Holy Shit (For Billy and XBox)

As god is my witness I am grateful to have indoor plumbing. When I was a young hippie, my first husband and I moved with our six month old child into a house in the county of Jefferson which rented for seventy-five dollars a year.
Yes.
A year.
It was called Aunt Bessie's House by the local folks and I never met her, although I feel as if I knew her. Aunt Bessie had probably long since moved into a double-wide trailer with indoor plumbing and wall outlets, which our house did not have. We did have electricity, as evidenced by a hanging light bulb in every room, naked and bare. The house was built of wood and you could see the outdoors through the boards in the walls and the floor, both. I'm sure that it was originally built as a tenant house. A place where black folks lived when they share-cropped a field and there was a field around us and a white farmer cultivated corn there, the summer after we moved in.
But that was months away from when we first took possession of the place. It was the coldest day of the coldest winter in many years when we moved in and it snowed. Yes. It snowed here in North Florida and we put in a woodstove and we improvised on wood and there were fireplaces in the bedrooms but if you lit a fire in them, they only drew the frigid air in from the places between the boards and the temperature in the rooms dropped like a rock.
Oh that place, Aunt Bessie's place.
We survived the winter and I'm not sure how. We drank pots and pots of dark coffee brewed in my grandmother's percolator, thickened and sweetened with Eagle Brand condensed milk.
Every morning I scrambled an egg and put my many-sweater-layered baby in his high chair and let him eat the egg with his fingers and the cat wove her body through the legs of it, waiting for what the baby did not want. We managed.
Spring finally came and the farmer showed up on his tractor and he planted the acres surrounding us in corn and it came a drought that year. The tiny sprigs came up and made plants but when it was time for them to fruit, they did not. He would show up, that farmer and shake his head and say, If it don't rain by Friday....
It did not.
The sun baked the earth and I had no running water and I pumped my water from a well out back. It took me approximately thirty two pumps to get a gallon of water and they were not easy pumps, either. We showered in town at friends' houses and I would spend half an hour filling my canning kettle up a fourth of the way to make a place for my year-old baby to play in. I would set the pot on the porch with its precious water in it and let my child squat in it, dipping water out with measuring cups, squealing in happiness at its coolness.
We had bulldogs then. It was a bad neighborhood and my husband was a guitar player, gone at night. My bulldogs kept me safe. They and the strong bolt-locks on the doors. We got a reputation, that husband and I, for taking in bulldogs and the shelter would call us when they got a new one that no one wanted. We did have a phone, finally, and that was our link to the world and animal shelter.
I don't know how many bulldogs we had for awhile. All I know is that at one point, we were over-run with fleas. They came up from the dirt under the house and I could not put my child on the floor or he would be covered. It was shameful and it was horrible. We went to town and spent the night with my friend Lynn, leaving a toxic bomb of poison behind and after we did that twice, the fleas disappeared. But the dogs' shit did not. I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems to me that bull dogs shit more than any dogs on the planet and I came to call our place Dogshit Palace
I got so angry one boiling hot summer day with the smell of dogshit and the flies upon it and the heat and the no-water-unless-I-pumped-it-from-the-ground and the stove that when I tried to light it blew up and burned my arm that I lost it completely. My shit, my mind, my soul.
I lost it.
And my husband stood back in stunned silence while I said, "Take me to Vero. Now."
And he did.
We packed up like normal people and we got in the car and drove to Vero Beach, the place which had always been my solace, my touchstone, my head and heart-home, and we got a motel room with air conditioning and beds and a TV and NO SHIT.

It was a strange time. I realize now that my husband had a lover at this time in his life and that he felt guilty for being with me- his wife and the mother of his child. I also realize that I was beautiful then, for all my living in a house that was surrounded by dogshit and flies and having to pump my own water and I found a shell on the beach with a hole in it and I bought a piece of leather thong at the hobby store in downtown Vero and I made a necklace and I was beautiful and my baby was beautiful and I showed him the Atlantic Ocean and splashed the salt water on his pale skin and he was baptized in holiness and he laughed. I think I may have conjured and seduced my husband back to me on that trip. To make him see me in my beauty, separated from the woman he was having an affair with long enough for him to appreciate what he had in his hand.

