memories

Digging in the dirt

June 9, 2017 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Tucked into a corner of my deepest mind is the image of two tiny feet poking up over a wall of dirt.

Bars of sunlight stretch between the sagging limbs of an ancient pine. My weight is supported by a narrow butt and two small hands sunk deep into a thick blanket of loamy earth. Beside me, the plastic blue blade of a child’s shovel is plunged into a mound of needles and leaves like Excalibur into the stone.

The image is all that remains. Where I happened to be or how old I was or why I had decided to dig a hole simply to sit down in it and gaze out over all creation are questions lost to me. All I can say is that it happened. And if the flavor of that memory is as true as my memory of it, I can also say I enjoyed sitting there a great deal.

It is strange how that image remains so fresh in my mind. So far in my life I have accumulated nearly forty-five years worth of memories, many of which are lost all together and will never be reclaimed. Important events, moments that shaped the person I’ve become, are now nothing more than great gaps of noise to my thinking. And yet the picture of my two feet dangling over the lip of that hole has stuck like a burr in my brain. The fact that it has not budged in all these years leads me to attach some sort of importance to it, as though it means something profound that I am not smart enough or wise enough to understand.

But maybe it’s something much simpler. Maybe that memory remains because I have always been one to crawl around in the dirt and mud.

My people are farmers and mountain folk who would rather be outside than in because outside there is room enough to move and breathe. Here we are raised to believe the ground upon which we tread is the very ground from which we were long ago made, a bit of mud gifted with the touch of the Holy Divine, leaving us to walk upon this earth half fallen and half raised. The caution given me by my parents and grandparents was to never set aside either half of that whole. Lose sight of the holy spark within you, and you’ll become little more than a dumb animal. Forget that you are connected deeply with the wind and rain and mountains, and you’ll live as though all of creation is yours to own rather than borrow for a short time.

That sort of thinking has stuck over the years. Even now, I like my fingers to be stained by earth. I like to dig and plant and find the lonely places. I prefer the feel of grass beneath me to any chair. I would rather lie upon a pallet of boughs than a bed of feathers.

I’ve read that scientists have discovered microbes in soil that serve as an antidepressant on par with drugs such as Prozac.

Natural medicine which enters the body through the nose and the skin. Proof positive that playing outside is good for you.

But it’s more than that. For me, anyway. Getting out in the dirt doesn’t only serve as a reminder that we’re all made of dust and stars. It isn’t merely a link to that long line of kin behind me who made their meager lives by the sweat of their brows and the aches in their backs. What I’m doing in the yard or the garden or the flower beds is acknowledging a part of my own existence that in times past I wanted so desperately to deny, and it is this:

Down in the dirt is where life happens,

right there amongst the mud and muck, and we will never find the means to keep ourselves unsoiled for long. We can try. We can aim to build our lives such that nothing terrible can get through, that we are insulated with stout walls and sturdy roofs that allow no pain to whistle through and no cold to grip us, but in the end this world will always win because it is so big and we are so little.

Best, I think, is to meet this life on its own terms. To get out there and get dirty. Feel the soil on your skin and under your nails and the sweat gathering at your brow. To work and tire and grow sore in your labors knowing all the while that the weeds will return and the grass will grow yet again and it will rain too much or too little but none of it matters in the end, or all of it matters very little.

Because what matters most is not to hide from the world but make yourself present in it, and to dig and dig and dig more.

When things were right

May 19, 2017 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

My kids tell me they’d rather be growing up when I did.

Trade 2017 for, say, 1978. Anything with a “19” as the first two numbers will do. I’m certain the bulk of their evidence for this conclusion can be handed to the stories I tell about how life was once lived in our little town, which isn’t little so much anymore. “Back in the day,” as some would put it. Or, as I’m apt to say, “When things were right.”

Like how during the summer you might go all day without seeing your parents and your parents were fine with that, because they knew you were safe and you’d be home either when you got hungry or when the streetlights came on.

Or how you’d just keep your hand raised above the steering wheel when you drove down Main Street because everybody knew everybody else. You either went to school with them or went to church with them or were kin to them through blood or marriage.

