Cotton and Crank

Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.

My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.

I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.

When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).

It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?

I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.