Dirt Clods and White Sound

Memories are quicksilver, tricky and shiny and always coming and going. I know not where they reside when they're not visiting me, and I'm not certain I want to go visit them. While daydreaming this afternoon, I was suddenly transported to the bedroom I shared with my three brothers on Crown Street in Westland, MI. It was the end of a long summer day and the last trailing flickers of green and golden twilight were tracing lines on the blue walls of the room.

I was on my side, my head aching and my hearing temporarily replaced by a hissing noise, a white noise that blocked the other sounds of our house. My brothers and I had been waging a dirt-bomb war with a group of neighborhood kids. Near our house was a gravel pit that also had large hills of clay soil -- sun-baked and crumbling into pieces just big enough to throw at each other. They would explode when they hit an object like a rock, a tree, a back, a leg, or a head.

I caught a high-arching clay grenade in the right ear and went down like a felled tree. I was about ten years old, and a casualty of the Cady Street Clay Wars. I walked home, but was sent to bed because my ear was full of dirt and I couldn't hear very well. Mom always cleaned our cuts, scrapes, and various and sundry wounds with hydrogen peroxide, which would foam and help cleanse them. With cuts and abrasions, this usually hurt like the dickens. How was I to know it wouldn't hurt to float dirt clods out of my ear?

Mick

Dirt Clods and White Sound

Long green shadows of twilight on the wall,
Flickered as the sun and clouds collided.
I felt Mom's footsteps -- heard nothing at all;
Nothing but hissing white sound, provided
By a clay-bomb smashing into my head,
And packing my right ear with dusty dirt.
Cool fingers probed my ear, swollen and red,
And I moaned to let her know that it hurt.
She turned me over and smiled in my eyes,
But I saw the brown peroxide bottle,
And the room filled up with my frightened cries,
As my siren roared up to full throttle.
While I squirmed, and I tried to get away
From the foaming touch of peroxide's sting,
She pinned my head on the pillow to stay
Put, and poured cold liquid into the thing.
I stiffened, preparing my shrieks and cries,
As I felt the foam and bubbles billow,
But pain never came, and before my eyes,
The dirt clods fell right out on my pillow.


Mick McKellar
October 2009