Come Early Morning

    I awoke at 5:30 this morning. That’s not uncommon for me, I tend to get up with the sun. In the winter, I can sleep til 6:30 or 7 even…but it makes me feel guilty and sluggish and that I’ve frittered away half the day. “It’s 7:30!” I grouse to myself as I’m heading to the chicken houses. “This day is practically GONE!” Then I’ll remind myself that half the normal world is just getting up and around, or maybe not even UP at all.

  I wake up much like I am all day. I need no coffee, no caffeine, no stimulants at all. I just….wake up. One minute, I’m asleep and dreaming and then POP I’m up and I can carry on a conversation and talk and think and prattle.

  I am, from what I’ve been told, a little annoying in the morning. When I worked in surgery, I got up at 4:30, left the house at 5:30, was scrubbed in and ready to work at 6:30. My friend Angie and I rode together, alternating between driving. She would be awake, but not be talkative  til she got her cappacchino at the little quick pick we stopped at every morning in Charleston. Then she would prattle and rattle and roll right with me. We talked and laughed all day, and all the way home. She is still one of my good friends and I cherish those surgery stories with her.

 So, I got up and headed to the bathroom and put my chicken house clothes on. Often on Sunday mornings, Clint will walk them for me. But today, I was up and ready to go and didn’t have anything to do at the house before church. I like to walk to the chicken houses when I can, in the cool of the morning, smelling the dew and seeing the sun rise. No one is up with me this early Sunday morning. It’s just me and Maggie My Dog and Tika, my brain damaged heeler/hyena mix. ( I could be wrong that she is part hyena, but it would  help explain her crazy eyes and snappish  temperament.)

  I put my old tennis shoes on, the ones I wear in the chicken houses when the birds are little and they don’t throw litter down into my socks. I sat on the porch steps to do this and had a sudden, strange rush from my past.

  I am 11 years old. We live in Cottonwood, Oklahoma. It’s a tiny community with a general store that has wooden, uneven floors and old chairs for old men to sit in and talk and spit on the front porch. The little store sold gas at one time, but doesn’t now and the old gas pumps sit idle and rusty. Old signs advertising oil and cigarettes hang here and there. The cash register is one of those that had a pull down handle to ring up the final price. There’s a tiny school nearby, housing 40 children from

kindergarten til 8^th grade. It’s summer and school isn’t in session. There’s a gym and an overgrown, weedy  baseball field and a small playground.

  We sleep on mattresses on the floor in one big bedroom, all us kids sprawled out here and there. Mom and Dad’s bedroom is just off our bedroom and they sleep with the door shut, the hum of their  window unit air conditioner part of the night sounds, the crickets, the frogs, the dogs barking.

  Mom bought the mattresses  at an auction or maybe a yard sale, often there is no fitted sheet covering it, but still we sleep. We have neighbors, a family with 3 young boys. David is 14, the oldest, he is lanky, with reddish auburn hair and brown eyes. I once make a joke to him as we are sitting on my porch that I get up every morning  and make my mattress and David laughs, a big hearty laugh and tells me I’m funny. I have a crush on him, he is smart and sweet and cute and polite. But he is 14, I am 11 and I know my time here in Oklahoma will be short. I don’t know how long I’ll be here…til dad’s rig job poops out or he quits or mom takes us kids back to Arkansas. I never know. I find out later from another neighbor boy that David likes me. I am stunned by this, as I am ugly, with thick glasses and horrid hair and bad skin. The neighbor boy says David thinks I’m pretty on the inside and I ponder this, thinking this is alright by me.

  We have an outdoor toilet, which I find mortifying. I see David and his brothers outside playing ball or Frisbee and I know they will see me walk thru the yard and climb over the gate. The gate is locked with a padlock and we have no key, so we have to awkwardly climb over that old, red gate, the wood sagging and giving with my weight.  