We went home when it was time- the money ran out, the people who were watching the dogs were surely worn out, and vacation was over.
I remember when we got home and the woman who had been feeding our dogs had left a note saying something like, "Please don't think I am heartless. The dogs got into the house through the windows and I have cleaned up a million dog shits and I know there are more."
And there were. Dog shits all over the house and those green/blue flies on everything, including in the outhouse where the flies fed on human shit.

It was still hot. It was still Dogshit Palace. But I had been given enough peace from the Atlantic and from the air conditioning and from the re-seducing of my husband to get me through it all and I was home. My philodendron was still alive, as were my fish in the organic apple juice jug.

We were home. There was still shit everywhere and there were flies- believe me. We were home in Aunt Bessie's house with the red and white handpainted sign above a door in the bedroom which said, "Jesus Save Me". That house where knives mysteriously showed up where knives should not be. The wooden shack home set in the middle of a field of baked and stunted corn with the outhouse out back, the cruel iron pump, the constant torment of heat where my first child took his first steps, said his first words, and where, one day when I was in the outhouse in the middle of a horrible hayfever attack I was stung by a wasp at the exact same second I saw a snake at my feet and that was the day we went to town and bought an old single-wide trailer and had it moved on a piece of property in Lloyd that we were planning on building a house on.
Forget the house. I wanted a bathroom and if it came wrapped in aluminum and red carpet, then fine.

We had a well dug and a real, electricity powered pump put in and I helped dig the lines to lay the pipe to connect the trailer to running water. It was while doing that I realized I was pregnant with my second child, and the running water was even more of a neccessity- time to hook up a washing machine.

I was in high cotton then, with my bathroom, my washing machine, my tiny kitchen with an electric stove which, although it had no thermostat in the oven, I still managed to cook in quite nicely.

The dogs came with us, of course, they they still shit in the yard but I had a hose then, and could spray the piles of shit into the dirt and I could wash my hands in the sink under running water and the flies were not so bad. I had a toilet like civilized human beings so that our shit was flushed away into the septic tank, gone and disappeared under the ground.

We humans do not like to see our own shit. We do not want to think about flies landing on it, feeding on it, and we do not like to think about flies landing and feeding on any thing's shit at all, those bottle green flies whose bodies are beautiful if you look at them in a certain light.
But we shit. We do. We must. We are animals. And our babies shit and our dogs shit and our cats and the spiders which live in our houses and the raccoons and possums and deer. I see the shit of these animals when I walk and yes, the flies are upon it and they are doing their job and in a way, it's a beautiful thing to realize that even shit has its purpose and I'm not even including the way chicken shit makes tomatoes grow.

It's all part of this cycle of life we are bound to live, even if we modern people manage to flush our shit away where we do not have to see it or think about it, down there under the earth. It's still there.

And I tell you what- if I found myself in some third-world country in a shack without a bathroom, I could survive and I think I would feel that I'd come home, in a way. Not in a happy way, so much, but it would feel familiar. Aunt Bessie's house was a third-world place and we dealt there with the things people have always dealt with- drought, the very real need to work for water, cold and heat and a house that did not always keep the outside out.
I would survive.
I would know to throw wood ashes down the latrine to keep the flies off the shit, the stink down to a manageable level.
As god is my witness, I would know how to do that.
And because I know that, I am more grateful than most, I think, to have toilets that flush, to have water that runs. To have hoses and faucets and sprinklers so that even when the rain doesn't come, I can use the water from the earth to grow my tomatoes, my flowers.
To stand under and rinse my body of the dirt of the earth.
To drink anytime I want it.
And the sight of flies on shit does not bother me. Not one iota. It may not be a beautiful sight, but it's as much a part of the reality of living on this earth as the wild passion flower, so alien and beautiful it makes your mind spin in disbelief.
There are even beautiful butterflies which feed on shit and I see them too. Their wings fluttering delicately as they hover above the steaming piles.
Part of life. Part of life.
Beauty and shit and pain and joy. We can't have one without the other.
I'm sorry but that's the way it is.
And I'm not offended by that, I am not shocked.