How there was Cohron’s Hardware right across from Reid’s mechanic shop, and if you were a kid and knew your manners you get a free piece of Bazooka! gum at the former and a free Co’Cola in a genuine glass bottle that was so cold it puckered your lips at the other.

How, back then, you rode your bike down to the 7-11 to play video games—Eight-ball Deluxe on the pinball and Defender and RBI Baseball—and then pool what money you had left for a Slurpee and a pack of Topps baseball cards.

How maybe in the afternoons there’d still be change enough in your pocket to buy a Dilly bar from the hippie who drove the ice cream truck around the neighborhood. You’d hurry up and eat before the sun could melt it away and then head over for pickup games at the sandlot which rivaled any Game 7 of any World Series, and after, once all the playing was done and the arguing finished, you’d have the best drink of water in your life out of Mr. Snyder’s garden hose.

Evenings were for supper and bowls of ice cream fresh from the machine your daddy spent and hour cranking on the porch. You spent the nights catching lightning bugs and lying in bed slicked with sweat because there was only that one fan in the hallway. You’d go to sleep listening to the lonely mockingbird singing through the open window from the maple in the backyard.

So, yeah. I get it when my kids say that’s the life they want. Who wouldn’t want a childhood like that?

Truth be known, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’d like to grow up back then again, too. Not so much to right certain wrongs (I have none, other than the day when I was six that I crushed a frog with a cinderblock just to see what it’d look like), but just to go back. To feel that sense of freedom again, and safety, and to know the world as wide and beautiful instead of small and scary.

I’ve talked to others over the years who feel the same way. Some grew up with me in this tiny corner of the Virginia mountains. Many more did not. They were born elsewhere in towns and cities both, yet each carry a story not unlike my own as one would a flame in the darkness. Even many who suffered horrible childhoods look back over them with a sense of fondness. They tell me things like, “Those were some good years, weren’t they?” Even when they weren’t.

This is part of what it means to be human, I think. We spent the first years of our lives wanting nothing more than to get away from where we are, only to spend the rest of it trying to get back.

My kids will be the same way. Yours, too. They will grow and flourish and have kids of their own, and those kids will be regaled with tales of how much better the world was back in the day. When things were right.

It’s only been in these last few years that my own parents have begun telling me the truth about my golden childhood. How they often struggled to keep a roof over my head and food on my table and clothes on my back. How it seemed like the country was on the cusp of some great abyss. People at each other’s throats. War looming. Nuclear missiles. How it was hard to tell the truth from the lies. Sound familiar?

My parents don’t look back on that time with fondness at all. To them, it was their childhood world of the 50s that was back in the day. That was when everything was right.

I’m sure my grandparents would disagree if they were yet here.

There were no good old days. I think we all know that deep down.

But that doesn’t stop us from believing there were, from wanting so desperately to know that one lie a truth in its own right. Because that’s part of what it means to be human, too. Maybe the best part. That deep longing and need for a time when things are right.

There are some among us who believe that will never be the case. Things were never right and never will be. I’m not one of them. Sure, deep down I know that my childhood wasn’t always the bright summer day I remember it to be now. But on some distant tomorrow? Well.

I’ve heard that heaven will be made up of all those secret longings we carry through our lives. I hope that’s true. Because if it is, I can take comfort in the fact that I’ll be spending eternity on a quiet street in a quiet town in a quiet corner of Virginia. I’ll be listening to mockingbirds and playing a pickup game of baseball and drinking from a water hose.

That’s all I want. Nothing more.

Missing me

November 6, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

It was laying in an old box marked BILLY’S STUFF in a forgotten corner of the attic, near where the insulation had been bitten and chewed by a family of long-ago mice. The words were faded and the cardboard brittle. When I pulled the top off, both one corner and a cloud of dust flew.

Normally, I would have moved on. It was only one box among dozens in my parents’ attic and one that was not marked CHRISTMAS, and thus not of interest. Normally, I would have gone on to the wreaths wrapped in trash bags and the candles that have gone in their windows every year since I was a child and the other boxes of ornaments and decorations and pushed them to the door, into my father’s hands.

Normally. But I didn’t this time, not with that box. Because this one said BILLY’S STUFF.

