“The Blue House,” an excerpt from The Blue House by Dawn Denham

Until my first chigger attack, I walked barefoot across myexpansive front yard to my mailbox atop a metal post. It takes time before the bites appear;when they do, it’s too late; the insects are dug in and have laid theireggs. 

During dinner at Rice and Spice on Jackson Avenue, I keptdropping my hand below the tablecloth to scratch both my ankles and feet.

“What’s the matter?” Taylor asked.

My old and dear friends Taylor and Nancy migrated to Oxford,Mississippi 20 years ago when Taylor, an Episcopalian priest, joined the clergyat St. Peter’s right off the Square.

“I don’t know,” I said, “probably mosquito bites.”

He said, “Show me,” and when I did, he said, “Yeah, that’schiggers.”

“What the hell are. . .” and then I remembered andshuddered, thinking of that red swath crossing my son Sam’s belly after asummer of bushwhacking through our New Hampshire woods. I’d never seen anythinglike it. His pediatrician had to diagnose it.

“The exact same thing happened to us when we moved here!” Taylor was saying, laughing.

“Oh, crap. What do I do?”

“Go home and soak your legs in a tub of water with bleach.It’s the only way. Then keep cortisone on hand for the itching.”

I had a tube of cortisone, but Taylor sent me home with thebleach. I’ve never bathed in bleach, but I did it without a thought.

Chiggers are disgusting like lice or tapeworms or shinglesand make me think dirty rather than clean, run-around wild rather thancivilized. Figures. I am in Mississippi. The place I thought I’d never live.The place Mom and Dad chose 25 years ago and where Mom died. All those yearsI’d visited and deliberately tried to separate myself from thick summer heatand humidity, spiders lurking in the bank of Arborvitae along their graveldrive where I squeezed myself out of the half-cocked passenger door. Raw, naked, unfiltered racism, sexism, religious fervor andpoverty. All exposed unapologetically under a relentless sun.

And now, I’d chosen it, too.

I swished around my feet for full effect, passing over rustpatches and cracked porcelain. I wore yellow latex gloves to bleach a sink;would this soak turn my feet and ankles whiter? When I was a kid, Mom had warned, don’t swim until at least 30minutes after eating. Don’t take a shower or answer the phone during athunderstorm. Why hadn’t she warned me about my husband?

She’d worked for years on her knees, completely transformingthe land surrounding their 600-square foot cabin at the mouth of Enid Lake,fifteen miles from where I was hanging over an old tub in a house on a hill,soaking in bleach. Inflamed and hot welts, dark scabs at the center of the bite,told of her work on hard land. Her fingernails cracked and encrusted with ablack thin line of grime. When she got sick, I implored her to get tested forLyme disease, but it wouldn’t be ticks. I grasped at answers. I wanted to fixher.

It took more than three weeks for the clusters of tiny hardscabs at my ankles and shins to disappear. When I walk in the grass now, I pullon Mom’s old genuine cowboy boots Dad found pushed back in her closet. I laughthe whole thing off and wonder where the manual is for how to migrate from theNortheast to the South.

There is no handbook for how to write a divorce agreement.In fact, there is no handbook for any of it. If you've never been married 30years and built a home, a child, a life, and then suddenly and within minutesdecided to end—finally—this marriage, you don't know what it's like to besitting in your pajamas at your laptop, coffee in hand, sliding down email,CNN, then Facebook where you find a message from a person whose name you don'trecognize. It's a woman, and she’s telling you in this long and detailedmessage about how she loves your husband and how she has loved him for fouryears and how she can't go on without your knowing. You can't know what it isto be sliding off your swivel desk chair, down your face into your gut, passingyour heart, which isn't there because it's shattered and lost but still pumpingbecause you get up and go sit on the back stoop off the kitchen under animpossibly beautiful sky, and say, “OK. OK.” You can't know the second youdecide, but you do, and you know you have when you say it out loud to no onebut that sky and those white clouds and your rescue mutt Arrow tripping in thegrass beside you.

“OK.”

