January 2, 2010

A friend of mine once told me that miracles work in both directions, so be careful what you wish for.

I grew up in a drought. Well...half. For the first half, I grew up in a swamp. No need to worry about water. If you're not careful enough there, you step outside and walk without looking and all of a sudden, you're knee-deep in mud, marsh grass up to your elbows. American alligators swim around on the bottom, so it's best if you watch your ankles.

It was so wet there the whole goddamned place was a sink hole. What do you expect when you build a city on a swamp? Fill up the swamp all you want with dirt, but nature finds a way, always, and two years later or less you realize God never keeps his promises. The whole God forsaken city gets flooded out, sink holes and all, with water up to the second story windows and the ocean doesn't give a damn. Comes right up to your door, knocking: 'Just came for tea'. If you're lucky enough to survive, you learn about the people it claimed. You watch children rowing boats to school because no one can tell how long the wait will be for the water to recede.

When it's dry again, the house you live in, if you were lucky enough for it to survive, still sits on a swamp. So the cement foundations split down the middle and they're not worth the trouble of repairing. you can tell, because we all played marbles. Put the marble down on one side of the house and its rolls east. Put it down on the other and it rolls west. Don't even think about living in a level world. The second you make the measurements for that kind of dream and try to lay even the cheapest of cement slab foundations, it'll either be split down the middle or drowned.

But maybe the floods and the sink holes and the alligators were worth risking your life on because when you walked outside the air may have been so thick with humidity you could hardly breathe, but what you could breathe in, if you didn't know better, smelled like lemons. If you did know better, you knew that Magnolia trees smell almost like lemons and there were Magnolia trees everywhere. And they were lucky enough not to be Live Oaks strangled by Spanish Moss which kills the trees by suffocation but which is prohibited by l aw to remove.

In my front yard, there was the Magnolia tree of every childhood's dream. The tree was a shelter. From the sun, from the rain. Branches from the ground up to the top. I swear, you could build a city in there, a thousand fortresses. You could build a childhood kingdom in that tree, with a thousand different cultures that could cultivate a million childhood fantasies. With the lemony scent of those fantastic Magnolias permeating every inch of it.

Thing was, the tree was owned by my landlord, who lived next door and kept his eye on that tree like a hound's nose on a fox. Any kid caught thinking of climbing it would topple from that fantasy kingdom of dreams and forts and lemons in a second. They guy would come running out like a rabid hound in his boxer shorts, screaming all the way to Kingdom Come, brandishing a shotgun that he had no qualms with using to blow our heads off.

It's funny how reality can be stranger than fiction, huh? But what else is new?

I went from the swamp, where, seriously , you were cursing water except for maybe when you went out into the maze of the saltwater marshes--which were beautiful. Otters would swim right next to you. And if you were really lucky, maybe a dolphin or two.

But anyway, we moved. At first, the rain was just as bad, but we were inland, so there was no ocean to come in. Raindrops as big as my face. No joke, But then, it stopped. The lake went dry, the trees started falling down, splintered by dryness. We started praying for rain. But it didn't come. It didn't come for fifteen years.

When it finally did come, we didn't need the ocean to come flooding in from the coast. The storms brought he ocean with them. It rained twenty--one inches in two days. For the record, that's almost two feet. But it was raining before that and it rained after. There was a body count again, all the way up there in the mountains. So that's what I mean. Miracles work in two directions. When you wish for rain, someone's going to drown, and if you curse the water, someone else will die of thirst. Inertia doesn't give a damn. What goes around comes around, and then it comes back again.