Tag Archives: family

The Midwest

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I should not have waited till now to write this entry. I should have written it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before. But I am writing it now, from gate forty-five at the Kansas City Airport, and all I can possibly think about is home. All I can think about is how devastatingly pleased I am that Karen and Hannah and Abby are going to be waiting at the Raleigh airport for me. (For me! So pleased!) But I am determined that, even as I leave the Midwest, I’m going to write to you about it.

On Sunday evening, I drove my grandpa over to Chillicothe so he could remove a catheter for an old friend. Other people bring a bottle of wine as a hostess gift, Grandpa brings his black bag and his kind hands. While he helped Lloyd, I sat in the front room with Doris, who worked for Grandpa for thirty years, and she told me about back when her daughter was “Miss Missoura” and she, herself, almost went to New York City.    We stayed after to visit for a little while. Doris left her walker in the other room and my grandpa, who hunches so that he only comes to my shoulder when to retrieve it. He was delighted by how much fun it was to use, until we pointed out that he had it backward. I’m blessed to be my grandpa’s chauffeur and phone dialer, even if it’s on catheter business. When I walk into Walmart, the greeter, a little man named Stan, stops me to ask if I’m Dr. Howell’s granddaughter. When I say yes, he beams. Everywhere I go I am Doctor and Georgeanna’s granddaughter, Hope’s Alice to those in the know. The name of Howell means something in Brookfield. It means an open door, an open wallet, an open hand. For those in trouble it means a number more reliable in the sheriff’s. It means a freezer full of beef, duct-taped copies of The Hiding Place, and a whole lot of large-print Holy Bibles. For countless people, the name of Howell is all they really know of Jesus. From experience I know that it’s a pretty good sampling.                                                                               It’s different here, you know? In the past two months I’ve had healthy doses of Des Moines, the Twin Cities, Duluth (especially its mall!), a few little towns in the Iron Range, and, of course, north central Missouri. Good old Brookfield. When my grandma announces that we’re going out to a nice restaurant for Sunday Dinner (eaten properly at about one p.m.) she means some place with a big buffet, metal chairs and linoleum. She cooks her vegetables with butter, and is a little baffled by my penchant for olive oil. When I am sent for errands it is not to a Harris Teeter with a sushi counter and olive bar, but a Walmart with a cheese aisle full of Velveeta, where the only salmon comes in cans. The middle-aged women who shop there do not have careful tans and silver jewelry, but sloppy ankles and tired faces. (There is a Redbox, though. Ah, there is a Redbox.) Someone’s always starting a beauty parlor and naming it something like “The Rusty Razor” or “Curl Up and Dye.” Welcome to this place where people live.

Last February I flew up to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a college visit, and here is what I wrote on the plane home:

There are no words for my loathing of the color of Midwestern asphalt in the winter. It is a mixture of the worst of brown, and the worst of grey, ending in a color which could aptly describe the worst of everything. It is the color of hell. On the other hand, when I look down on the Midwest from an airplane my heart swells, because it has its moments in a way North Carolina does not. North Carolina has its blue skies, its mountains, its beaches, its green hills, its talkers, its thinkers, its doers, its dreamers. The Midwest has few of those things. On poor days it has none, but it has plain moments of clear life which no one bothers to cover. There is a boy on my plane, not much older than me, who is going to be a U.S. Marine. His mother and his grandparents saw him off. They all hugged. His mother cried awkwardly, and his grandpa told him to “Keep his eye on the ball.” That was it. Then he left. They left. They love that he’s going, and they hate it. They love him, though, and they want him to do them proud, and come back a better man. They don’t really have those words, but that’s okay, because he knows. There are no waving signs of adoration, no groups of hysterical friends, just a boy with a short haircut who knows what he is about and what he is doing. Sometimes I think what all the North Carolinian talkers and dreamers really are striving for is something these people with their ugly streets have had since birth: grit, plain sense, and an understanding which requires no words.

In one sense I will never be a Midwesterner. I am too much enamored of elegance and education. I care too much about white tablecloths in restaurants and Renaissance poetry. But the Midwest has taught me, even just this summer, some rather important lessons. It has taught me how to use a riding mower, how to clean a pool, how to pull a sticker plant, how to pass a slow bailer on the highway, how to scour a counter, and how to be patient. I have been taught over and over again how to be patient. Patient with slow steps and oft-repeated stories, patient with people and patient with God. I am learning, slowly, to wait. I am learning to live in this in-between space. I am learning to want what Paul has in Philippians 4: 12. “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”

On Wednesday evenings, when I went to pick up my grandpa from the prison in Moberly after his bible study, I usually had to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes. On my right was the prison, looking like a gargantuan middle school, wrapped round and round in yards of barbed wire that sparkled in the heat. Immediately on my left, on the other side of the drive, was the flag pole, surrounded by carefully manicured little flower gardens full of some of the most brilliant and lively colors I’ve ever seen. I sat in between, and waited. They’ve got a pretty huge sky out here.

