(no subject)
No matter how tightly we closed the windows, every season there'd be inches of dust blowing off the cotton fields onto the window sills, into the kitchen sink, onto the beds, to be rinsed away, turning to mud in the drains and washing the county away to a water treatment facility in some larger city. When we clenched our jaws there was the crunching sound of dirt in our teeth. The dirt was always there.
I remember the day it rained mud: we were going to church for the second time that day, the little white church with its pink carpets and the curtains my grandmother made, the little white church that smelled like citrus oil wood polish for a few months after the yearly cleaning and like the musty smell that came out of the baptistry for the rest of the time, the little white church where I first tasted mortality in the form of a lemon drop that got stuck in my throat during the reading of First Corinthians (We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed); it rained mud that day, there had been blowing dust and blowing rain but as we stepped out of the car in our dresses and mary janes it rained fat drops of mud which soaked into our clothes and our hair and which we spent the rest of the service digging out of our ears.
I remember the day it rained mud: we were going to church for the second time that day, the little white church with its pink carpets and the curtains my grandmother made, the little white church that smelled like citrus oil wood polish for a few months after the yearly cleaning and like the musty smell that came out of the baptistry for the rest of the time, the little white church where I first tasted mortality in the form of a lemon drop that got stuck in my throat during the reading of First Corinthians (We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed); it rained mud that day, there had been blowing dust and blowing rain but as we stepped out of the car in our dresses and mary janes it rained fat drops of mud which soaked into our clothes and our hair and which we spent the rest of the service digging out of our ears.