine -
high summer sun bakes
the old brick wall








a dusty-red wren
perches on a pail -
heat shimmer's glare
above the hot-tar roof









that musty smell,
limestone and broken glass -
the stain of fallen walnuts
stuck to our hands

Lottie Trude

.



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




.