Perspective and Going Running

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I have spent the past week at Story Book Lodge up in the Iron Range of Minnesota. It’s a Bible camp my uncle directs which is operated entirely on the strength of donations and prayer. It is a wonderful, wonderful place which is very dear to many people who are very dear to me. And yet, I am (rather emphatically) not a camp person. Of course this was just a family camp, so to relieve my bad mood I could do things like drive down to the mall in Duluth with my cousins and let shopping get me even grumpier, or sit in the foyer outside the gym for an hour and a half, waiting for evening volleyball to finish and getting eaten by very large mosquitos. You know.

The fact is I have not been super-pleasant this week. My cousin Hannah put up with me quite well and made me laugh a lot besides.  But I kept having conversations with my parents about a rather tense issue, and also spent an inordinate amount of time dreading being back at my grandparents’ house by myself for another two weeks. It’s not that every sensible cell in my brain does not know that it’s really a wonderful blessing to be there, one which will only be available to me for a few more years, but more that I tend to get panicked about being so alone with myself all over again. A nasty part of me is pouting and saying, “But didn’t you already pay your dues? You shouldn’t have to do this.” Really, I should want to do this, but I don’t, and someone should knock me upside the head. Suck it up, Alice. Learn to mow the lawn, and be patient about seeing Harry Potter.

On Thursday night I stayed with Hannah while she housesat for friends and after she had fallen asleep I had a white night sitting in a stranger’s kitchen and crying while their dog alternately licked my feet and growled menacingly. I had a long careful think, and decided three things. First, I was going to beg my cousin Joe to come back to Grandma’s with me. Second, I was going to have all my hair chopped off into a super-short bob. And third, I was going to start going running regularly, preferably early in the morning. Brilliant. Life-changing. I called my mom and told her my plans, and she told me to go to sleep, it was two a.m.

When we got back to camp the next day, my mom told me that Joseph wasn’t going to be able to come, and I received dubious reactions to the bob idea. But the running idea stuck, which I was pleased about. Still am, actually. Feel free to laugh, but I want to do this, and I can be just as stubborn about wanting to do something as not wanting to. (At least, that’s the theory. I’ve never actually tested it.)

And then God brought something else. Perspective. I got on facebook for the first time in few days, and found out that my freshman RA, Alyssa, had just had an emergency liver transplant. I know very few of the details. Last time I saw her she was perfectly healthy, but as I write this she is in Dallas at the Baylor University Medical Center. She is able to blink and move her eyebrows to communicate, and soon they’ll take out the respiratory tube. While she recovers, inch by agonizing inch, I will be breathing clean lake breezes and pulling weeds. I really have no right to say anything but “Thank You.”

I love you, Lyss. If you can have major organs replaced at the drop of a hat, I can learn a little patience and trust, huh? God really is good.

Places

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Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle begins with the wonderful declaration, “I write to you from the kitchen sink.” Unfortunately, I only write to you from a very crowded backseat in a very crowded car. Someday I’ll find myself a big old kitchen sink, and climb in.

Really, there are lots of places from which I’d love to write you. There are those of the kitchen sink variety, places I suppose any imaginative person could think of: a window seat, a fireside, a roof full of chimneys, a balcony, an attic. Then there are the places particular to me: the freshly clean breezeway at my grandparents’ house that has Charity and me bursting with pride, the old cemetery across the highway, or the dam at the top of the lake, home to Poopsie’s Greatest Achievement and the world’s most delicious breezes.

Finally, there are the dream places, the places which, as of yet, I only love in fantasy. First there is New England. I’ve never been farther north than New York, so a little back sector of my mind is determined to walk cobblestones in Boston. I’ve been to almost every other part of my country, I suppose because New England is not on the way to anywhere (except perhaps Prince Edward Island—now, that’s a place to write from!) and most of the states I’ve been through have been on the way to family and holiday. But if New England is on the way to itself, then I suppose it must be worth seeing. Right, Liesel?

Next is Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the town with the most used bookstores in the world. I think my very first banner on this blog was a picture of the bookshelves which line the streets: Hardbacks, 50 pence and Paperbacks, 30 pence. In other words, heaven. Then, of course, I’ve just finished Wuthering Heights, and it’s such a wonderfully novelish novel. Though I was really quite pleased to see Catherine and Heathcliff fall dead, it made me want to wander the moors, stand in the wind, have my hair properly wuthered, and above all, write.  There is also Venice. Since reading Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord early in high school, I airily disregard all complaints of its stench and dirt, and instead concentrate staunchly on gold lions, arched bridges, and meeting my dear friend Scipio. Actually, my mother told me if I got a full ride to college she would take me, but obviously that didn’t work out. Sorry, Mom. Someday.

