I used to live in a very saturated world. There were people, there were animals, and there were flowers. There was crime, there was death, and there was family. I lived in a world where I could never tell it to stop, that it was too much, and that maybe it should slow down. Everything piled one on top of the other but the pile never got bigger, it just got denser. I kept thinking that with everything piling up, it should eventually run into the sky. I mean, it had to. Eventually it gets too dense to compress anymore and then you have to start building another layer. This is learned in basic geology. First there is the sedimentary layer, then, it enters the igneous stage, when heat and pressure are introduced, it becomes a metamorphic formation. There is simply no more room for anything, not even air. Then you must start again. Begin the process of layering again. I became obsessed with this idea when I was young. I figured that I could speed up the whole geological process and eventually I could be in the sky. Where it was clean, clear, bright, organized, and spacious. I never saw it as a Heaven; I saw it has a haven. Heaven made no sense to me. I never understood why my grandmother said I had to be good in order to go to Haven (she had a heavy southern accent, which made heaven sound like haven). If she was setting the example of how to be good and make it to “haven”, I knew that that meant it would be filled with people as well. I thought that there was no way that the sky could be as full of things as it is here. I figured this was just another one of the many things about her that doesn’t make any sense. I thought that the only thing the sky could be was another surface, another place like this but uninhabited. But, another room that we could inhabit, scratch that, another world that I could inhabit. It wasn’t a complete whole new world but in the personal sense of the word, it was. It was going to be my world. My world was so full that there was no way to keep it clean, to keep it organized. No matter how thoroughly you cleaned, you would inevitably find a new crevasse where the dust had built up. There was so much that all you ever wanted to do was to fall asleep and return to your clutter-free dreamland. See, I lived with my grandmother because my mother had died when our house flooded. My grandmother said it was the “great flood”. It only flooded in our house. I woke up one morning and came down stairs for breakfast and my mother was there floating in our half submerged living room. She looked like an angel. Her willowy negligee and long curly brown hair moved with the ebb and flow of the tide that existed only within the walls of our house, in our little world. I went back upstairs; I figured I was interrupting something. I waited in my room for my mother to call for me. It was days. I finally got so hungry I decided I didn’t care if I was interrupting. The water was gone. My mother was gone. The carpet was dry under my feet. I didn’t understand how the ground could just soak up all of that water and my mother and reclaim it as its own. I did notice that my mother and all the water must have filled the ground to capacity; it had reached its metamorphic stage. There was a thin layer of dirt left on the surface. So, another layer in the geological process had started.
Because the ground had soaked up my mother there was no body for my grandmother to bury. This made her sad. I didn’t understand. I told her Momma was already in the ground, this made her cry. One day we went to the woods with forty-five loaves of Wonderbread. She instructed me to stack each slice one on top of each other in towers. But, the towers had to cover an area that was five feet and seven inches long and two feet wide. I was so impressed by these towers, each slice making its way a little closer to the sky. I returned to this site daily for the next three months. I wanted to learn how much the earth could absorb before it had to start a new layer, or era. Each day the towers were minutely smaller. The rain had a definite affect on the bread. And, I had to account for what the birds took away to feed themselves. I didn’t mind because I figured that when they died they would contribute their bodies to the compaction of each layer; In effect, bringing me closer to my solace in that clean, crisp void above me. Half way through the second month there was nothing left of the memorial. My research had to be inconclusive because I could not remember if we had built the towers on an existing mound of dirt or if that spot of land had actually began to fill by absorbing the bread and bird feces.
I had to create this experiment again. I began making piles of my own, on level ground. I would let them sit and see what happened. Because my mother and water were the final ingredients to completing the geological cycle in our house, I watered my piles. And, any roadkill that I found, I added that as well. I first began by digging up all of the grass in our front yard and created one great big heap. My grandmother was not happy with this. I watered it, contributed anything I could find but it never hardened to the point of turning to rock. There was always room for air.
The neighborhood kids and I built another pile in our street one spring. By summer, wildflowers had bloomed covering the whole surface.
