Saturday at noon in Seale, Alabama, greeted me with the heady scent of red Alabama dirt, the singing of cicadas and the dry tickle of September grass. The sun pressed close and beads of moisture clung to my upper lip. Never had I felt so romantically Southern.
A Harper Lee quote danced in my head: "Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."
The Museum of Wonder is 45 minutes away from Auburn on AL-169 S. I pass it every time I visit family in Dothan. My boyfriend and I had finally taken a pre-game mini road trip so I could honor my curiosity.
Four shipping containers by the side of the road serve as the world's first drive-thru art and antique gallery museum -- Seale Cultural Center and Butch Anthony's creative vehicle.
The opened containers display Anthony's collection of found and repurposed objects, folk art and taxidermy.
Each piece evokes the entwined past of Anthony and his hometown, like a box of jumbled items in their collective attic. Trophies, photographs, portraits and scrawled phrases fit together to create shrine-like structures.
Each item is given meaning. The profound, sarcastic, comic and heartbreaking all blend into a single expression of a collaborative history.
Walking among buried treasure in a near-sacred space stirred my mind.
Our life experiences, the moments we give meaning, homogenized like a potion we drink daily that determines how we continue to interpret the world.
My potion is the color of the Carolina foothills where I grew up. It has steely blue and sage in spring. It sloshes in my throat and thrusts forth images, sounds and phantom smells, my own museum of wonder.
There is a mote of dust floating in a sunbeam; a beating from a man other than my father; a cry, "Olly olly oxen-free," to end flashlight tag; a rush of poetry after midnight and the scramble for my sparkly purple pen; the tiny whistle of air as I fly over the balance beam upside down; applause, accolades, critiques and ear-popping laughter.
There are snatches of quotes from great books and lyrics from all the songs I've ever heard. There are movie stills and paintings and faces and buildings -- Versailles, Harold and Maude, The Clash and Jane Eyre are all on equal footing.
There are skylines from Buenos Aires to Seoul, from New York to London. There are sunsets and sunrises and cotton fields. There are stories in my grandmother's genteel Dothan dialect and witticisms penned in my aunt's handwriting. There is an encouraging glance and a hand on my shoulder. There are bedtime stories and fairy tales and corny dad-jokes.
There are 7 billion museums of wonder. Each is unique. Each is valuable. They evolve daily as we turn over new meaning in our lives -- as we put the pieces together and time carries us further from the most painful memories.
Human capacity to translate and record life is essential for survival. We make art. We reach out. We accomplish wonders.
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