dirt

Tonight in our extension class at the seminary on meditative writing, we had to write our biography in five minutes as part of several short writing exercises.

I wrote:

The dirt in Central Texas is hard, black clay. Out on dirt fields that once grew cotton, developers built wooden bungalows for the soldiers returning from the war, and their brides, and their children.

My father worked in the tire factory. My mother worked at home, dreaming of becoming an interior decorator.

Where cotton once grew, I played and dreamed, often daydreaming of other places. Living within one's head is a quirky thing, allowing one to not always need others to participate in journeys of escape. My life is, and has been, stories of leaving that place where the cotton grew, and carrying parts of it with me.

Nothing profound there, just a quick attempt to write my life story fast. Then we had to write about something in our written bio that surprised us, something that we left out that surprised us, and something that we are glad we didn't write about.

The meditation part of this exercise was then to write about one of those three things and see where it would take us as we wrote. I would have thought that I would have written about growing up Baptist, a very profound part of my childhood. Instead I wrote about that black clay that when it got hot it became very hard, with wide earth splitting cracks that went down so deep that I could not find the bottom even with long sticks. Almost all the houses in our neighborhood had cracks in the wall from the shifting foundations on this cracked dirt.

After my father died, I remember visiting his grave one summer and seeing the hard barren earth all around the area where he is buried. Somebody had planted daisies at the grave site next to his and it was obvious they would not survive without moisture and relief from the heat.

He was buried in an extension of the graveyard that took in golf course where he tried to teach me how to play the game. It's where the first green used to be.