  I sit on the porch in Oklahoma putting my tennis shoes on. They are some of Bobbie’s old ones and are still too big. Bobbie is two years younger than me, so I get her hand me ups as she was already 5’8’ when she was ten. I got her old clothes and shoes, never really growing into them but wearing them anyway. I am bony thin, and my hair is white from the sun. My eyelashes and eyebrows are blonde, my skin tending to be pink instead of tan. I see pictures of children from Ireland and I see myself sometimes, in these  ruddy, pink children.

  It’s still a little dark this morning. No one knows I’m up, none of my family. They don’t even know I do this, get up early and take off walking.

  I hitch my cut off shorts up on my bony hips and set off walking in Bobbie’s shoes, down the gravel dirt road. I can smell the pond in the distance, that smell of fishy, dirty pondwater. Bobbie’s shoes crunch the gravel. Rabbits run here and there, some of them so used to me walking these early, dark mornings they let me get within feet of them. Mockingbirds mock and call and tease all around. The air feels cool, it will be no cooler than now, I know, and I soak it up.

  I think of Arkansas and my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. We have no phones. Occasionally we write letters, but I have no paper or stamps and don’t know their address. I walk past mimosa trees, their pink, feathery blossoms…I trail my fingers over one, feeling the soft tickle. There are mimosa trees in Arkansas and it gives me comfort.

  I walk in the cool, singing to myself, telling stories (oh, dear reader. I have changed so little) writing books in my head. I think of my friend David, I cannot imagine him a boyfriend, just a friend who is a boy ( the thought of a boyfriend so foreign, so strange, so uncomfortable)  and  decide I am content with just making him laugh. Once I sing a funny song to him, a song I heard long ago and he tells me to sing it AGAIN, louder and I don’t want to, I feel shy. He says “you have a nice voice. You should sing more.” Does he know I cling to that? think of that kindness years later? I think not, but on I walk.

 I think about being pretty, on the inside. I know I am not a beauty. I have no delusions about the way I look. I wish it were different, but it’s not. I scheme about the day I can buy makeup and paint my face up like some of the women I see in town. I’m fascinated by these brightly painted women, with their cute clothes and dark, lined eyes. I think I will get a job, when I can, and buy makeup…lots of makeup and paint my face (oh, dear reader, years later….the first money I make at my first job at age 13… I DO buy makeup. Lots of it.)

  I walk and I walk. The road curves around, making a big loop. I always stand, where the road goes straight and think about walking down that road. But it is unfamiliar, with houses, with people I don’t know…so I turn left, turn down the road that will wind around and take me back to that house with the outdoor toilet, the stained couch, the unsheeted mattresses on the floor… the bookshelf filled with books I care not to read, left there by a former tenant…romance novels….mysteries…books I HATE and I think maybe I will see if we can go to the library today. I’ve read every book I’m interested in, most of them twice. There’s a limit on how many I can get, so I pick out book after book and shove  part of  them in Bobbie’s pile. She laughs at me and goes along with it. She knows I will read all 25 of these books in a week and be grousing about being bored, wanting to go back.

  I checked out one book, it was a book from the 50’s about grooming and hair and makeup. I found it so interesting and funny. I found others and checked them out, too…even one for black people, how to style hair and take care of skin… which made the librarian look at me strangely. I read about greek mythology and sign language, learning both (oh, dear reader, years later I would be at church camp and would be the only person there that had a rudimentary knowledge of sign language. A deaf girl was there that year, blonde and pretty. We conversed, she and I, in my elementary, halting sign language…dredging it up from the bottom of my brain. She found me amusing and helpful.  She stayed with me, unable to read my lips and learn my name, so she called me “The Girl that Smiles”)

  I walk and walk. The sun is coming up, the promise of the heat of the day hanging like a flag. I head home, making it up the driveway and up the stone steps to the leaning, saggy porch. I sit in the living room, quiet and still…just thinking. My mom and siblings start to stir. Mom walks past me and says “you been up long?” She knows my early to rise tendencies and trusts me to not get into anything. “not too long. Can we go to the library today?” I ask. She says maybe and heads to the kitchen. I should know not to ask anything before her coffee, but the lure of the library is too great.   

