Confessions of a Feral Dirt Child

Several weeks ago after our second bottle of wine, my sister Tiffini and I were having an emotional heart to heart while watching Katy Perry videos on YouTube. My sister and I have become very close now that we are in our 30s, but when we were children both of my sisters pretty much ignored me as soon as they got into those hormonal tween years.  Gulping my last sip of jammy pinot noir, with Katy Perry's Roar in the background, I mustered up the courage and asked Tiffini, "Why didn't you guys play with me when we were kids?".  Her answer was blunt but painful,  "Well.....honestly, you were kind of a feral dirt child". 

In hindsight, I guess I was expecting some sort of guilt-laden answer in which my older sister begged my forgiveness for not teaching me how to french-braid my hair and shave my legs, and then we would finish off another bottle of wine, watch more Katy Perry videos, and she would finally teach me how to french-braid my hair. Her actual response though was like being shown a mirror and for the first time noticing a huge disfigurement and thinking, "oh my god, how have I never noticed that?!".  All these years, I had envisioned myself as this adorable little nature loving princess not a filthy Mowgli-esque creature, eating with my hands, climbing trees, and making friends with half-dead, baby jack rabbits the cats would bring in.

Memories are merely impressions of the truth, so I figured I need substantial evidence to prove that I was, in fact, a feral dirt child.  I have found that pictures lie less than people, so while visiting my family back home in Magalia, I went through the album marked "Turner Girls".  In my high school and college pictures, I was a bit grunge and sometimes thrown together (aka hungover), but not dirty.  In my middle school photos I was awkward and had that typical adolescent struggling with puberty look, but looked clean enough.  Then I found the ones from the years between ages 5 and 10 and there was definitely some truth to Tiffini's theory.

There I was-- matted hair; always somehow covered in dirt.  Many times in the photos, I wore a large grin, proudly displaying or cuddling a random cat or dog who unbeknownst to the that smiling girl would inevitably come to some horrendous death --coyote massacres, heart worm, internal bleeding; car tires. Some of the pictures were family group photos and, to be honest, it was difficult in these to decipher if I was feral or if like the rest of the people in the photo, I was just an 80s fashion victim.

Looking at these pictures, a thousand memories came to me that I had long forgotten.  My trusty generic Swiss Army knife that I would use to cut branches and boxes in order to build non-necessary shelters for myself and my stray animals in the desert mountainside. My walking stick/horse that I affectionately called Trigger and would ride all over my grandparents' property leaving long snake-like trails in the dirt behind me.  The notebook my father gave me when I was six years old with koalas and kangaroos wearing safari clothes on the cover in which I would write nature poems and sketch animal tracks.  Finding a puppy at the dump (why a child was playing at a dump, I will never know) and bringing her home and naming her April and my grandparents keeping her until she died 14 years later.  My dad building me a tree house in a pinion pine tree by putting a pallet in a tree and making me a rope swing. I would spend hours upon hours in that tree playing make-believe until dinner time and my grandmother would then try to get the sap out of my hair, giving up and just cutting off chunks of sticky hair. The horror of finding out I had pin-worms that I probably caught from picking my nose and eating it after handling all of those wild and stray animals and the delicious bubble-gum flavored medicine I was given to kill the parasites. I remembered reading books in trees, on smooth rocks by rivers, and under my California Raisin blanket with a flashlight. Hot summer days lying on the cool grass in front of my grandmother's house with four little kittens crawling all over me, mewing and purring while I drew pictures of clouds and mythical creatures with my set of Crayola 64 colored markers.  Catching my very first trout in the Walker River, naming it Henry and being so proud to get to eat it. Feeding horses and cattle at the farm kids' houses and the sweet smell of rain on hay bales when out of nowhere dark clouds would roll in, raining for just enough time to cool us so we could keep playing in the autumn heat .  I remembered sleepovers with my best friend on her trampoline under the stars and the nights where the moon was full, believing that the reason the snow-capped peaks were glowing was because of magic, not moonlight, and making wish after wish until we both fell asleep hoping when we woke up we would have everything we ever dreamed of.

I had dirt under my finger-nails, and only bathed when my mother or grandmother forced me to, me insisting that all of my My Little Ponies join me in the bath tub. All my clothes became play-clothes with grass stains on the knees and permanent red dirt on the butt.  I never brushed my stringy blonde hair or allowed it to be put in a pony tail except for on picture day, and even then I look a little disheveled.  I stole items from my sisters' room, leaving smudge marks all over everything and hid their precious treasures in the sagebrush, making them arbitrary treasure maps to find their items and always forgetting where I actually hid them. I memorized creepy poems about the men dying in the Yukon and became obsessed with saloon girls and bordellos. My favorite outing was getting to go to ghost town graveyards so I could do charcoal rubbings of the prostitutes' and outlaw grave-stones. I was a little stinky and quite a bit odd.   I was indeed everything Tiffini claimed--this feral dirt child running a muck in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

These past few weeks since this realization was made, I have struggled to imagine what my childhood would have been like if I was not the way I was--if I had been less of a weirdo and more like the other kids and my sisters.  Would I have been a happier kid, had more friends, been less shy? Perhaps my sisters would have played with me more, but most likely they wouldn't have because I would have still been a bratty little sister and they still narcissistic teens. From the pictures, this little girl with her face covered in dirt wearing a ripped t-shirt and cuddling kitties is happier than she ever was when she worried what people thought of her.  Her hair was messy, but she was always ready for adventure, believed she could do or be anything; didn't judge people or feel jealousy, shame, or regret. In a way, she was the best version of myself.

Other than the booger eating and accidentally losing Tiffini's two 1901 silver dollars on a failed treasure hunt, I do not regret being that feral dirt child. I think in times of need, it is that feral dirt child who has been the decision maker in my less traditional and more courageous life choices. I can only hope she comes around from time to time to help me travel the world, make friends without judgment, get dirty for fun, and keep me always just a little bit weird.