Afterthis verbal agreement, you can't know how to pack your Felt bike, your clothesand meds and toiletries, how to head north toward friends, toward the home inNew Hampshire you bought and built, where you built a child and a life. Youcan't know this house will be respite. Layover. And that you will take to theroad for a long time, and that that road, that full car, this leaving, is yourunning toward freedom. There is no handbook for knowing what this freedom is.

*

I did not move to Mississippi tofix people.

Once, I moved from coastal Connecticut to the Arizonadesert, and in a conversation with my mother about the American Southwest,proclaimed, “Maybe I’ll teach English on a reservation.” A trainedanthropologist, she responded dryly, saying, “They don’t want your help.”

I moved to Mississippi first to help my ailing 86-year-oldfather, who 25 years ago had migrated across the Tennessee border to a smalltown 40 miles outside of Oxford, Mississippi and second, to help myself. 

I left my marriage and then spent nine months driving acrossthe country, finishing my research for a book I’d been writing and grieving. Iwas 55, jobless and had walked away from our family home of 20 years. One yearafter I left, I was in Belize with Sam over his spring break when my dad calledasking me to come help with some medical tests. I bought a plane ticket andplanned for a week’s stay. One week turned into five; dad faced a cancerdiagnosis, then surgery and recovery, and by the time I flew back to Boston,I’d found and accepted a job teaching writing at the local high school and hadrented this beautiful old house in Water Valley.

*

Two weeks after I move into the sky-blue house, I read hislawyer’s one-page letter. I’m sitting at the white distressed dining room tablemy sister gifted me and loaded into my POD the day I left New Hampshire. Mybreath quickens and I sweat. I don’t understand what I’m reading. It soundsaggressive. It sounds combative. It sounds like a defense. I don’t want to goto court, to break down thirty years of stories I still don’t understand. Myaccountant and financial planner both tell me New Hampshire is the easieststate to get divorced in, that no one cares about emotional duress or evenabuse. It’s a numbers game. I stand to lose more than I could gain if I takethis to court.

My husband’s email reads: you’ve just changed everything for the rest of our lives—No greeting. No signature. No punctuation.

Wait. But,

Wait.

My stomach lurches as I reach for my cell. I call himbecause it sounds like I am being sued or counter-sued and this doesn’t makesense. I figure he’s been served. That’s what prompted his email, not a threat,really, but a death knell. As in there’s no coming back from this.

“My cousin told me that writing an agreement together is offthe table now that you’ve filed,” he says.

My hands shake. That’s not how I understood this.

“I don’t want to go to court,” I whisper.

“I don’t either.”

My house is quiet. I look at the exposed chimney and thekitchen behind it. The ceiling at ten feet above, its original shiplap paintedwhite and traveling the length of this double room. The tiled counters and theelectric stove set on two thick beams that come to above my belly button. Mylandlord Kagan is 6’ 6” and I need to buy a footstool.

The entire room is bathed in light. The entire house isbathed in light. White walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, light bluish-graypickled floors, turquoise doors in each bedroom opening onto the wide Royalblue wraparound porch. I’d taken all the art I’d wanted, including my sister’soil painting of a copper kettle against an aqua background and framed in gold.Mom’s large print of Mississippi artist Walter Anderson’s two white birdstaking flight. Watercolors she’d painted and framed for me. The large Chagallframed in gold leaf given to us a few years after we married.

It’s getting hot, and I run the air all the time now—blessedcentral air—and mostly stay inside. But in the early morning, for howeverbriefly, I get up and go out to one of the wicker chairs we’d bought together, sit,close my eyes, and breathe. Then I notice the dainty, pink rose blossomstumbling down long-thorned vines reaching over and through the railing at thefar end of the porch. Like the ones I once dug up from a friend’s garden backin New Hampshire and planted next to our front porch there. I don’t know aboutMississippi’s blooming seasons or the fig trees that flank my cement steps andthe third one in the backyard. I only know figs to be hard and course and tanlike rawhide, no matter their origin, and bought in stores. I don’t know thatsoon my figs will drop from thin arms between dark green leaves the size of my hands,their skins soft and yellow- and purple-hued, their bodies giving as I gentlytug them from each branch. I’ll research recipes for preserves and make a batchwith half my harvest. The thick dark brown goo will burn to the bottom of thepan, and even though I jar and refrigerate it, every time I hope a taste, charlingers.

