Dear World: I Am Doing Weird Hillbilly Things

This is apparently what a clean slate does to you

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

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My card declined at the grocery store.

“Honey, you still owe us money,” she announced impatiently, as if I were the slime on the bottom of her shoe, like some sort of voracious repeat offender, someone who never has money in their account, someone who counts out pennies to buy cigarettes, someone who clearly can’t do math and probably does meth in the bathroom.

Her disgust was so great, I had to look down at what I was wearing.

“What?” I said, looking at her surprised.

“Your card only accepted five dollars.” She said this to me as if I were hard of hearing. Me, the forty year old hag. Her, the seventeen year old know-it-all. “You owe us the rest.”

My face got hot, and my face never gets hot. But, in that moment, a lifetime of shame came bubbling up—shame from when I grew up in this tiny town, and my mother would send me to the tiny town market, and I’d have to use a combination of food stamps and dollars, and sometimes there wasn’t enough.

I wanted to give her a lesson in etiquette. Teach her eloquence. Teach her how to speak professionally—all three things that were critical to my own social mobility, since my days in the trailer park.

Something I have discovered about being here in rural America, renovating this farmhouse:

Whenever something like this happens, it’s not usually because of rude intentions.

It’s usually a lack of language.

“I’m sorry, would you mind trying your card again, ma’am?” might have been more appropriate. But, that language isn’t available in the mental bank. It reminds me of a theory I studied when I did my masters in Linguistics:

Your world is limited to your language.

I looked it up and this dude on Quora had the best way of phrasing this:

How well you know your language limits what you can represent and refer to in the world. And, as such, reflects what you can do in the world.

Sometimes I wish I could put up a school that would teach these kinds of soft skills. And then I remember: no one would come.

You’d have to present it differently: you’d have to sell ‘em what they want, and give ‘em what they need. This is a marketing concept I know to my BONES. I’m very, very good at product positioning. So, in this case, you’d have to advertise it as a training school for a hard skill—and then use it as a vehicle to teach the soft ones.

Unfortunately I hate people so I’m not doing that.

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This week, I am going to buy a four-wheeler at the fair. This feels very hillbilly of me. However, the wind in your hair is one of the best parts of being here: to ride down open dirt roads, surrounded by wildflower meadows, and go for miles and miles and miles, is a joy that most people do not know.

The other joy, of course, is not being a fucking idiot when it comes to yard work.

Do you know what I did this week?! DO YOU??? I borrowed someone else’s four wheeler, and I attached a dump wagon to the back of it, and I drove it up to these huuuuuuge, big pine trees on the property, and I took a shovel, and I shoveled, and I shoveled, and I shoveled a decade of old, built-up mulch around each tree trunk, and I threw it all into the wagon, and I drove it across to my field, where I dumped it on top of the old barn.

I did this nine times.

Then, I drove the four wheeler into my garage, loaded up fresh bags of black mulch, and drove them down to the trees, where I dumped out each one, and muscle memory took over, and I caught myself knowing just how to get it out of the bag, by hoisting up the middle of the bag first—a lesson I learned a lifetime ago in my mother’s garden.

I was her four wheeler.

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I performed some more light gardening this week, by which I mean I rented another excavator (did you know you could do that?! this wasn’t my first time) and barreled across my lawn and ripped out a bunch of evil, no good, very perverted bushes. These bushes were diabolical. The kind of bushes you’d see in the front yard of an abandoned house, where they’re so overgrown, they’re slithering their way into broken windows and cackling at little children.

Do you know how satisfying it is to take a big piece of machinery and change the landscape? You feel like you are going toe-to-toe with earth—and for once, you have control.

Bushes weren’t the only things that got torn out of the ground that day: a set of old tree stumps did, too. That is, after a couple of hours of hydraulic yanking. These must have been very big, very old trees. The power company came years ago to cut them down. And now, I had to mow around them…every…single…week.

