The Dress On the Porch On the Shack on The Farm

Perhaps once periwinkle blue with a trace of citrus in its tiny daisy floral pattern, it hung, parched, soiled and beaten by the tantrums of nature to the hue of desert bones. A simple dress. Cotton, it had to have been, because it so easily fluttered on the slightest dusty-tongued breeze, and in the late 60’s there was only real cotton or the new cardboard-stiff fabricated polyester fibers that had woven their way into my family’s “in living color,” evening news fed, cream-of-everything casserole, American lifestyle.

That dress should not have been there. It hung from two wooden clothes pins on a frazzled line drooping across the back porch of a small, abandoned shack on my family’s property in Chappel Hill, TX. It should have been blown away by wind, rainstorms, or even a tornado. Or disintegrated under the ruthless, boiling Texas sun in one season of drought. The polyester would have had a much easier time of it.

I’ve no memory of how or why my father, mother, little brother, Frank, and I ended up standing behind that shack. The whole structure could have been a monument to splinters. I imagined the spiny, needle-pointed darts thrusting into the pillowy layered soles of my blush-pink, tiny feet. I was seven. (Or at least I think I was seven. Most of my childhood memories have registered themselves at the ages of seven or eleven; the lucky numbers in the game of craps.)

Behind and below the dress, right in front of the back door like a welcoming mat to hell, a black hole the size of Mack-truck tire bullied the dilapidated deck. For all I feared, that hole was the slick slide straight to Satan where our Episcopalian minister at home in Houston had already convinced me that I was surely bound for. My imagination had open borders for the territorial conquests of hell, where fire reigned with a searing iron fist over the contraband water. Standing on my toes in my red Ked’s tennis shoes, I strained to look through the broken-out, jagged-glassed windows of that shack. I could see nothing inside except fallen beams and I guessed more black holes to hell.

It was “hotter than Haydes,” as Southerners used to gripe back then. I felt desperately dry. To this day, say you’re “dry” in Texas and someone will slide a bottle of whiskey across a table or down the length of 50-foot bar in your direction without saying a word. But my parents’ whiskey was back at the centurion ranch house where we were staying, and in those days, people didn’t haul bottled water around with them 24/7. We got water from the kitchen sink, a public fountain or a garden hose. But we had none of that with us. The ground and the air and each of us were as sapless as the sound of the pissed-off secedes bitching in time with my nervous inhales and exhales as they flirted with an asthma attack.

Strangely, we were but a fifteen-minute walk to the swampy Brazos River shrouded by a dense collection of lofty cypress and cottonwood trees, scrunched huisache shrubs and thickets filled with fire ants, black widows and brown recluse spiders, venomous copperheads and cottonmouths, and poison ivy. Tight as any threshold to the womb, its layers were swarthy and wet, while that dress and my entirely blonde family were lit up and waterless. I’d heard about “spontaneous combustion.” I thought the dress might suddenly explode into fire and take the shack and us with it.

“Water, water everywhere, without a drop to drink,” my father’s mother used to say—her spewing tongue always desert-parched, though she did not have a dry sense of humor. She had no sense of humor. She was “meaner than a wet hornet,” (another Southern adage back then) and was also a huge fan of people whom she didn’t approve of burning in hell. Her words referred to salt water I believe, but that fresh water in The Brazos was nothing I thought anyone should drink, although I never saw that river in all the years my family owned that land. I’d been warned that alligators lived in it, and I was sure there were ghosts and demons in there as well, perhaps having escaped from the hole on the porch.

Once, some teenaged boys took my little brother, Frank, down to that river’s banks to “go fishing,” they said. I hated their guts for it. I didn’t think Frank was going to come back alive. I sat on the concrete steps of the ranch house staring at a hill waiting for him to come over it for hours. When he finally appeared trailing behind those horrible boys, I shoved my tears of relief into my gut and didn’t say a word to him about it. I don’t remember those boys’ names or what they even looked like. But thinking of them still stirs up a bit of hatred for them in the same place where I stashed those tears.

Given all my plethora of fears related to that river I’d never seen, at the time I didn’t know of its greatest capacity for destruction – that it could swell maniacally, swallowing up acre after acre of land including the bit we were standing on that day, thirsty for just a few ounces of what it held in enormity. The Brazos had done so in the famous flood of 1899, confiscating 12,000 square miles, killing 284 people and permanently sweeping the survivors from the “before” into the “after” of that date.

Water can kill you. So can its absence. Texas weather tends toward all or nothing.