There is a kind of magic in such situations, as though time is blurred such that the past and present become the same in one small tick of life. That’s what I felt right then, crouched down under the eaves. This was the Me I once was tapping the Me I am now on the shoulder, wanting to sit for a while. Wanting to talk. Given all that, I had to open the box. Even if Dad was hollering into the attic, wanting to know where I was.

So I reached down and folded back the remaining sides, feeling like I had just discovered some long lost tomb. Inside were memories long forgotten—notebooks and newspaper clippings, an old T shirt gifted to me by someone who must have been important but whom I’d forgotten, an old fountain pen. And buried beneath it all, a single cassette tape with the word LIFE written on the label.

Dad hollered again, telling me Christmas would be over by the time I got all the decorations down. I felt the stuff in the box. I took the tape. Partly because it was the only thing I could fit in my pocket. Mostly because it intrigued me. I had no idea what was on there, and I wanted to know what LIFE meant to a seventeen-year-old me who believed the world lay at his feet.

I got back home and dug out an old cassette player from the closet, amazed not only that I had one, but that it still worked and I’d remembered how to use one. I sat it at my desk, popped the tape in, and pushed Play. What came over the speaker wasn’t my own voice expounding upon my adolescent wants and dreams. It was music.

Of course it had to be music.

Back then, at that age, everything was music. I had so many of those cassettes back then my truck couldn’t hold them. Half were kept in the glovebox, half in my room. Mix tapes, we called them. I guess you can do the same with CDs now, but I don’t know what they’re called.
Honestly? I was a little disappointed. Was I really so shallow that long ago to think sixty minutes of spandex-pantsed, makeup wearing, hair metal music was the one thing of my past worth preserving for the future?

It wasn’t the first time the person I am shook my head at the person I was and called him an idiot.

But I kept the tape playing. One song melted into the next, and before long I wasn’t only playing air guitar and singing along, I was remembering. Where I first heard that song. Who I was with. What I was doing. What I felt.

Then I understood. And suddenly I realized it wasn’t the person I am cursing the person I was at all, it was the other way around. These weren’t songs at all. This was the background music to a former life.

I’ve just spent the last hour on iTunes, downloading every one of those songs. I miss cassette tapes (heck, I’m old enough to still miss vinyl records), but digital really is the way to go. Right now, I’m turning my past to my present and plan to enjoy the person I was while listening to those songs on my phone while I mow the yard. Listening and remembering.

Because you know what? I haven’t talked with that old me in a long while. Sometimes, I miss him.

The puddle

May 21, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

It was a hard rain, and fast—the sort of pour that early May is known for here. It came from clouds the color of dark smoke that rolled over town like a wave, here and then gone over the mountains. What was left in its wake was the grateful song of a robin from the oak in the backyard, and the sugary smell of wet grass and tilled earth.

And the puddle.

It was not a deep puddle, nor was it wide. Maybe three lengths of my boot and deep enough to reach the second knuckle of my index finger. It lay just beyond the mailbox at the end of the lane, a pothole the rain had converted into a passing mirror of liquid glass.

The mailman had delivered the day’s assortment of junk mail and bills just before the first cracks of thunder. Now that the sun had returned and the robin was singing and that sweetness was in the air, I decided to go check the box. A small boy riding a dirt-road-brown bicycle rounded the corner as I made my way down the lane. He tried a wheelie, barely managing to get the front tire off the ground, then uttered a Yes! as if what he’d just done was almost supernatural.

I gave the puddle a wide berth—I was in blue jeans and flip flops, and didn’t want to risk getting either wet. There are few things in life more irritating than wet cuffs on your blue jeans.

I’d just pulled the mail out of the box (a reminder of the upcoming Book Fair, a ten dollars off coupon for Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the cable bill) when the boy squeezed the brake levels on the handlebars. The bike skidded nearly ten feet on the wet pavement, the last four or five fishtailing, which produced another Yes!, this one whispered.

I looked up. The boy was staring at my feet, where the puddle lay. A soft breeze rippled the surface, and for a moment, however brief, my mind turned to something I’d once heard from an old relative—all mirrors have two sides, she’d said. One side you look at. The other side looks into you.

“That’s a pretty cool puddle,” the boy said to me.

I looked at it and then to him. “Sure is.”

He nodded, and I got the feeling it was the sort of nod that was more the punctuation on the end of a decision rather than an agreement with what I’d just said.

