Black Gumbo Dirt

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It's hateful for me to not allow people to think they're gonna get over on me by trying to deal with them gently. Many times when they try to corner me or have me up a tree they're already in a jam with some desperate situation in life. It bothers me to have to get crude in order to break through their worried minds, but, a man gotta do.

I stayed with my mother for two and a half years after my father died. I had already been living in their house in order to help her with my father's dying for two weeks. By the time I ran for my life by going to hike on the Appalachian Trail I could have easily murdered her in cold blood. They weren't my parents anymore or anybody I ever knew in our entire ti-me together.

Dying due to the aging process is not easy to watch. My parents were the most educated people in either of their families by a long shot. My father was the only child among his siblings that completed the seventh grade. He had to go live in a boarding house a long way from his parent's home for the opportunity to finish enough school to get into college. He was thirty-three before he finished.

My mother didn't finish college until she was forty-eight years old. She kept going back and going back to summer school classes. If I had gone straight through four years of college after I graduated from high school I would have finished college before she did.

They were not the people we buried side by side in the City Cemetery. They had become total strangers from who I had be led to believe they were by the time they died. Why would they not? Much of the remembering that went on in their dotage was a complete surprise to them as they forgot who they had made themselves into for the sake of appearances.

One incident from each parent was enough memory of their aging process. The delighted look on my father's face in his mid-eighties when he suddenly re-experienced his fifth birthday party. He had received a little rubber ball and some Jacks to play that game. He still had the ball and a couple of the Jacks in a collection box. My mother remembered how much she loved her first husband who was a serious alcoholic when I stayed with her during those two and a half years.

It seems difficult for me to remember the ground down in the river flood plain around here is called gumbo soil, but it's not like the black gumbo soil in Texas. Here it's black and mucky alright, but it has a lot of sand in it. It's all over the swamps around here. The area has lots of sandy land that when it was cleared to grow crops the sand eroded down the the flood plains of the local rivers and then mixes with the muck it finds there. It is not a rich organic soil that's good for growing a garden, but it grows ferns of all kinds real well.

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