The place which trumps all, though, is mine. I am currently in the throes of a mild-to-severe case of house fever. I look them up online and plan paint, and built-in bookshelves, and secret passageways. It must be big and old and storied. It must have wood floors and stairs that creak. It must have its own peculiar smell (but not too peculiar.) Eventually, it must have the perfect bathroom. Round and domed with a huge, claw-foot tub and sunny windows high in the walls. There will be a fireplace and a big, wide towel rack, and piles and piles of books. (I suppose there’ll be a toilet and sink, too, behind a screen somewhere.) Oh, and probably a daybed and lots of large, ticking clocks. And perhaps a chandelier. That’s my bathroom. A Room of My Own.  A room from which to write you.

Story

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It is nine-thirty on Monday evening, I have just finished reading the first two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird to my cousin Charity, and I am wide awake, while she is fast asleep. I guess my southern drawl is soporific. Obviously she wasn’t very engaged in Harper Lee, but I’m so glad to have picked it up.

You see, I really want to write this summer—a real story—something with a climax, plot complications, and the sort of happy ending a reader can curl up and fall asleep in. The books I had been trying to make myself read, while worth my time, weren’t doing much for the creative juices. Bleak House, anyone? I cannot possibly write with Dickens on the brain. I can read with animation, I can hate Mrs. Jellyby with a holy passion, I can weep when Jenny’s baby dies, but when I sit down afterwards, I cannot think of a blasted thing to write. I do not have that scope. Instead, over the last couple of weeks I have drawn up the entire imaginary family tree of a clan called the Hardisons—sixty-one members and six generations worth. There are a good number of extra-marital affairs and shady business dealings involved, and I have the bad habit of marrying off third cousins to one another, but it has been great fun. I have worked out everyone’s birth and death date, and maiden name, all of which are neatly outlined in the 150 year timeline taped above my bed. And yet, there is no story screaming to be written. I have simply been joined by sixty-one vaguely interesting little writing companions. And we all lie there in bed late at night with little to say for ourselves.

In any case, while I could never be Dickens, there is a smidgen of hope for Alice as Harper Lee. I do not mean either that I grew up in place like Maycomb, Alabama in the thirties, which I didn’t, or that I could write something as wonderful and successful as To Kill a Mockingbird, which I couldn’t. I simply mean that Atticus Finch? I know him. I could reach out and shake his dry, warm hand, and honestly declare that I was pleased to meet him. The trick of writing characters, at least for me, is that I cannot write the people I actually know, but I must actually know the people I write. (If that makes any sense.)I must know them, at times, better than I know myself.  Yet, before I really know someone, I must see them doing—I must see them performing the action of being themselves. I know Atticus because I have seen him remove his glasses to shoot a mad dog, and remove his jacket to defend an innocent man. Which brings me back to where I begun. I must have happenings and doings; I must have story. I must have eucatastrophe and dyscatastrophe. I must have that which makes the ladies reach for their smelling salts and the gentlemen for their guns.

My little battalion of sixty-one, or perhaps soldiers from an entirely different quarter, must rise, sail onto the page, stake their claim and defend their territory. Go West, young man into the distant regions of the memory and the subconscious, drag the rivers, mine the gold, rake the muck, but return not empty handed! (Please. I really want to write a story.)

Grandmother’s House

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HI!

Please picture me wondering around an empty house turning off the radios my Grandpa has left on, spreading grass with a large, lethal pitchfork, trying on an extremely classy sixties dress and coat set from my Grandma’s closet, going to battle with a mulberry bush that lives in the middle of the prickliest roses, and discovering the most wonderful photographic evidence of some very early cousin bonding. Kindly remember that I have not yet visited Walmart, and there is still a cow carcass to be removed from the barn. Wish you were here.

Love, Alice

(That was a postcard for you)

Other highlights so far have included having a very business-like game of waving with Cheryl’s twin boys, finding that unless I have the number memorized I am far too slow for the dial telephone, making friends with a sixteen-year-old girl at the library who’s obsessed with anime, finding a really cool cigarette lighter in the yard, walking up to the cemetery on Memorial Day, then slinking away when real mourners came, and making the life-altering decision to give the dog a bath, so that when he gets friendly while I’m weeding I’ll still be able to breathe.