   One morning, I get up and slip off my mattress and into my waiting clothes and wander into the living room. It’s dark out and for some reason my bedroom door is shut. I open it, and the light from the living room is on. My mom sits there quietly, drinking coffee. Her eyes are red rimmed. She has been crying. I don’t ask why. I never do. I already know.

  “Where you headed?” she asks. I stammer, knowing I’ve been caught. “ummmm…..I like to get up early and walk.” then I prattle about the rabbits and mimosas and mockingbirds. She is unmoved.

  “you don’t need to go walking so early, by yourself. Wait til someone can go with you.” I don’t argue. There is no point. No one will walk with me and listen to me prattle. I am too shy to ask David even though I had shared my secret of my early walks. He opined that he would go and take a pellet gun and shoot the rabbits, maybe. They get into his mama’s garden. I was saddened at the thought of these trusting rabbits, knowing  I am not going to harm them, only to be shot by my friend….so I dropped it and never mentioned it again. Later, he tells me he got up early and walked that road and looked for me. He said he saw the rabbits, too and wanted to let me know he didn’t shoot any of them. I told him that I had been caught slipping out to walk and couldn’t do it anymore. He seemed saddened by this, but didn’t mention it again.

  He never got the chance to. One day, Daddy came home and said we were going back to Arkansas, just to visit. We’d come back and get our stuff. I gathered up a few things, leaving a green plastic star necklace hanging on a nail in our group bedroom. Bobbie left a poster on the wall she got for finishing her reader in the third grade. It was a furry, spotted baby seal. We thought it the cutest thing we’d ever seen. I ran to David’s house to tell him we were going back to Arkansas for a couple of weeks, but we’d come back. He said he’d be looking out for me and watch for our vehicle. He told how he couldn’t wait for me to come back, to start school there that fall. His friends would love me, my sense of humor.

I wonder how long he watched for us before he gave up. 

  We never went back, never got our stuff…never said goodbye to friends. Library books, never returned. Food in the fridge. Toys in the yard. Mattresses on the floor. Window unit in my parent’s bedroom. What else was left? What else from my childhood, left scattered here or there in that old house, hanging on a nail?

  I thought about that this morning, as I laced up my tennis shoes, Maggie My Dog and Tika my brain damaged Heeler/badger mix (I could be wrong about the badger part, but it would explain her temperament) I headed down the road, my shoes crunching gravel. I smelled the creek, smelling of fish and mud. I saw rabbits, ducking and running under the brush. It was cool, the coolest this day will be, I know and I soak it in. I walk chickens, picking up the dead, singing to myself, telling stories, writing my book in my head. I head home after the last chicken house and see Clint’s truck driving up the gravel road. I walk toward it and he says “woman! I would have walked chickens for you today. Give you a day off.” I smile and climb into the truck. “you been up long?” he asks. “Oh, not long. I couldn’t sleep. I like walking out here early in the morning.” I say. He smiles “I know you do, you always have.”  I smile at him and pat his arm.

  He takes me home and I shower and fix my hair and put on my makeup. I line my eyes carefully, line my lips even more so. One more coat of mascara. I press the powder into my face. My eyeshadow, brown and gold, matching my dress, my hat. I love my hat, it is tan and has a wide black ribbon and black flower. It has a small brim and looks vintage. Clint tells me I look pretty and I kiss him. “You look handsome.” I say, smiling, flirting a tiny bit, lowering my eyes.  He kisses me and the memories of  early walks and mattresses on the floor and waiting, wondering friends  disappear like a rabbit into the brush. Like the dew after sunrise.( Oh, but dear reader. The memories are there. Like a poster on the wall. Like a necklace on a nail. Waiting for me to come back, come back and retrieve them. I can’t and I shan’t. )