She had small ears. Small, delicate looking and very nicely round, but small. Nestled against strawberry blonde hair that fritzed off in many directions fine as feathers and bright under the florescent light
–A vignette of a girl I briefly loved during an lecture that overran my lunch on Monday.
G.A. Buba
“The pain was something I could taste, dry as chalk on the tongue. It was something that filled up all the hollow spaces in my chest as I tried to breathe, like drowning in salt water. ”
– G.A. Buba on grief
I remember coming home from school in the red van. Mom was driving. The puppy was huddling in the ditch beside the road leading to our house. I remember how red he was, short, soft fur russet and gold in the sun. I remember how his hipbones stuck out wide like the knobby ends of grandpa’s back massager, and how his soft red coat hung over his ribs.
I don’t remember the color of his eyes, but they must have been big and trusting, because he always played very gently, even with the mean old tomcat. I don’t remember, but he was so meek and quiet I don’t think he even growled when mom and I ripped fat ticks off the soft skin inside his floppy ears and from between his over sized paws, with metal tweezers that dripped blood when we were finished. I don’t remember but I think he was only with us for two Tuesdays.
I remember how we found him, coming home from school, skull all misshapen. I remember dad had to scrape the deflated red coat, no longer shiny, off the summer hot concrete with a shovel. I remember the roses, yellow as egg yolks and big as my head that hung full and heavy from the bush we buried him beneath.
And I remember when we watched the Yellow-Blue-Green pot of boiling water in the cracked salt crusted ground and I read a park sign.
Yellow Stone National Park
Emblazoned above a newspaper clipping about a collie who’d fallen in, just here, and the owner who jumped in to save him. I remember the article described how the man’s skin had peeled off all together when they took of his shoes, and how they both died, dog and boy, a day later.
xxx
Creative nonfiction essay written as part of a “Primary acts of Imagination” and association assignment for my creative writing workshop- intended to explore personally important moments
(photo is from http://snapper119.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html)
Prompt: Describe a place you lived in two paragraphs, brainstorm before writing.
Selected Location: A ranch 6 miles outside of a small Texas Town along I-45, South of Dallas
The water tower that marks the exit off I-45
The big curve of the road before the abandoned farmhouse that cuts through the corn
The yellow corrugated steel church just before the turn for our house
The split of the road towards India, TX that grandma once took by accident for 20 miles before she realized
The karaoke bar that is a gas station without gas and sells sushi only on weekends
Pecan Pie
Riding horses to school
Y’all’all
Curly blonde haired women
Ten churches per square mile
The girls who wear flowers in their hair are part of the gangs
The sushi bar gas station has a line out the door on weekends
The best place to go for cheap, beautiful cut flowers is the funeral home on main street, not the florist across from them
The little barber shop on the corner where the lady doesn’t speak any English and ignores any and all of your suggestions, still gives the best haircuts I have ever received to this day- for $5
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The water tower with the yellow jacket marks the exit for the Farm to Market Road leading away from town, 4 curves, one big one, just beyond the school, 180 degrees through corn and wheat, cotton and soybeans, then past the abandoned farm house, wooden, and once blue, up the hill past the red gas station, selling sushi on Sunday nights, but no gas, while the pastor sings karaoke music from the 80’s loudly, over the dip where irrigation flows in spring, past the church of yellow corrugated metal where “Y’all’all are always welcome you know”, and a too small parking lot, a black cat fireworks shed that is never open, with staring yellow eyes and a red tongue, and then the turn down the row of mailboxes and ranches, 10 acres, 50, the landing strip, where donkeys graze, the vet who never tells you he went to the same school twice, down the big hill under a green glowing bower of trees, goliath, and oak, and redbuds flush with hearts to the sharp turn and the three bar gate that’s never closed, where sits a stone farm house, two stories with the western edge sheltered beneath the spreading boughs of a paper shell pecan tree, green shells splayed open like half popped corn.
The tree drops 75 pounds a season, but my father hates pecan pie. We sit inside, around a dark wood table, that is in both the kitchen and the living room at once, away from the 110 degree Indian summer cracking shells with mallets or fists. Snacking on chilled omelet slices made from garden fresh onion, zucchini, and tiger skinned tomatoes, with cubes of queso fresco, while we plan which Czech Christmas cookies we will make from ground pecans instead of almonds. The baking will have to wait till after the sun sets.
Life happened and this personal project of a blog set to moldering while life hit me like a train wreck, several times. However! This semester (my last praise all the listening gods) I am taking a creative writing course for funsies- and the GPA boost, so I have decided to store any interesting writing exercises and other tidbits that are created but not good enough for class here.
Over the winter break I traveled the coastline of the entire Iberian peninsula in 13 days, and also spent time in Germany and France. It was intense and I saw so much- so I will be using my collection of some 6000 photos to produce both a travel write up and place specific writings over the next couple of weeks/months. I am lucky and the writing workshop I am enrolled in is based around an exploration of how place grounds writing and I have permission to use this travel blog/thing as my weekly place journal. I will be posting first each rough piece with its accompanying visual fodder and interesting historical/geographical facts, and then at the end the pieces will be made into some sort of coherent project- I’ve been toying with the idea of an interactive map. Ideas/feedback is ever welcome.
G.A. Buba 