Monday Mimisms ~ Detours

"Why do you like trees so much?" he asked."That's a long and winding story, my Dear," I replied. He hated my long and winding stories and had no patience for them. So, I'll tell you instead.

I grew up in a tiny four-room house with six people in the middle of the middle of nowhere. I was thirteen before Daddy built onto the house to make it barely modest.  Space was not something readily available - not in a hallway, a kitchen, or a shared bunkbed bedroom with younger siblings - not even outside on the porch that needed painting for twenty years. I needed room. My rooms were outside. My rooms were trees.And we had acres and acres of those.

 My palace was a patch of forest on the east side of Granny's fishing pond, where I would escape while she wormed her way into the mouths of the catfish we ate for dinner. My kitchen was a swept clearing of matted leaves where tree stumps were cabinet tops and thick moss carpeted the little trail that led to my firefly-lighted living room. I took afternoon and after-school "naps" in a cool tobacco barn full of golden forbidden leaves hanging from rafters that smelled like Heaven and looked like yellow crinoline angels. Story fodder. Silent witnesses. Space. 
There was plenty of opulence in the denseness of trees. Plenty of shade under mimosa branches and more than anything, I couldn't be seen or heard if I climbed high enough. Children were not meant to be seen or heard in the sixties deep dark South. Just be scarce. And quiet. And obedient. It was too crowded inside the little house that daddy built to do anything but control the traffic and hope for the best.  So you see... I have lived in tree "houses" all my life. Tree playgrounds.  Willow tree shade-houses with sterling silver tea sets precariously perched on a log bench full of fire ants. Privacy and solitude. Priceless.
"Why do you like trees so much?" he asked.
We don't need Freud to understand why I live in a house too big for me, a cat and an imaginary blog dog. I need space. I need a room (or two or three) of my very own. I need roaming room. I want to escape downstairs and find a corner in the "dungeon" (aka the basement) to pot a plant or paint a board or take a nap. I want to make noise. Lots of noise. I don't want anyone to tell me to be quiet. And then I want to walk outside in the regality of my own old-growth trees in Bloggingham. I don't need them for rooms anymore...but I want them and need them as familiar shelter, you see. There could never EVER be too many trees in my life. They saved me. They loved me. They held me.
If only he'd understood my quirky forest obsession.
 Here's a link to Katy Never Was a Jackass To Me to give you an idea of the smell of wide open spaces and well....cow dung on the farm, which seemed to waft equally pungent and morally significant on any given day in my childhood- depending on which way the wind was blowing.  "Don't step in the pasture," said Mama. "Don't climb that tree...."  or "Get out of the barn, Mimi!"I never listened. Hence, stinky shoes and shaky branches.

My heart took a wild and crazy detour last year. But that's a story for another day. I promise.  Somewhere deep down in the folds of my pencil skirt the truth of that earth-quaking detour still rumbles, running circles around in my pencil head, just  another story on the tip of my tongue.... he and I...everybody needs a detour like that now and then. It was our turn for one, I suppose...no time like a pandemic to square away the cobwebs we faced. It felt like three lifetimes in three months, moving through molasses at breakneck speed.  My pen hits the paper to bring it alive .....until I pull myself up by the Milanis and remember who I am and what I came here for.
Mama whispered, "Do NOT hit publish on that one, Mimi." You heard her, right? "Yes, ma'am," I whisper. "I won't."

Back to dirt-roads. You might think all these photos are from the same stretch of back road leading to a dead-end driveway, where people get out for fresh air in the country but never go anywhere at all.. You would be right about the location but wrong about the rest.  My stories and my books were already written before I left home to find them. I walked back and forth back and forth until one day all that stillness forged a well so deep I could carry it with me into the world. 

I stopped walking and started writing.

I cultivated deeply rooted tangled up Ivy League plots with scandalous lovers who smoked wacky cigarettes on the floor of the forbidden tobacco barn. I never told. And tales of fire-breathing dragons. There were those too. I walked it out in gravel-studded shoes. Chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. You see those stories in the shadows of this land, right? You've read many through the years. I have at least a bushel-barrel more.

"But Mimi...my dear...why do you need so many trees?"

I can't breathe without them.When I write, words leap out of my chest and appear on a blank page. My heart smiles and remembers. It remembers the aforementioned questioning man, the tiny house of many people, eating wild berries and honeysuckle juice straight from a roadside tavern. My lungs breathe goodness and space. I feels like fire. It feels like life. Internal worlds collide. Past and present. Tears roll down my cheeks. I can't catch my breath until that one word I'm searching for lays bare on the page. Plump. Splat! There it is. Happiness catches fire and I feel alive.

There is nothing like conjuring words under the branches of treesnaked feet in thick green grassmakes a girl remember a detour or two....

I took a long drive this morning on my way home from somewhere I probably shouldn't have been (sounds like a country song, doesn't it?) My car had a mind of its own, making turns and twists according to the directions of my memory and intuition instead of that good 'ole common sense - the kind God gave a mule, that is. To the right...cornfields. To the left...cornfields! Through the window...cornfields! and the occasional angel wing cloud. Through a town and down a street where my first house sits, by the school near lover's lane where I used to park with my boyfriend. It was so crowded in the white framed house, you see, and Daddy would turn the porch light on as soon as we arrived home from a date. Mama tried to pretend she desperately needed to water a porch plant at 11:00 pm (my curfew). There was NO sitting in the car after dates. But I digress....wait a minute....I'm remembering...and it's OK. 

It's really really OK.
I can't wait to see where the turn of the road takes me next.I like this fence. It's familiar....Wouldn't you like to run across that field towards the tree line in the distance? If we hurry we can probably still find a spot for a picnic. 

Come on!

Photos: Mimi Lenox

Follow Me

Join us for Blog4Peace Nov 4

Like Our Facebook Page

Peace Store