Be it Ever so Beautiful
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
In which Nixa is left behind, and back to beautiful civilization…
Last day.
Hotel check-out.
Back to the lectures.
Collette wondered what sort of impression she must have made in her Doctor Who t-shirt, moccasins, and Princess Leia knots. Three days living out of a duffle bag. Who cared what sort of impression she made.
Purchase textbooks: $267.88.
Bake sale and fifty-cent coffee offered in the cafeteria. Collette abstained.
Their director spoke of her husband born in Brooklyn, the 90 year-old one-room school house that was their home.
That same enigma now clad in cloths of red and pink candy stripes and what appeared to be emblems of farm kitchen supplies, inspecting several grocery bags stuffed with what may have been tomato plants, dropped off at her chair by an Indian woman.
A woman retelling the story of her child having a sunburn so bad, his fever was 103.
Interesting descriptions of the morning, including such essays on the overhead as…
It’s big as a softball, with thick, bright, fake-looking
skin.
I dig in my thumbnail like a spade and begin to loosen and
tear the hide, exposing, a white webbing, a kind of packing material.
A tang fine as sea spray scents the air.
The globe is perfectly seamed and perfectly sectioned.
I break the threads to release each segment, fat as a wineskin,
and slide one into my mouth
The juice was bottled in Heaven, I am certain.
As I eat, it rips from my fingers and lips, lavish and
miraculous until I eat it all, leaving a film of sweetness like
gold leaf on my face.
Collette did not find herself quite so enamored of said fruit. However, the essay was interesting. And the title of the book from which it had stemmed had an interesting ring: The Roar from the Other Side.
A little walk-off the sitting after lunch to the quiet, cool, upstairs — lengthy circular hall of classrooms.
Youth white board: June 9th Float Trip on the King’s River.
Stack of high school devotionals labeled Life Matters, a cover featuring a girl holding a tower of brightly colored balloons illuminated by the sun.
Packaged strawberry cereal bars sitting on the stairs.
By 3:30, Collette was out of there, likely never to return to Nixa, Missouri, for the rest of her days.
More Bossypants, fistfuls of turkey wrapped in white cheese, and the absolute perfection of warm Hershey’s chocolate bar, just soft enough to pull apart like taffy. Heaven on Interstate 44. Heavy stock of fresh butterfly roadkill. And all done in less than one tank of gas, start to finish. In the all-explanatory words of her oldest of two younger brothers…
Boom.
Back for squealing smiles and koala-bear hugs from her chubby boy.
A call from Great Uncle Harry in New Mexico to talk over genealogy and the wildfire in Arizona.
“Whoever started it should be hung,” he said.
And OLeif returned later in the night after his Bible study.
Nothing like St. Louis.
Nothing like home.