Tessie D

Hello, Out There…

I suppose I should continue to tell you more about myself. 

I live in Texas—if you drew a dot in the dead center of the state, the part in the middle away from any city, where it looks like nobody would live there, that’s where I’m at. 

There’s a small town in the middle of the state named after the capital of Ireland. If you go to that small town and then drive another 10 miles out into the country, that’s where I live. I think my parents only found it because they got lost one day, pulled over, and decided that was as good a place as any to put a house.

Our trailer house is a doublewide with three bedrooms, down at the end of a caliche road. Behind the house is the pasture with the most amazing, lush coastal hay. When we first moved out to the farm, the front forty acres were covered in mesquite trees, but underneath the thorny trees, with spikes as long as sewing needles, was “the good coastal.” 

In the morning, Daddy would drive the tractor out into the field, pick a tree, crawl under its lowest branches—a cigarette dangling from his lips—and dig a hole around its trunk. Daddy would then wrap a chain around the trunk and drive the tractor forward. If he was lucky, he pulled the tree up from the ground on the first attempt. Most often, though, the branch would snap before the tree popped up from the ground, and Daddy would start the process over again with a new root. 

Daddy would come to the house at lunch, his arms brown and caked in blood and dirt, his shirt torn. When the front pasture was eventually cleared, Daddy moved onto the back pasture, clearing the brush to grow hay, watermelons, cantaloupes, or peanuts that Abbi and I picked in the summer.

There’s also a small three-acre pond and huge pecan trees. Sometimes we’ll see deer grazing in the morning when the sun is coming up. On the back side of the pasture is a dried up creek bed and and a small cemetery. The headstones are all from the late 1800s and early 1900s–many of the headstones for children and teenagers.