I thought he was going to ride through it. That’s what I would have done at his age. Plus, it would have the added benefit of turning his dirt-road-brown bike back into the red I suspected was underneath. But he didn’t. He threw down the kickstand and dismounted as if from a mighty steed in the Old West.

He walked to me and toed the edges of the puddle.

“You gonna use that?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Mind if I borry it?”

“You can borrow it all you want.”

He nodded and took three kid-sized steps back. Then he ran forward, leaped, and landed square in the middle of the puddle. Water billowed up over his legs, reaching his waist. He lands with a smile that to me is brighter than the rainbow over us.

“Thanks, mister,” he said. “You can have a go if you want.”

He rode off, a plume of road water trailing behind him. I held the mail in my hand and tried to remember the last time I jumped into a puddle in the road after a May rainstorm. Years, probably. Probably long ago, back when I had my own dirt-road-brown bike.

Puddles aren’t adult things. Adults avoid them. They splash and make a mess and get the cuffs of your jeans wet. It isn’t responsible or mature.

Maybe. But then there’s that mirror inside each of us. The one we look into that shows us who we are, and the one that looks into us and shows us who we should be.

I won’t tell you if I jumped or not. Some things need to stay secret. But I will say this—I can’t wait for it to rain again.

The boys of summer

May 14, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

In the late springs it was always school and chores after, and when the grass was cut and the garden weeded, there would be time for an inning or two. Then May would give to June. I cannot fully convey just how special that time of year was to me growing up—those few weeks when the air would first warm and then the mountains blossom, and that long string of big, black X’s on the calendar I’d begun in September finally ended. Summer vacation. That’s when the season would really start. That’s when the lot would open.

There were five of us neighborhood kids, and we’d always get together once school was out. There was me and Greg and Chuck and Noel and Jonathan. Sometimes there was a sixth named Duane, but it wasn’t often he was allowed to play. Duane’s daddy was a preacher—not the holy roller kind but something close—and his momma always frowned on us neighborhood kids running around, shooting each other with pretend guns and playing cops and robbers. It was always better when Duane got to play. He was the only one willing to be the cop. It all turned out for the best, though. Duane, he never had much of an arm anyway.

That’s how we measured ourselves back then—by our arms. Not how big they were or how strong, but how far and how fast we could throw a ball. Because let me tell you—back in our old neighborhood, baseball was king and the lot was our castle.

It wasn’t much, that piece of land Maybe half an acre wide and that much long, with a row of big pines marking the left foul line and Mr. Pannill’s house marking the right. The road was our fence.

Come the first day of summer, we were at the lot every morning at 9:00 sharp. We’d play until the sun got too hot. Sometimes Greg’s mom would feed us, and it’d be peanut butter and banana sandwiches in the shade of those pines. Other times, we’d bike it down to the 7-11 and poll what money we had for the biggest Slurpee we could afford. One time Noel said he couldn’t share a straw with all of us, there were too many germs. Don’t you know we let him have it for being such a wuss. Then it’d be back to the lot for more of the same until the sun went down and our mommas started hollering.

The thing about childhood is that you don’t know how special it is until it’s over. All those memories you make will stay in your pocket for the rest of your life, and you’ll take them out from time to time just to handle them and remember. But I think we all understood that back then. I know I did. Even that young and even in the midst of those moment, I knew how special they’d become one day. How long-lasting.

I grew up in that lot. We all played on the Little League teams in town, but whatever we did on the big field didn’t matter. Our reputations—good or bad—were made between the pines and Mr. Pannil’s backyard, and we all knew it. I hit my first home run there, clear to the other side of the road. Broke my first bone in the outfield. I learned about divorce from listening to Noel talk about his parents, and I learned about sex from listening to Jonathan talk about his.

Things like that, they stay with you. They get tucked into your pocket and are never lost.

I learned this at the lot, too—nothing is ever permanent in this world. Even the good things go away eventually. We spent almost nine good summers on that lot and I remember each and every one of them, and I remember how it all began to slowly disappear. Noel moved away. So did Duane, though we never really missed him. The rest of us . . . well, I guess we all just grew up. We got cars and got older. Too old for the lot.

