March Mud-Season-Mercy

Another mule-letter from the studio desk in the Mississippi Delta

March 27th - 8:14 pm - 

Looks like the grass jumped up four inches since this afternoon, 

(i remember him saying, let me do preacher math, I could’ve said two feet) 

Green and sweet and curling up, up, up. 

Sat down and wrote you last week about love, the old man and his white sheet cake with pink icing and pink candles, and how sweet it is, and what is love, anyway, is that it? The full hearted purpose of going out and finding the right cake, because maybe we shouldn’t eat this, but I know you love it, and I love you, and I know it’d make you smile, and it’s your birthday, make a wish. (and I wrote it to you and said, this is the one to make the newsletter, but it wasn’t, talking about angels and the land and,)  

Sat down next to write you about forgiveness, getting a little tractor stuck in deep mud and fat cold raindrops falling, and wondering if the tractor wouldn’t just return to the earth before our eyes, and him calling, “tell him to put his jeans AND boots on,” and he was laying down shoveling mud out, and they had to jump the old John Deere tractor, and it was three tractors and a side by side and a hauling truck and one artist who had no business asking anyone for anything, for the flat-tired trailer she moved so other people could look out on the land and breath in Delta air and have a little quiet, watch the sunset, sunrise if they wanted, and he came to help, and got his tractor stuck, and someone saying, the game is on, they have an ambidextrous pitcher, and I haven’t gotten to see him pitch yet, 

Riding to the coast and writing, thank you. You didn’t have to help, but you did. You didn’t have to help at all. It took everything we all had to get it out. And he’s saying, I was stuck in the mud in Vietnam, that was life and death. This wasn’t anything. His son saying, I’ve gotten stuck worse than that. Forgiveness. Everyone saying they’ve done it worse. He’s going home saying, look at that tractor in the mud, five men standing around, four with their hands in their pockets. It’s the season of mud. It’s all right. Forgiveness, then forgotten. It’s simple. And they’re smiling about it. The land itself will fill itself in, renewed. And I suspect he still got to see the pitcher. And I wrote him, thank you, that felt just like forgiveness, you never had to do that. There was no reason you really had to help at all, much less answer the phone. 

We slept with the door open, already knowing something bad had happened. Falling asleep full and warm with an evening in the Delta with food from West Africa and eating with our hands in the cozy light of the old-turned-new hotel, people from everywhere, finding their common thread. The rain to my back, the lightning, like maybe it wasn’t even happening. The sky was clear and bright with stars when we got home, like the storm had washed everything away, the breeze cold, us under her quilt, everyone close, to rise in the morning and still be blessed with our every-day-things, 

The next day, trucks loaded with water and supplies, headed south, fast. If you come to the Delta, 61 or 49, you’ll find the devastation. Folks walking their house in the sunset, their home shattered in Silver City, tornados coming at night as though they couldn’t think of another way to be meaner. Rolling Fork seeing rising water, flooding to the highway already, wondering if this isn’t one of the better thermostats on the future, but it’s Mississippi, and it’s the Delta, and I don’t know if people know, if people have hearts the way I believe they do, but there’s so many ways to tie your strings these days, 

Today, walking and thinking, the land here demands that you grow. The earth, the air, the weather, it wants to change you. And thinking while laughing and beating the mud out of the PTO that I put there, that I messed up, the clang of it hard against concrete, he calls it the season of mud. It isn’t always growing season. And it usually isn’t harvest season. 

The love lesson some fertilizer, the forgiveness lesson some fertilizer, but here in the season of mud…he keeps warning me, don’t go through it when it’s still too deep, too wet, you’ll be riding over the ruts you made the rest of the year. Treat it gentle, have some patience, let it all soak in and come around, none of this is forever, ever, not the flooding, not the drought, not the tornados or the hurricanes, 

It read, he said his prayers on air,

It read, I am surprised anyone survived, 

And there was a wedding photograph that blew into someone’s yard seventy miles away, 

And they found a book blown open with “storms can happen at any age” underlined in graphite, and he said, I don’t understand. I can’t understand.

And in the season of mud maybe you can make a change, but you have to be careful, 

Don’t go out and get stuck, the land is forgiving and also brutally merciless, and in the season of mud, there is the warm fire of friends, neighbors, and the beautiful thing that’s in you, 

She said, is it the eternal heart? And I said, that’s the same thing, same as the sacred heart, 

Our own seed we are growing every day, our own sacred hearts, washed against the storms of life and desire and heartbreak, warmed with community and family and true love, strengthened by trial, continuing to grow, making our own fires to light the way, 

Cotton and okra will grow real tall if you let them, longleaf pines need fire to grow, cypress thrive in swamp waters, Steinbeck said something like, even if you let it fall fallow, something will grow,

In the season of mud and in harvest I hope you have all of the sunshine and rain you need,

Sending love, forgiveness, kindness, from someone who is also trying their best to be in harvest, to be all blossom, all eternal heart, for you. 

Love you. Mud season or harvest season. Even in harvest you have to work really hard, thank you for being the same, staying steady, 

mule 

tornado relief in this world of grief;
https://www.gofundme.com/f/rolling-fork-tornado-relief-fund

Thank you. Already entirely too wordy so i am unsure how to proceed, except, gratitude. thank you.

March 31st, a wonderful lineup, Gail Keenan Art Gallery at Coast Episcopal in Pass Christian, 5065 Espy Ave.

My good blues buddy and future doctor and past carriage driver Charlotte Jones (and possum mother and former otter mother and gator bite “victim” and there’s so much…) we wrote an article together for Country Roads, it’s here, and in their April road trip issue:

https://countryroadsmagazine.com/travel/getaways/mississippi-delta-road-trip/

with gratitude to Jordan LaHaye Fontenot who has works tirelessly on everything she runs towards, incredible:

and there’s more, and there isn’t, thank you for the support on Belonging, and in the Little Green Store, these are no small things, they are so big in my heart and memory, but it’s not the time for me to be no mockingbird, thank you for everything, everything, everything. please write any time. big love & brayerfully, mule

it’s blind willie johnson and willie b harris singing, come and go with me, won’t you go with me, we oughta be holy (we all will be holy) to that land, to that land, where i’m bound,