There I Am - Ruthie Lindsey Page 0,1
tube snakes down my windpipe to the edges of my lungs. The nurses thin my blood for me with little injections in my tummy. I’m a robot with skin.
The stream of visitors is constant, two at a time. They bring casseroles for my parents, black speckled lilies and tea roses, and lots of tears.
What’s the problem? Why are you crying? Don’t cry.
I want to tell them. But I can’t. I try scrawling on the bedsheets with my fingers but nobody really understands. My hands are stuck to the bed and my voice has been taken from me, but everyone I love is here. I feel so, so loved and so, so confused. I drift in and out of a haze, not knowing where I’m going, but feeling as though I have a very long journey ahead of me.
1 Different Kinds of Smart
I am awake but I keep my eyes closed, letting only the smallest bit of light slip in. There’s just enough hot, heavy Louisiana breath coming through the window screen to fog up the pane with the promise of another hundred-degree afternoon. The bird dogs start in, barking at the chicken feathers floating in the air and running circles in the kennel, but I am only listening for the sound of her feet on the floor. The farmhouse groans as the humidity rises and the air conditioner sputters to life. Finally, I can hear her.
My mom pads barefoot across the hallway and the smells of face cream we can’t afford and Community Coffee settle on top of me. Her shadow crosses the threshold and I peek quickly at her glossy red toenails. Even at five years old, I know that she is beautiful, painted just the way a Southern woman should be.
“Mornin’, RuRu,” she sings.
I’m sprawled belly down on a trundle bed between my big brothers, a lanky, big-eyed doll with salty morning breath. She rubs up and down my back and scoops me up the way she always does, forearm in the crook of my knee, left shoulder a pillow for my cheek, and we walk. She knows I am awake, but she pretends so that I can, so that we can keep dancing our favorite dance.
Coffeepot steam and dust come to me in warm, sour clouds as we move down the stairs. I sniff hard and worry it will give me away. I am not ready to be done with our game yet and there are still a few more steps left to go, creak, creak, creak, down the stairs and past the kitchen.
Her feet sink into the plush rug and go quiet. We have arrived. She sets me in their bed next to the hearth that is my daddy. His big, warm body is a furnace you’d think I could never need in July, but that I cannot do without. I snuggle right into him.
“Pat, pat. Rub, rub,” he coos as his hand sweetly finds the spot between my shoulders. “God loves you. Daddy loves you.”
We wait together for a stretch of time that has never felt long enough. We wait until the bugs scream louder than the birds and the world comes calling for us. This is my most sacred space, where joy lives. This is where I begin.
St. Francisville is small, a half speck of a town. For a child, though, it is just the right size. In this place between the sticks and the swamp, joy is growing everywhere; it’s always within arm’s reach. You could hack away at it if you wanted to but it would always grow right back, bigger and fuller and wilder than it was before. Lots of things grow wild here. The live oaks are covered in mossy Muppet hair, palm leaves poke through the picket fences and tickle your legs when you walk, and love is the long, leathery vine that wraps itself around all of it. It’s comically Southern, but I don’t really know it yet. On Fridays, the boys play football and the girls wave cellophane pom-poms. On Saturdays, the women whisper about all of it, attaching scandal to every glance exchanged between daughters and sons. The men just smile and shake their heads. On Sundays we all slip into our church clothes and watch the hot sun shining in through the stained glass in Popsicle-colored laser beams. My daddy sits next to me in the pew and points out the dove in the stained-glass window.
“Every time you see the bird, know your daddy’s thinking