October 11: Well, Hell. Here's more.

I called my mom and asked her for others--her mom is the Ozark connection. She agreed with the ones I had and thought a while before adding:

You never watch someone leave all the way until they are out of sight. Close the door before they disappear or you’ll never see them again.

You can pass the pepper, but you can’t pass the salt to someone’s hand. You have to put it on the table and let them pick it up.

If you leave the house and then remember something you forgot, you can go back and get it but you have to sit down while you’re there. If you are going up or down the stairs and remember something, you have to finish the steps before you can go back to get it.

October 10: A few more

Some weather:

 If you can see the backs of leaves blowing in the wind, it’s about to storm. If the breeze blows straight, it might mean rain but no storm.

Cicadas or katydids start singing three months before the frost.

 If birds are feeding on the ground during a rainstorm, it will rain all day.

 And I’m sure the persimmon isn’t just Ozark--split the seed, and if the growth inside is a spoon, it means heavy wet winter snow. A fork means little snow, and a knife means wind, sleet, ice all winter.

While a few of these have scientific basis (like the leaves showing before a storm due to the wind movement), I thought these were well known truths until I was in college.

October 9: More superstition

More superstitions I grew up with:

If you drop a spoon in the kitchen, a child is coming to your house. A fork: a woman. A knife: a man. I still drop a fork on the floor and wonder who's on her way.

In the morning when you wake, never tell someone your dream until after you've eaten something, or else the dream will come true.

 If you sing at the table you'll marry a crazy man. If you get wet across the middle when you wash dishes, you'll marry a drunkard.

 If your right hand itches, you’ll find money. Left hand? You’ll lose money.

It’s good luck to accidentally put your shirt on inside out.

You spilled salt? Pour water on it. The shoulder throw thing isn’t a thing.

October 8: Superstition

My family has superstitions. They aren't spooky except when they come true. Of course this is a relative truth--some things were going to happen anyway. With my Ozark roots, most of the superstitions are ones that other people haven’t heard.Not like the black cat crossing your path or walking under a ladder. A new broom sweeps clean? It means that when you move, you have to buy (or make) a new broom or else the bad things from your old house will follow you.

 If you are walking two abreast and something comes between you (another person, a post) you have to whisper bread and butter under your breath or that thing that comes between you will become an argument.

October 7: Old House

Urban archaeology is active in south St. Louis. All you have to do is put in a new fence and dig down past a foot and a half into the dirt in the yard.

Glass bottles, marbles. Doll baby heads. Pipes. Broken dishes. All of it thrown into the privy or the ashpit. The palpable reminder of people long dead who once called my house their home.

This doesn’t bother me in my new place built in 1927. Single family home small and cute. Ashpit, sure, but there was no privy here. But my old place. 1904. Old place, brick streets covered over by asphalt. A boarding house for 20 years. People in and then churned back out. I could never get the place clean of their presence.

October 6: Weldon Springs

We are all downstream. In Missouri, this is more true than in other places. We have karst topography--essentially the ground is limestone swiss cheese. This creates caves, sinkholes, and losing streams. Geologically fascinating, it is also dangerous ecologically. Build a uranium enrichment plant on the side of a bluff in the 1940s, say, as part of the Manhattan Project, say. Where might that waste, that leftover radioactive waste, wind up? Anywhere south, east, or west. What’s done is done.

Sophia and I hike Weldon Springs, rebranded as a Lewis and Clark trail. But the land is fallow because what’s under the ground, seeping away, dripping, dripping, dripping.

Capitol Reef National Park. October 5

Great stern towering cliffs crumbling in geologic time. A lonely drive past the orchards into an old wash. Signs posted at the edge of the road: warning, radioactivity. Explanatory signs pointed out the tiny one-man sized holes in the far cliff walls. A hundred years ago men would crawl inside to claw out the yellow rock filled with radium. The signs warned visitors not to drink the water or stay longer than 12 hours. We drove down the road back to the orchards; had pie and ice cream. All I wanted was the ease, the comfort, of Missouri. You can grow things there. Rivers and rich earth. No carcinogenic lonely little holes in the crumbling walls of the canyon.

October 4: Outside White Sands, New Mexico

The gates to the state park were wide open. No ranger to check in with. We set up camp in a beautiful desert campground. Clean restrooms, showers. But no one else joined us. Darkness. We were exposed in the wilderness. I didn't want to stay. There was a KOA down in town. They mocked my fear. I sat up all night until the gray light of dawn creeped over the trailer. Then Maeve woke with a fever and earache. I couldn't sleep while others got ready, I had to comfort her and find a clinic. Fragile and worn out from a trip too long, I didn’t chide myself for silly fears. Instead I wondered why my fears didn’t count. It was the wedge in the fissure of our marriage.

October 3: La Prele Ranger Station

You get used to being able to contact the outside world. When cell service disappears and you're on a tiny dirt road in the middle of Wyoming, terror starts to creep in. The station where you're staying has maps, coal in the basement, and a solar powered water pump. No electric. Plastic mattresses on the bunks. A guest book designed to scare. A strange metal contraption in the front yard with no explanation. A full moon. You don’t sleep. Around 4 in the morning a truck drives by. Your husband and kids perfectly comfortable. You lie in the dark room with an ax you found by the front door. In the morning he mocks you. But you kept them alive, you know you did.

October 2: Shortwave Radio

I would listen back in high school when the eastern bloc countries were changing and the Berlin wall fell. It was a perfect time to have a shortwave radio, in the era before the internet listening to faraway voices give me the news. Or read Frankenstein in ten minute sections over the course of a month. The odd station signals. The thin tinny voices and middle eastern music. Radio Kiev. Radio Berlin. The BBC. Flitty bits without name. Morse code and ship to shore breaking in. I would listen in the dark in my bedroom to the great giant world breathing and telling me how it was over warbly static. Being able to only hear is scarier than seeing it on a screen.

October 1: Spooked

I am spooked by things that do not rationally scare me. Some things are scary. But I get spooked by dark basements and wind rattling the windows. I do not like to look at, or hold, old mechanical things, and one time I bought a pair of wooden knitting needles at a flea market that I have never been able to use. They had a bad feeling. Flea markets in general, actually. Opening the door to the garage at night. Having a dog or cat stare over my shoulder, at nothing, and maybe growl just a little bit. Houses with open crawl spaces underneath. Anything unnatural dug into the ground, frankly. I’m ok with caves. They belong there. Mines, quarries, basements, nope.