Except, I’m a real problem solver now: when one tree stump gets in your way, go get a power tool.

And, now I am left with a clean slate.

This feeling of a clean slate is one I find myself craving over and over again.

Maybe that’s why I want to paint everything I see: I want it to be mine. Somehow, this whole interior design thing has become quite the form of self-expression. I am learning a whole new language myself, when it comes to this. Who knew I’d be so cottagecore?

This must be why I want to paint the front door.

Right now, it is red. And, it is a beautiful red. Not like the dead neighbor’s front door, which is a very upsetting red. I hope whoever buys it repaints that door, too.

But as for mine, red doesn’t match my vibe right now. Blue does. Everything in this farmhouse is turning blue. There is the petrol blue House of Hackney wallpaper I hung in the den, and the dark blue apatite paint I drenched the library with, and the light blue fishscale tile from Spain I used to re-do the guest bath, and this incredible antique blue William Morris Ruggable rug that I cannot stop staring at. My bedroom is blue, and so is this nutty peacock wallpaper I’m putting in the hallway. (Should I do the teal paint, too?! I might have to go down that dangerous rabbit hole.)

So, how can the door be red?

I am obsessed with Oval Room Blue, from Farrow and Ball. I have a very bad feeling this is also related to my childhood (thanks, human nature!): our entire home was painted in a color very similar to this: the living room, hallway, kitchen, dining room, everywhere. The same color blue, all throughout. My mom went nuts. And yet, it was the most calming and serene space. If you want stress relief in a can, paint your house blue??? (Can that be somebody’s tagline?)

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Speaking of great questions, did you know that snakes can come up your drain and into your bathroom sink and one day you will walk in to take a pee and scream a weird scream you have never heard come out of your trachea????????

See! We are learning together!

Picture this happening, and then picture what you would do. What do you do with a snake in the sink?

First idea: put on gloves and grab it. But then you will put on these chintzy yellow rubber gloves and you will not feel any less horrified at the idea of grabbing a snake with your bare hands.

Second idea: sell the house.

Third idea: put a bucket over it (and then sell the house???).

Fourth idea: Remember that the sellers left this old people grabby thing in the garage that looks like it could barely pick up a toothpick, but for lack of LITERALLY ANY BETTER OPTIONS (or a stunted brain), you decide that you must figure out a way to tweeze this snake in between these two toddler arms, while making sure it doesn’t leap onto you and down your shirt, and then somehow wind up enough to fling it out the window without flinging it directly into the wall and onto your shoes and why aren’t there products on the market for occasions like this?!

Sell ‘em what they want: SNAKE OUT.

Give ‘em what they need: Therapy.

Alas, I must be far more dexterous than I ever imagined, because lo and behold, the plan (somehow) worked. The snake was captured and flung at a perfect 90 degrees east, out the window, into the yard, and I have minimal PTSD, except I will be shutting every single sink drain I ever come in contact with for the rest of my life.

HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU? Can I have the number to your therapist?

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I’ll let you know how it goes attending a country fair in rural America this week (look out for this girl, whoa). My property borders the fair grounds, on the other side of the hill, so I’m kind of obligated to go. There are lawn mower races! Beekeeping demonstrations! A rabbit petting table! Chainsaw carving! And a demolition derby (naturally). Several kids I know will be there with pigs they have spent the whole year raising. They will take them to auction, where they will be sold.

And I will be there watching, and taking it all in, and saying hello to every person I ever went to high school with, and mentally painting every door blue in my mind, and making sure I am wearing very high boots so there can be no snakes in between my toes, and attempting to purchase four wheelers from men named Jimmy, and enjoying that clean slate feeling that comes every September, when nostalgia takes over, and backpacks are on the backs of children, and school buses start their engines, and trees paint us the most beautiful painting, and once again, there is a renewed hope that just maybe, maybe, you will be a new kind of happy.

So long as your card doesn’t decline.