We spend our lives trying to keep our "housecoats" clean. We curate our appearances, polish our words, and avoid the muddy banks of life to ensure no one sees us falter. My grandmother spent eighty years being the pillar of her community, the deacon’s wife, and the woman who never had a hair out of place.
The humidity of the Mississippi Delta has a way of clinging to your skin like a damp wool blanket. It was mid-July, the kind of afternoon where the air feels heavy enough to swallow you whole. I was ten years old, standing on the muddy banks of a creek that fed into the great river, watching the woman who had raised me lose her footing. My Grandmother -Grandma- you-re wet- -Final- By...
She had slipped. It wasn’t a dramatic fall, but a slow, rhythmic slide into the shallows while trying to retrieve a tangled fishing line. Her floral housecoat, usually starched and smelling of lavender and bacon grease, was now plastered to her frame, heavy with silt and river water. We spend our lives trying to keep our "housecoats" clean
By embracing the mess, we embrace the fullness of being alive. Because in the end, we’re all just children standing on the bank, waiting for someone to show us that it’s okay to fall in. The humidity of the Mississippi Delta has a
If you find yourself standing on the edge of something scary, or if you’ve recently taken a tumble into the muck of life, remember the woman in the floral housecoat.
I expected her to be embarrassed. I expected her to be angry at the mud ruining her Sunday best. Instead, she sat there in the calf-deep water, looked up at me, and began to laugh. Not a polite chuckle, but a deep, belly-shaking roar that echoed off the cypress knees.
"Grandma, you're wet!" I shouted, my voice cracking with a mix of panic and the cruel, unfiltered observation of a child.