rural Alabama – Words Not On Paper

I am sitting in a grassy field under a small tent. A young nurse is taking my blood pressure. She is dressed in army fatigues, like one of the nurses from the old television show M*A*S*H. It is sunny and the light is very bright. She is talking to me, her voice muffled like we are under water. There are no other sounds. No birds singing, no traffic, no other voices. We are alone.

“We are going to get you to a room soon honey, okay?”

“My head hurts.”

And later:

I am lying in a bed somewhere. My head feels as if it were in a vice. I hear my son’s voice.

How you feelin’ dad?”

“I don’t know what to do. They gave me all these COVID kits to put together, and the instructions are in Chinese. Can you help me figure it out?”

I would later learn that the first memory never happened. I was admitted to the hospital by standard procedure, through the emergency room.

The second did. My son found me babbling like that the next day. I had received no treatment up to that point. My fever had spiked to 103.

I remember almost nothing about what transpired in the week that followed. Most of what I write reconstructed from The Book. Other things were false (or no) memories that the Redhead explained in the days and weeks afterward.

No, family did come to see you, you talked to them. Yes, you did have your phone, but I did not see you look at it. Yes, you were awake a good bit of the time. Yes, we talked about a lot of things. No, they did bring you meals. Don’t you remember any of that?

I did not. I do not.

The Book has pages and pages of tests. Bizarre imbalances in blood profiles. Some categories were extremely low, others alarmingly high. There were also MRIs, CT scans, and ultrasounds.

They were looking for West Nile virus, but that test was negative. They considered meningitis, but never did a spinal tap (an error, given what was to come). The baffled internist bowed out and referred me to the “Infectious Disease Expert.”

After four days of intravenous antibiotics and fluids, the blood tests returned to normal.

A memory, confirmed to be true:

I am sitting in a chair and a doctor is speaking to me in a quiet voice.

“Mr. Clifton you have been an extremely sick man. We have done a lot of tests, but we do not know the cause. I suspect it may be related to the tick bite you had, but tick-borne infection tests must be sent to a lab in Virginia. It will be two weeks before the results come back. Until then, I am giving you a prescription for one week of Doxycycline just in case. By the way, I noticed from your chart that you haven’t had your COVID vaccine, and I really think you should consider…”

“No. I am not taking your shot. You should focus on figuring out what I have rather than trying to get me to take some so-called vaccine for something you think I may get.”

“Sir this is not a political thing, but…”

“No, it is not political. End of discussion.”

“Understood. I will call you when your lab results come in.”

Admittedly rude, that. It might have affected our future relationship.

The Redhead drove me home soon afterward, but to this day I do not remember the ride.

porch

“This is Catherine Hinds. Buddy wanted me to call and let you know that he seen a turkey this morning come out across the road from our house, a gobbler, and he went back in the woods going toward your place. He wanted me to call and tell you. Seen his beard hanging down. I thought I’d call and tell you. This is Catherine Hines and my phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX. It’s uh…What time is it? It’s 12:03, is what time it is. Thought I’d call and tell you. Bye.”

This was on my voicemail last Friday.

Catherine and Buddy are my neighbors. The live in the next to the last house before the last house on a rutted-up red clay road.

She is 89, he 92. They are porch-sitters. Neither can hear well, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with their eyesight. Nothing comes down that road without notice.

Needless-to-say, I don’t have a security system. Be a waste of good money.

The last time I stopped and visited (which was way too long ago), we all sat on the porch and talked turkey. Mostly the lack thereof. I bemoaned the fact that the wild turkey had disappeared in the last couple of years. Every Fall for 20 years I watched droves of hens pass through green fields and oak flats as I waited for a glimpse of a deer. Every Spring, gobbling like thunder on ridges all around. Now I can’t even find a track. Buddy, who has lived on this same plot of ground his entire life (except for the War, of course), was just as perplexed.

Thus, the reason for the voicemail — turkey sighting.

The Redhead and I stopped and visited the next day to thank Ms. Catherine for the call. The ladies chatted while Buddy and I hashed-out our theories about the mysterious turkey decline.

The conversation soon turned to the community.

Catherine said we have new neighbors in the next house back up the road. They keep to themselves. Looks like they’re going to be good neighbors.

Wednesday is her “go to town” day. The grocery store is a good one. It used to be a Food Town. Now it’s Renfroe’s, but she said she still calls it Food Town because that was the name for so many years. She knows everybody that works there by name and they know her too. It’s not a big store, but they have everything you need. Meat’s good too.

Buddy said the timber on the Nelson place just up the road was recently cut. Billy Dennis cut it. Buddy knew his daddy. He was a fine man. Lived about three miles up the road. Died about ten years ago. The lady who owns that land now lives up north somewhere. She was a Boone, you know, before she got married. This country used to be just slam eat-up with Boones. She stopped last time she was down. Wanted some red berries off that bush out back. Told her that she could have the whole damn thing if she wanted to dig it up. Her land, now, they sure skinned that place, but Billy said they were going to set it back out or seed it with pines or however they do that stuff next Winter. He couldn’t remember it looking so “clean” since they used to farm it.

This goes on without pause the next thirty minutes, a seemingly random conversation, but really a chain of thoughts, each link leading to the next topic, all within a few miles from the house.

We eventually excuse ourselves. Our dogs are in the truck and we need to “get on down the road.”

Buddy said what he always does. “You’ll stop again next time you pass.”

We have to pass to get to our house.

I tell the Redhead that Buddy and Catherine have a better life than us.

She doesn’t understand my thinking, can’t see how I could believe such a thing. Just two old folks living in a little house on the same plot of ground for the last sixty years.

I see it differently. No computer. No cellphone. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. No Fox, CNN, MSNBC. No Left, Right, Center. No Trump, Peolsi, Biden, Bernie. No Venezuela, China, North Korea. Not much interest in the workings of the world more than a few miles from home.

Really not much interest in anything that can’t be seen from the porch.

All they have is each other. It’s their world, and that suits them just fine.

I think that’s about as good as life can get.

Tag: rural Alabama

Four: Storm

Life from the Porch