Red Dirt and Strawberry Universe
A memory exercise, finding the universe un-form and re-form in a singular taste of fruit
(a reflexive memory exercise from a recent writing class at Paonia Books, Paonia, CO)
I am 25, and didn’t know he would be gone soon enough. That things would get harder in so many ways unimaginable once he was gone. That I would be crying on his lichen covered front porch with noone around anymore, a decade later. It is late Spring, but the days are already hot enough to feel like full summer. Where sweat drips from just standing there, whether in shade or harsh sun. The soil is red and thick in some places, sandy white and soft in others. The sandy white and red seem to blend together but not quite really being a part of one another, mica rich, a sparking soil.
In other places, where the rain has recently fell hard, and where the open-soiled rows faced downhill just so, a swirl of micaed sand pools, leaving an imprint of where the rain filled it and moved it in circles, while the heavier clay remained uphill, and hardpan, without much give when I walk through. The sand caught in the afternoon storm the day before lifted and moved while the red thick just sits sturdy. The red and sand make long rows, in an open field. On one side a row of planted Loblolly Pines, their needles sprinkling the edges of the open red, where the edges met crabgrass, baby Pokeweed and feral Passionflower.
In the distance the other direction, the garden of open red rows merge into a soybean field, a mass of green homogeneity, all the same pea leaf dancing in cadence to the humid breeze that moves through the whole scene. Silence, except for wind. An occasional tractor trailer on the highway just in the distance. Beyond the soybean field, a crumbling tenant farmer’s house. Crumbling I guess, from the outside, but sturdy enough in its Cedar and Oak bones that it will probably be there awhile, slowly being weathered by time and memory and moisture through the seasons of the deep southern Piedmont. Near it grows a singular giant White Oak, from it a 360 view all around. I didn’t know that at some point he would be gone, and they would be grilling up there every night telling stories around a fire with the inlaws, peering at the old church we went to just in view. I didn’t know that I would actually have to step in that old Baptist church again after swearing to never again, for his funeral, just a few years later. To the other end, an old fenceline, several layers of barbed wire, old cedar fence posts. On the other side a field of cows and tall grasses. But you know, at this time, I knew he was going soon, I just didn’t know when. I make time to see him, while navigating the anxiety of being back home. Full of hope that I might be able to farm here, I go to the red rows, and look for the Strawberry patch.
Papa comes over in his golf cart. He rides up to the edge of the red and sand swirl, wearing his long light brown canvas pants with some grass stains on the knees from his morning mowing of the whole farm. He wears the thinnest of his plaid farm shirts, light pink and brown, buttoned up halfway, leaving space at the upper chest to breathe. A hat, Farm Bureau logo, from the late 90’s, with a wide front brim for the sun.
“Look in there and see if any are ripe.” he says from a few feet away.
I get down on my bare knees, sweat helping to stain them red from pressing down in the clay soil. I move some foliage around. Down by the sandy-red swirl, under the shade of the wide trifoliate leaves, I find a cluster of juicy red ripe strawberries.