It was the year the azaleas bloomed in February. It was the year it rained so hard it knocked the crookneck squash off the stalk, left them to wither in the dirt. I was younger than I was before.
Macon, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)
I was listening to Easter on the turntable, Patti wailing in the other room, and it got quieter, almost muffled, and I couldn’t remember but wondered if it was part of the song, but I didn’t remember it. I had put it on because I was reading the Paris Review and wanted to feel literary. It was a really good short story by Tom Drury. I didn’t know who he was and meant to look it up but I tiptoed into the other room to check on the record. So much fuzz had collected around the needle that it made a tiny little dust bunny. I forgot to look him up but decided maybe the point of a short story was not to look someone up and then buy everything they’d ever written, but just enjoy those few scenes, those sad people walking in the snow, like a song on the radio where you only catch one chorus.
It was the year the weeks seemed to fly by, just jump ahead like a chapter skip on a DVD. Last week I was standing, staring, in Shuqualak. I know I have been here before, I was saying to myself, but I think I would have remembered that Philco sign. The awning had fallen down. I made a picture but it seemed very far away. I walked a block over. Four boys were making their way down the street, slow as honeybees on a Sunday morning, bouncing a basketball. Across from me at a little storefront church two little kids played in the dirt, even in their white shirts and skinny black neckties. I figured they were going to get in trouble.
Wonder what happened to Dolly, I think.
Shuqualak, Mississippi
I was taking the long way home, which is the best way. I’d crossed the border between Alabama and Noxubee County with Creedence blaring, chanting Lead Belly,
It was down in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana
I was very far from Texarkana.
Birmingham, Alabama, by where my grandparents are buried
I had gotten a message two weeks before. Are you coming? Please say you are going to be there. I traced it back and there was a Facebook post.
Hey guys! So here are the details for the party! We have rented out a private room for a 3 hour time span. We can stay longer, we just won’t have that particular space. It is a large venue with room to mingle. Everyone will be responsible for their own food tabs. Sound like a plan???
Holly Springs, Mississippi
Two of the jalapeño plants in the raised beds in the back had died. I shouldn’t have planted them in the first place; they were runts anyway, sick in the little plastic container even at the nursery. The other plant was now like a foot tall, with little white flowers that would soon turn into tight green ovals. I thought that maybe I’d plant some flowers in the spaces there, make the bees happy. I hadn’t actually seen a lot of bees around but was hoping they would like it.
I had gone to the party, which had unexpectedly been great, and left me feeling warm and happy. At one point this guy had been telling a woman how pretty she was. It wasn’t gross; his wife was sitting by him, we were just talking and he was just trying to be nice. “I think you look just like Taylor Swift,” he said. I thought the woman didn’t look like Taylor Swift at all.
“No one’s every told me that,” she said. “But one time the lady in the Jack’s line told me I looked like Renée Zellweger.” Holy heck, I thought, she looks just like Renée Zellweger. At least her cheeks. “But that was a lady at the Jack’s, so take it for what it’s worth.”
Downtown Birmingham, Alabama
I spent the night at a Holiday Inn because I was too tired to drive back to Mississippi. The day after the party I decide to swing by through the old neighborhood of my high school. I wanted to make a photo of the drugstore where I worked. Most everything else was erased or reshaped by a tornado a while back. This happens ever so often in the South, so your memories have to become stronger, since there’s nothing left to anchor them.
It was a Dollar General now, but at least it was open so I could go in. For years I would go in the little pharmacy by my Nana’s house, the place where I got my first comic book—Star Wars #71—and my first pack of Topps baseball cards. I went back because it still smelled the same.
But the store in Pleasant Grove didn’t smell like anything, really, and like all stores like that, the aisles were too close together. It was all vaguely depressing. I stood in line to buy a drink and in front of me a lady was wrangling her daughter and trying to get some balloons. Maybe they were going to a birthday party. The little girl’s hair was up in big puffs on top of her head. She was wearing a shirt with a drawing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on it. It was two dollars a balloon for helium, which was too much, and they were out anyway.
I let myself feel the feelings I was having while I walked to the parking lot, which were, I never have to come back to this place ever again. It didn’t make me feel happy or sad, it was just true. There was nothing there for me now anymore.
A few days later I dug up the wilted bits of the garden, and planted orange zinnias.
“PEARL ANNIVERSARY” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, an occasional dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, preserved by instant film.
If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
so beautiful. so much light. thank you.