The Smell of Dirt (Castles)

I want to write a memoir but I’m kind of bored by my own story. What a pickle. 

A recent write-your-memoir prompt was “the smell of dirt.”  

I don’t have anything Toni-Morrison-eloquent to say about the smell of dirt, but I like it.  And I liked playing on big piles of it when I was a kid.  Construction sites where my dad worked.  They could be dangerous, I guess...rebar and cement block and power tool thingies with giant blades.  Bulldozers, hammers, rocks, sticks.  Not pretty pretty princess stuff, but it was okay.  I was into the mud.  Glorious mud!  I don’t remember trashing my dad’s van afterwards, but we must have.  Maybe it didn’t matter because there was no upholstery.  Or seats.  Just tools rattling around in a metal box on wheels.  

Anyway, playing on dirt piles was fun. Building castles, preparing for battle, going to battle against your brother’s dirt pile/castle.  Which reminds me: growing up sucks.  When you’re a kid, you can kill everybody and die all you want with zero angst or consequence.  When you grow up, you can’t even fake die without getting some kind of performance review.  What’s cool about that?  Until recently, I thought being a grown up put me more directly in contact with the magic I craved as a kid.  I demanded unicorns and miracles but too well knew the difference between imagined and real.  Now I can buy myself all the unicorns I want on Amazon!  But as a kid, when it was time to go home, the castles and battlefields became dirt piles once more and we climbed into a real van.  An uncomfortable van, but a real one.  

I’m less convinced by what’s real now.  Clinging to notions of it like, Please!  Be real! Stay solid!  Things like safety, home, self, democracy, America the Exceptional, me at the top of the food chain.  Please!  Stay real..!  What a reversal.  The kid had a much more solid grasp on what was what.  When something bad happened, it was always someone else’s fault (my little sister’s),  There was always someone to go to for reparations (Mom and Dad). Now, something bad happens and it’s all my fault.  I have to check my karma and intentions and ego and neuroses and privilege and shadow and upbringing before choosing what to eat for breakfast.  I make all the bad shit happen!  By flying in airplanes and watching TV and being born and buying food that comes wrapped in plastic and so on...My fault is the default. 

Also, my imagination controls me even more now, bleeds into reality with awful-izing (if this word isn’t in the dictionary it should be after this pandemic) and catastrophes around every corner.  As a kid, the game always ended and there was pizza and a movie on VHS to ground me back in this good, solid world.  Sure, the boogie man scared me, but it was someone else’s job to make him go away.  And he only showed up every now and then.  It wasn’t my Sisyphean task to scare him off every second of every day.  Someone else had the final word with “that’s not real,” and I believed them. But now the boogie man has set up shop in my news feed and my head.  Boogies have become a way of life. (Another crazy reversal—I think of boogies as a kid thing, right?) 

WTheck? I’m going back to being a kid.  She was never bored with her own story.  Because there were castles and battles and she was writing it as she went. Boogie men and news feeds be damned. Maybe I will write a book about dirt piles.  Better yet, maybe I will go outside and find one, climb up to the top of it, feel the mud squishing in my shoes.  And reclaim this reality for me, whatever the heck I imagine it to be.