Studying that dress drooping on the line I decided its owner had been in her late 20s. She’d had classic features, was thin and small boned, bronzed skin from daily life beneath the sunrays on the days they were welcomed and the days they were dreaded.

Her husband was rugged and ruddy, and their four children were lithe and wiry. They had no fear of death which made her fear it for them with a fever of the red-hot scarlet kind. They all worked on the farm, sewing and reaping hay, and tending to a small herd of cattle, perhaps for my father’s father who’d bought the land before my dad was born.

Of course, there was no evidence whatsoever of the woman’s nature or situation, but I spun her life through my imagination and materialized her into someone as real as the living bodies that surrounded me daily. I felt she’d been ripped from that dress, and it from her. I believed she was no longer treading the earth – that the earth, or one of its inhabitants, had tread her over. I sensed in her abandoned dress, something that I’d already forsaken in myself. I felt she’d lived with a silent, boiling terror, and standing there I let it overflow into my bubbling veins until I swear I heard it roar.

Suddenly, I wanted to touch her dress far more than I’d ever cared about having a new one of my own. I started toward the shack. My father, standing on his crutches, lifted one, pointed its rubber tip towards the stuck-half-way-open door, and said in his military snap-to-it voice, “If you go in there, be prepared to fall through the floorboards.”

I was more afraid of him than the house, even if hell did lie underneath it. But I held back. I knew that underneath his warning lay a command and a suggestion of punishment, not unlike the ones Mr. Episcopalian liked to threaten.

“It’s too hot,” my mother said, “and I need something to drink.” We loaded ourselves into my mom’s Mercury station wagon with the fake wood panels and scorching vinyl seats and headed back to the ranch house. My little brother and I sat next to each other on the floor of the big screen porch studded with rickety rockers and tables drinking ice water from tall plastic glasses. Both the water and ice had sprung from an old farmer’s kitchen sink. My lungs and blood began to calm. I studied Frank’s profile. He was as sensitive as I was. I wondered what stories inspired by the day were birthing in his mind.

When I was old enough to drive, I went looking for that shack. I found not a single splinter nor thread left. There were no visible holes to hell carved into the grassy earth. Except for time to time within my heart, hell has ceased to exist for me as an actual place of dwelling.

I created this woman’s story in my seven-year-old mind, and I’ve had another 57 years to sculpt and expand my childhood perceptions. As I became older, she became deeper. She received her fill of dust in her mouth and Brazos overflows. She was weary, exhausted, but almost never pulled away when her husband pulled her toward him to relieve his own wearied exhaustion. When the great losses came, as they do come to most of us, she lay on the cusp of shattering without letting a single shard cut loose.

I still reflect on her. Have I exchanged a soft strangers’ smile with someone who loved her?

I will forever wonder why, when she left, she or someone else failed to snap that periwinkle dress with the tiny yellow daisies off the line. She could have done in a moment what water-whippings and sun-searings were powerless to do given years.

I think of all I’ve left on the line, hanging by the proverbial thread, waiting in dry vain for my return, and wonder when the river will rise to forever strip it from me.

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Afterword

On July 4th, 2025, I received a phone call from a close friend telling me about the massive flash flood that had swollen The Guadalupe River. We had friends staying in Hunt, TX for the holiday - two couples whom we’d known for much of our lives.

I’m very close to that little brother of mine who stood with me behind the shack all those years ago. As we became older, we became deeper. We don’t hold back thoughts or tears anymore. I called him as my friends were his as well, and he is my greatest comforter. He was watching the river on television. I couldn’t turn it on. Blindly and stubbornly, I insisted our friends were going to be fine. “You know how tough “M” is,” I said. “She’ll just kick the river’s ass.” He didn’t laugh like I longed for him to.

“I pray you’re right,” he said, “but you’ve got to prepare yourself. I’m watching this water. What it is and what it is doing is inconceivable.”

M’s husband watched the river tear her from him. He would never see her again. He managed to climb up on a roof where he sat for five hours in the pitch black with the exception of lightning strikes that caused split second illuminations of visions he has never spoken of.

We never heard anything about the other couple, but several days later, I received a short clip via text showing my friend’s brother sifting through the rubble where her family’s rustic little house had been. Something caught his eye. He bent over to pick up a small open trinket box and exclaimed, “Oh my God, my sister’s wedding ring.”

I shall leave to rest the cloaked details of these stories to my friends who lived them. But I shall never leave to rest the dress, and the woman who wore it.