With every new pile came the same results- a slightly higher elevation of earth, but not one that would get me to the void. If I had been able to walk on flowers, I may not have been so disappointed. I decided that the earth needed a path to follow. Upward. My piles became less of mounds and more cylindrical. I added supports, dead trees, street-sign posts, whatever I could find that would speed the process. I also piled up old siding from our house, mattresses, fences, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, trampolines, ironing boards, anything that was harder than earth. I figured the density of the material would hasten the process. Over the years, all of my piles, or ladders to solace, had shrunk. Each one of them was no longer a story high. They were just mounds. My uncle took me to the dump one hot summer day when I was in my teens. The artificial grape deodorizer that they spray took on a sickeningly sweet characteristic when it was this hot and humid. I was not happy to be going there for two reasons: One, I was in my rebellious stage and two, he had dismantled one of my heaps and that was what we were getting rid of. We drove onto the scale: the truck, my uncle, my hard work, and me weighed exactly 5, 247lbs. As we winded our way through the rolling hills with various signs telling us which road to take depending on what kind of debris we had we began upward towards the scrap metal and misc. wood designated areas. We reached the summit of one of these hills and there it was- the biggest pile of crap that I had ever seen. A smile stretched from one ear to the other. I then realized that all of the hills that we had been winding our way through were grass-covered trash heaps. And then, I realized that our tiny county of just over 9,000 people had produced more trash than I could ever imagine. I was looking at a pile that was only for scrap metal. Then, one to the east that was only for misc. wood. Then there was one further in the distance to the west that was only for appliances. This was amazing. On top of the shear magnitude of these piles that were reaching for the sky, there were bulldozers in action compacting these heaps of trash. They were pressing out the air. They were doing the same as me, but more effectively, they were acting as the geological process’ little helping hands. When we had successfully avoided the mud holes and were out of the way of the “little helpers” I jumped out of the truck and happily began adding my contribution to the greater good, or to my greater good. I got satisfaction when we left the dump; on the scale- the truck, my uncle and me now weighed only 3,153lbs.
I returned to the dump monthly, I offered to take everybody’s trash in the neighborhood to the dump at no cost but the dumping fee. I wanted to watch the evolution of these massive trash heaps. I would stop at the top of the highest grass-covered hill and watch all of these government paid workers work for me. I always tried to be at this spot at 2:15pm. When the day was at its hottest and the smell was at its worst. The artificial grape deodorizing truck would be passing me at this time. I liked to wait there and make sure that my heaps were being watered, even if it was in the form of fake grape.
During this time, from pile building to discovering the dump, my grandmother became more and more distant. I hadn’t noticed until the following winter when the neighborhood’s need for their personal dump delivery service dwindled. Similar to how I was obsessed with what was above me, she was obsessed with what was below her. I had spilled cranberry juice on my grandmothers brown shag wall-to-wall a few years back and my uncle had cut that area out and replaced it with fresh carpet. My grandmother would lay in our living room stroking and talking to that patch of the carpet. I swear, it was talking back to her.
One day I was reminded of the children’s story, Jack and the Beanstalk. This immediately shifted my thinking. Site-specific piles were not the answer. I realized that no matter how tall I, or the county, built these piles, they would eventually be absorbed by an adjacent part of the ground. If the central point filled, it would be soaked up by the closest empty space. I had to build over the masses, slowly, as far as the eye could see. I had to cover the continent in trash so that there was no place for the material to go but down to be compressed with no room for air.
My mother told me that I was born in water. I was encased in water in her stomach and then was born into a pool. I returned to our house when I was in my twenties. It was still there, standing. It even appeared as though upkeep was being tended to, although I knew for a fact that it was not. I inherited the land and the structures on it and did nothing with them but hope the ground would take and use. It seemed as though the earth did not want to reclaim this house. Maybe it truly was full at that spot from my mother and the flood. The front door would not open, so I climbed in a window. The living room was just how we had left it, except; instead of the thin film of dirt there was a full-fledged garden. There were Daisies, Marigolds, Black-eyed Susans, Echinacea, Queen Anne’s lace, Peonies and many other varieties that I could not name. Every item that was not submerged in the water was clean like it had just come from the dish rack or clothesline. There was no dust, there was no mold, and every thing above the center mark was spotless. Even the curtains were stark white and pressed. Everything below the center mark seemed as though the layers of earth were growing inward toward the center of the room instead of up towards the crisp, cold, clean blue. The flowers even stopped growing once they reached a certain height. Ivy was growing up the walls but as soon as it reached the center mark, it made a right turn and aimed towards the center blindly grasping for anything that it could hold on to. It seemed as though the ivy grew stems downward to act like legs just so that it would be supported until it reached the counter. It would have been so much easier just to continue upward, but all of these vines made the decision to grown inwards instead. It made no sense to me.
After the visit to Mama’s house, I decided that it was time to leave. I wanted to find that place where the ground and the sky were smashed up against each other. I needed to find a way into that clutter-free, crisp, clean place. I am thinking of heading west, then south, then maybe north. I don’t know. I will let you know when I have found my void. I won’t tell you where it is though.
