The Flood
My high school art teacher, let’s call her “Patsy,” was…artsy. She wore shoulder-length white hair that matched the flow of her long skirts, especially on windy days. Her skin was red, or so I remember. It wasn’t the red of too much sun over her years or the red of some medical something; it was the red of imagination. And she was…imaginative.
During my freshwoman year, which was enough of a departure from the safety and security of my rural community elementary school where everybody knew everybody and everybody was poor, high school brought popularity contests and different buildings for different subjects. Home Economics and Keyboarding were taught in the round building. The G.O.B. (Good Ol’ Boys) spent much of their time in the Agriculture Building where they learned to dip Skoal, skip class, and fix everything. General Education classes were taught in the main building and Patsy and her art were housed, along with the band’s classroom, across the parking lot in a small building somewhat removed from the rest of the school. I suppose the band needed the distance for practice. I suppose Patsy needed it for her imagination.
Taking Patsy’s introductory art class as a scared 9th grader was originally promising. One-fourth of my daily class time would be spent in creation. I would learn to draw, to use colors and brush strokes and most importantly, I would be in class with two of my friends from elementary school. Sweet relief.
Patsy made class…artsy. She was always flustered and looking for something that she had just placed… Where was it?… She just used it and… Oh, let’s just do something else. She was lenient with the day’s instruction, not-so-lenient with two young women who seemed to struggle with making it to class by 2:00p.m. They were late most every day and one of those every days, Patsy had enough. It was raining that afternoon, common in the North Carolina Mountains, and seeing that the two young women were once again absent as class began, Patsy made her way to the classroom door, locked it, turned around to face us with her pleased red skin, and continued instruction. When the knocks came, once, twice, three times, Patsy laughed.
“This must be what Noah felt like on the ark,” she said. “Ha! Ha!”
But was it?
Continue reading “#34: Opry Mills”
Kitty Eveling 