I’ve lost track of most of them now. That happens often in life too, and I think it’s one of the saddest things. There’s now a house where our lot used to be. It’s a nice ranch with a big front porch and flowers planted all the way down the sidewalk, but to me it’ll always be an ugly thing. To me, it will always be the thing that covered over my castle. But I drove down there tonight and just sat. It’s getting on in May and June is right around the corner—just the sort of evening when we’d get together for a few innings. I sat there with the window down and the breeze rustling through those old pines, and I swear I could hear the laughter of five young boys trying to figure out what it meant to be alive. I swear I would hear the ping of the bat. I swear I could hear someone say the next game’s tomorrow.

On witches and free books

April 30, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I was only a boy when I learned of the witches, and the picture I’d formed in my mind—something akin to the marrying of the Wicked Witch of the West and the one from those Bugs Bunny cartoons—wasn’t the picture I ended up seeing along that mountain ridge. I saw no brooms or bubbling cauldrons gathered about that shack, only a few drying possum skins and a column of gray smoke from the chimney, an overturned metal pail by the well. Could have been any old body’s shack, really. Except this one wasn’t. Witch lived there.

“Ain’t no witch,” I said. But I said it low and kept my head that way too, one eye and all my body behind a stout oak some fifty yards away. “That’s just some woman lives there.”

“Ain’t,” Jeffrey said. “Ever’body knows she’s a witch. My mama came up here onced for medicine. Daddy didn’t want her to but she did.”

“Witches don’t give medicine.”

“This one here does. Mama says she makes them in a room in there. Says she prays over all these plants and stuff.”

“Witches don’t pray.”

Jeffrey said, “This one here does.”

That was the first (and only, as it happened) time I visited Jeffrey’s house and the deep woods beyond it, the two of us fast friends that year of first grade, two country boys marooned at a Christian school in the city. Ours was a kinship born of place rather than blood. While the other boys would spend recess putting together Legos and learning the names of the disciples, Jeffrey and I would be out in the mud patch under the basketball goal, digging up worms with our hands. He’d invited me over that Saturday afternoon, saying he had a lot better worms in his yard and more mud too, plus maybe we could shoot his daddy’s .22. Turned out Jeffrey’s daddy was gone that day and the sun had scorched that soft mud to brown concrete. That’s when he asked me—Hey, you wanna see where a witch lives?

“Where’s she at?” I asked, leaning out a little from the tree.

“I don’t know. Daddy says sometimes she turned to a bird or a deer so you can’t tell. He says she’s watchin even when you don’t think she is.”

“Let’s go up there,” I said.

“No way. You wanna get cursed?”

“Ain’t no curse.”

Jeffrey said, “This one here, she’ll curse.”

I’d like to tell you I went on anyway, left that tree and marched right up to the door on that shack and knocked with neither fear nor trepidation. But I didn’t and neither did Jeffrey, because right after that a crow called from the trees and we ran. Ran all the way back and never stopped until we were locked inside Jeffrey’s little bedroom, and then we never spoke about no witch. I never went back. Not to Jeffrey’s, not to that stretch of ridge. To this day, that part of the mountain is one of the few places I’ve tread but once.

That memory is still fresh in my mind all these years later. I can’t remember the name of my fifth grade teacher or exactly whose house I egged when I was seventeen or where I left the keys to the truck this morning, but I can tell you how the sun beat on our backs that day and how the creek water felt like ice when we ran through it hollering and stumbling and that something—animal or witch—followed us through the trees the whole way back from that cabin. I know it.

There are stories here in the mountains, secret ones told by granddaddies on their porches at night when the crickets sing and the moon is high in a dark sky and a Mason jar is in their hands. Tales to make your skin goose up. The ones with demons and angels are good. Ghosts are better. The stories of the witches some say still hide in these hollers, they’re the best.

I guess that’s the biggest reason I decided to add to those best stories with a tale of my own. Not about two small boys that happen to strike the ire of a witch, but an entire town that does the same and what happens when that witch seeks her revenge. About the darkness in us all, and the light.

The Curse of Crow Hollow won’t be out until later this summer, but you have a chance at getting your own copy a bit earlier. I’ll even scrawl my name in it. All you have to do is follow this link and enter your name. Easy peasy.

In the meantime, you keep away from those witches.