A Canopy of Shadows
The world I left in Starr and the world I found in Amarillo couldn’t have been more different. Starr was red dirt and corn fields. A place where barefoot redneck farm girls like me didn’t need much more than the shade of a pecan tree and a good stick to stir the earth. Amarillo, on the other hand, was a modern maze of cement sidewalks, strip malls, and buildings stacked on top of one another like bales of hay. The air itself felt different—electric with the hum of cars and chatter, a far cry from the quiet buzz of cicadas back home. I had come from a place where life sprawled outward—fields stretching to the horizon, barefoot days spent chasing fireflies, and people who spoke in the rhythm of cicadas. Here, everything rose up, as if the world were trying to press me into the ground.
To a scrawny, sunburned girl whose wardrobe consisted of hand-me-downs and whose best friends had been barn cats, Amarillo was a bewildering place. I didn’t fit in. My clothes, my accent, even my wiry frame marked me as different. I was the redneck farm girl who didn’t understand why sidewalks replaced dirt paths or why the sky seemed smaller here. At night, the shadows cast by streetlights through the canopy bed’s frilly lace convinced me that monsters lay in wait. By day, those same monsters followed me into classrooms where my sharp mind didn’t help me make friends, only made me more of an outsider. At school, the other kids had shiny sneakers and matching lunchboxes. They talked about cartoons I’d never seen and danced to songs I’d never heard. I tried to shrink myself, to slip into the background, but my awkwardness made me stand out all the more.
The feeling of isolation settled over me like a fog. I longed for the familiar scent of butter beans, biscuits, and the sound of Grandmother's voice calling us to join her for supper. Instead, I was surrounded by strangers in a world that moved too fast for my small-town heart to keep pace. Even the night felt different. Back in Starr, the dark was a gentle blanket, full of cricket songs and the occasional hoot of an owl. In Amarillo, it pressed in on me, thick with the rumble of traffic and the glow of streetlights.
At home, my shared room with Aunt L offered little comfort. That canopy bed became a stage for my fears, the shadows beneath it alive with imagined monsters. Every night, I took a running leap to avoid their grasp, convinced they would pull me into some dark, unknowable abyss. I didn’t tell anyone about the monsters; I didn’t have the words to explain how real they felt. Instead, I turned to the typewriter.
Mama J’s typewriter was more than a machine—it was a portal. In the rhythmic clack of its keys, I found a way to process the chaos around me. It gave shape to my fears, translating the abstract tangle of thoughts in my mind into words on a page. I wrote stories about things I watched on the evening news with Daddy B and poems about fields of corn and rows of watermelons back home. Sometimes, I wrote letters to no one in particular, pouring out thoughts I couldn’t share aloud.
The typewriter became my sword and shield, a tool to fend off the shadows both real and imagined. It was my sanctuary. The keys were solid and predictable, a grounding rhythm I could control in a world that felt like a storm. When I pressed down, the letters landed on paper in neat, orderly lines, as if it were possible to make sense of things after all. Yet, looking back, I realize the monsters under my bed weren’t just figments of a child’s imagination. They were manifestations of something deeper—my struggle to understand a world that felt too loud, too bright, and too foreign. My mind, it seemed, worked differently from the minds around me. But at seven, I didn’t know how to articulate that. All I knew was that the typewriter made the world feel manageable, if only for a little while.
The school counselor tried to help. She took me to Swenson’s Ice Cream every Friday for a scoop of bubble gum ice cream. Her questions were gentle, probing, but they often brushed against feelings I couldn’t fully comprehend. Still, her presence was a balm, a reminder that someone cared enough to try.
Mama Jean cared, too. One afternoon, she presented me with my very own pack of typing paper and a set of carbon paper. “Now you can make copies of all your stories,” she said with a smile. That small gesture felt monumental, her way of telling me that my words mattered.
Even now, when I think about those nights in the canopy bed, I feel a pang of empathy for that little girl who didn’t understand why she felt so different. The monsters under the bed weren’t the real enemy. The real struggle was within me, a battle to make sense of a world that often felt alien. And the typewriter, with its steady, reassuring rhythm, was my lifeline.
