Ode to Mud
My first love was mud. In the backyard of the pink house in Denver on the corner of a street lined with other one-story tract houses, my little family lived. Mother didn’t plant, Daddy Joe didn’t garden. The bushes were scarce and scraggly, whatever the developer had set in the ground. Untended, like three-year-old me in the springtime yard in my snowsuit and boots, gloves off, exploring.
I loved my snowsuit because it once belonged to my older sister, my favorite person in the whole world. Marcee was only fourteen months older than me but a crucial fourteen months. She explained the world to me. She didn’t let me eat worms. That day in the yard of leftover snow, I didn’t have Marcee’s protection. In the shadows, the snow was still crusty as lace, but it had melted into full-blown mud where the sun licked, tasted, and found it good.
At this point, I wasn’t moving. A pebble had caught my eye and lured me toward the mysterious sinkhole. The rock shone white like a winter charm in the brown mud. I succumbed to its pull and wandered into the sucking mud.
I lifted one foot.
It didn’t budge.
Hands out for balance, I lifted the other foot.
No go.
I was stuck.
If I yanked, my foot released but not the boot. My sock skimmed rubber.
I quit that. I didn’t want a muddy sock.
I rocked, trying to free myself until my desire gave way to amazement. I was attached but free, gliding. I fell in love with the grounding mud.
Later, I would ensconce myself beside the tarp covering my Uncle Jimmy’s tractor and make mud dishes—tiny plates and cups with delicate handles—from the slick tan mud of Mamo’s farm. In college, on Easter’s Weekend, I would slide into the Mud Bowl where almost-grownups threw themselves onto their tummies in a watered field again and again until it was as mud-infested as God’s first creation. As a young lawyer, I would pat green mud onto my nighttime face, convinced It would leave me young forever.
All of that mud involvement was tame compared to the gripping hand of Mother Earth holding me in her palm the way Daddy Joe would raise me aloft inside the Denver house, showing off my balance on his own proud palm, until he died, suddenly gone, no longer there to brag and admire but buried in the ground himself, leaving me writing stories of the missing father, the dead dad, the forever-gone pop, the mud that held but did not bind, rocking.
Are we all controlled by our hauntings, like walking down a long corridor, constantly bumping into the walls? Is it possible to give up seeing this as a bad thing, let it float away like a beloved red balloon, fun while it lasted but a responsibility I no longer want to carry?
That day in the yard, in the grip of the mud, I was not stuck.
I was free.
Joe Hawes
I enjoyed this; you have a remarkable memory and your Denver yard had some fine mud. But the mud in my grandmother’s yard in West Texas was full of sand and gravel and thus unsuitable for mud pies or dishes. But when we moved to Houston the mud was smooth snd abundant. Later in college we competed in a mud pit trying to capture a flag on a pole.
I suspect most of us have memories of mud; yet almost all of us hsve left it behind.
You have reminded us of our loss
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Good morning, Joe. So cool you have mud memories! I didn’t think of that! And your’s go all the way to college, too. 🙂 This piece came from a prompt of the Contemplative Writing group: a time when you were stuck, I think (Lord, my current memory wobbles). The memory is strong both from my own memory and my mom telling the story (she was looking out of the kitchen window at me). I always saw it as a metaphor for my obsession with my dad’s death. But in the writing prompt I really went into what I was feeling, and I realized there was no rancor, no anxiety or upset.And I wondered if there was a different way of looking at this very old memory.
oe Hawes
Your reply is especially interesting as I have read some of your early work dealing with your father’s death, and I am glad to learn that you are no plagued by his dying. Next time you are in Memphis, we will have a coffee on Mud Island.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
“Coffee on Mud Island.” 😄
Joanne Corey
This is beautiful, Ellen. Thank you for sharing it with us. <3
Ellen Morris Prewitt
I’m so glad you liked it!
Marie Bailey
You capture the wonder of a child amidst all the kinds of muddy life that sucks us in. I loved reading this!
Ellen Morris Prewitt
I’m so glad! This was the result of a contemplative writing prompt: a time when you were stuck. 🙂