Edna, Texas

Rooster and I headed to Texas for my summer vacation a couple of weeks ago. This year has been brutal to the part of the state where I was born and raised–months and months of no rain–and you feel this the minute you drive through Houston and you hit a wall of heat so powerful it saps the moisture right out of the cab of the truck and quickly every part of the vehicle is radiating the same immense heat. It’s almost surreal right now, everything so hot and so parched. The river is dry and the cattle stand in the shade of the trees all these long days of summer and then, when it’s finally cool enough in the evenings for them to move, there’s no grass anywhere. As they scour the bone-dry earth for something to eat with their muzzles, the force of their breath blows the dust. While it was a great trip home and lots of fun, there was a pervasive sense of depression about the place. The heat and drought were the anchor of every conversation: “Is it dry in Louisiana like it is here?”, “Have yall been getting rain?”,”Dubby, we’ve been so hot and dry”. Questions like this made it seem as though Louisiana, or anywhere else for that matter, was like another planet, a strange place where water inexplicably fell from the sky and grass grew from the earth. Here the people only knew the sun and wondered why the rain had left them.

When I was a boy I stayed at what then could only be described as a “daycare” run by a couple known to everyone as Momma Helen and Pa Dewey. I write daycare in quotes because it was nothing like the facilities of today–we kids spent the day locked outside in her enormous back yard with nothing but spoons and a few old Tonka trucks, and were fed sandwiches made of American cheese, white bread and miracle whip along with some chee-tohs and red punch to wash it all down with. It was the most wonderful and imaginary of places, almost a child kingdom where adults were as rare as the rain now is in Edna, and Momma Helen loved her kids more than anything and we were always welcomed. My parents then were still young and it wasn’t rare for them to drop me off in the wee hours of the morning before they headed down to the coast for a day (or weekend) of fishing, and it was even less rare for them to pick me up in the wee hours of the morning after a night at a party. Momma Helen was a country woman whose dentures clacked everytime she spoke her colloquial English and I loved her very much. She always told me that I was one of her favorites and I often went to her house on the weekends when the other kids weren’t there just so I could climb up into her chair and nuzzle in her bosom and the click click click of her dentures would soothe me to sleep. One of my favorite tricks was to ask her every single day what was for lunch, to which she’d reply without fail, “Poke and grits…poke ya head out the window and grit your teeth!” I still have no idea what poke and grits are but sometimes I like to answer the question the same way when someone asks me what I’m cooking.

Momma Helen ruled her house with a firm but sweet hand. If you violated one of the few rules that governed the place, like biting one of the other kids or being a tattle tale (“Nobody likes a tattle tale,” Momma Helen would admonish), you either had to sit at the table for an unspecified amount of time or you got your mouth washed out with soap. During the hottest part of the day, Momma Helen called us inside where we were forced to sit and watch cartoons until the unrelenting summer sun passed far enough in the sky to give some reprieve. The house had only one air conditioner, which was in the living room and this is where Momma Helen retreated to watch “the stories” amongst her collection of dozens of china dolls that peered with their porcelein eyes from the rows of shelves. We kids sat in the sweltering heat of the den, waiting for Momma Helen to announce it was snack time and unlock the back door and dole out some sort of delicious popsickle or ice cream we could then resume speeding our Tonka trucks down our spoon-dug dirt roads to our imaginary houses made of twigs and leaves. When it rained, we huddled underneath the wall-less tin shed that housed our toys. As long as it didn’t thunder or lightnening, Momma Helen would let us stay outside, and then we’d pretend to be Indians and perform our rain dances.

Rain rain go away.
Come back another day.

Back then in Edna we used to get daily afternoon showers during the dog days of summer, just like we do here in Louisiana. When the rain stopped falling and the sky cleared, we thought it was us and the power of our imaginations that moved the clouds. We looked around in wonder at what we had done before lining up our Tonka trucks and pushing them down the now muddy dirt roads, laughing and playing until our parents came to pick us up.

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