I sit on the white wooden porch swing near the giganticSawtooth Oak my landlord planted a decade ago; when his wife was pregnant withtheir first child, she walked the land, gathering its shiny nuts in her pocketsto set in bowls all over the house. Two versions of blue hydrangeas drape theirrobust blossoms along the front. An Autumn Clematis wraps its tiny whiteblossoms around the railing.  Hollys andtheir Christmas berries.

Birds endlessly twitter. I watch black-winged and darkred-bodied wasp-like dirt daubers fly high and gather in the eaves at my frontdoor. Large black and gold bumble bees. Thin and fast yellow jackets. Cobwebshang from the rafters, underneath the wicker chairs, and in the corners alongthe brick chimney.

I thought it was Cardinals I heard last night, what soundedlike scraping and a thousand tiny feet clattering above me, but it was only thewind dragging tree branches across my tin roof.

Cardinals breed in abundance here. They stood guard on myparents’ porch railings as my mother lay inside dying and have visited me manytimes thereafter. Fifteen miles. I’ve never lived anywhere near my father sinceI was twelve years old.  I’m fifty-fiveand Dad is eighty-six, and we make the only family we have here.

The west side of the blue house is built into the middle ofthe hill’s slow rise. Kagan built the porch high and wide. Standing outside mybedroom door, it’s as if I were on deck, out to sea. I cannot believe the peaceand beauty here. Nothing about Mississippi was beautiful to me before.

Mom loved her azalea bushes that have grown into trees. InNew Hampshire, I’d planted mine too close to the lilacs and a bridal veil, andthey never took. The ones along my porch here are large and unwieldy and appearto sprout vines, tenacious and fibrous when I try to pull one. They climbthrough all the other bushes and attach to whatever else is sturdy there. Hereand there, a leafy shoot pops up between the porch boards and makes me think ofTucson and the desert where Sam was born. People always think when you say desertyou mean mountains and miles of sand, but the Sonoran Desert is the greenest,and there, between the slimmest of margins—rock against rock, pavementcracks—something always reaches up from the pebbly, dusty desert floor andgrows.

But we died there. I know that now. Even if we did havetwenty years to go, Tucson was the beginning of the end.

*

He’s on speaker, and I’m talking calmly, kindly. He does,too. We don’t say all the words we will never say. We don’t say the words wedid say weeks ago, the ones that changed everything. That broke me open, makingme finally understand that my confusion and anguish would not end until I endedit.

The parallelism of this conversation is making my head spin.How are we sitting politely talking through these details when…?

It’s like when I was a girl and my family fought. All of usgiving our worst until someone left, but the next morning, it was all smilesand sunshine, and everything’s fine. In my turbulent, depressed teens, Itold people that living in my house was like walking on eggshells. How canwe be this way when we were just like that?

I have to call my lawyer who clarifies it’s not too late forus to write the divorce agreement together. I call my husband back to explainthis, and we make a date for a few days later to write the document. Hementions something about how the house I’m living in looks cool as shit.He probably saw photos on my blog.

I let these two things be true at once: I have a cool-as-shit life on the horizon, and he is not going to be in it.

***

Dawn Denham is a writer, editor and manuscript consultant, and teacher living in north central Mississippi. Her work appears in Solstice, Zone 3, Brevity, Literary Mama, Past-Ten, and Poets & Writers. “Aleatorik” won the 2012 Solstice Magazine essay contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is co-author of Writing Together: How to Transform Your Writing in a Writing Group, She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, a BM from Eastman School of Music, and has been in residency at the Vermont Studio Center. The Stream and the Broken Pottery is a blog about the life, art, and legacy of American mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, the subject of Dawn’s hybrid memoir-in-progress titled Close to Water. She is currently completing her first memoir, The Blue House. You can find her at Dawndenham.com or on Twitter @dawndenham23.

Photo by Sam Cumming on Unsplash