I’m rather lonely—my cousin Charity won’t be here for another week and a half—and am still adjusting to life mostly sans internet and phone reception. There is currently a rather startling red X over the wireless icon at the bottom of my screen, but tonight I’ll drive Grandpa to Moberly for his prison Bible study, sit in the YMCA, and use their Wi-Fi to post this. And I’ll probably watch the season finale of Modern Family, and it will be very therapeutic.

One more thing. I’m making dinner tomorrow night, and in a counterproductive act of utility I convinced my Grandma to give away a good deal of her cookbooks last week. She doesn’t use them—but I would. Ideas? Something simple that would remind me of home.

Pew, Fitwell, and Other Finishings

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I have come to the end times of my freshman year of college. Which is really not that big of a deal. At all. But, you know, I thought I’d talk about it anyway.

On Monday evening I had my last cello recital of all time. All year, you see, The Pew Fine Arts Center and I have had a rather tense relationship. In fact, I’ve gotten into the bad habit of referring to it as “Eeeeew…Peeeeeew.” (Because it rhymes, and I happen to think that’s funny.) I started college last fall rather naively thinking that since I’ve played cello for most of my coherent life, it would be natural to just keep on. I dropped out of orchestra after one rehearsal and was only kept from dropping lessons by my loyal parents. The thing is, the music majors scare me. Everyday, particularly last semester, I would march myself down to the practice rooms in the bowels of Pew where there is no cellphone reception, and no one will hear you scream, but everyone will hear you play. Even on the nastiest winter days, I always went the long way round outside so that I wouldn’t be walking through the lounge where they sprawl wretchedly across couches, complaining about practice hours and solfeggio, as if they are the only ones who really work. On my way down the nonsensical flights of stairs I usually stopped at the bathroom to give myself a little pep talk in the mirror, and I’m not really joking. I actually did that. After practicing Bach in a tiny grey room with a heavy door the color of raw meat for what was always a shorter time than I intended, I would play the one thing I still felt proud of–Amazing Grace, doublestops, fortissimo, eyes closed like a doofus. Then I would pack up and sneak out the way I had come.

The thing is, you may have the wrong impression of me about this, but I’m not musical. I can sing on key and play the cello, and I like doing so in most situations, but ask me what artists I listen to, and I will tell you the truth: none. I like words, and when it is not the time for words, I like silence. Deep down, notes and chords and harmony don’t mean that much to me. I’m not saying they are not as eternally significant (or insignificant) as any thing I read or write, just  that they are not the language I speak. Pew is not my place. I will be perfectly thrilled to go to class in the Hall of Arts and Letters for the rest of my college career.

That said, I am thankful to have parents ( a mother in particular) who were dedicated to my cello even, and especially, when I wasn’t. I’m thankful for the year of lessons I took here, and for my nice new bow that makes a pretty sound. During the week between Easter break and my recital I didn’t go over to Pew at all. I practiced in my room. I worked on memorizing my Bach, played hymns, and enjoyed the friendly, wide-eyed heads that poked themselves around my door. That was great. So on Monday night my nervousness was really pretty inexplicable. The only people who would hear me were my teacher who had heard me earlier and knew I could do it, Heidi who would love me anyway, and a couple dozen nice people who actually didn’t care at all how I sounded. Yet when I sat down on that stage with the rest of the kids playing Bach’s first suite, I put my cello to my chest and I could feel my heart thumping against it. Definitely not a resting heart rate. As I listened to the movements before me, the thumping got exponentially louder and faster. When my turn came, I put my trembling bow to the string, and the first note quavered audibly as I played it. The second note shook too, and the third, and so, to be honest did every note after that. It was a somewhat ridiculous performance. By the end of the suite (several movements and performers later) my shaking lessened somewhat, and by the time we got to the ensemble pieces I was able to zip through Cripple Creek and smile. As Heidi and I walked out, I cried about five tears from giddy relief. The only sign of me left in Pew is a big empty cello locker with my name misspelled on a piece of masking tape.

The other part of my life which officially terminated this week was Fitwell. Really, how was it that I ended up at one of the fittest colleges in the nation, where your physical condition affects your GPA? We have half a semester of lectures then another semester and half of “labs” (circuit training, mech weights, aerobic conditioning…) Then there’s a “Fitness Appraisal.” Aren’t you pumped just hearing about it? For girls, we’re scored on sit-ups, push-ups, flexed arm hang, broad jump, sit-and-reach, and (wait for it….) the step test! I improved since last semester, which was my goal, but of course I still only scored about a fifty percent. However, I don’t feel too bad, because the standards they use are the same as the U.S. Marines’. I’m finished, I never have to wear a grey P.E. uniform again, and the rite of passage is over. I’ve officially done my time as a Grover freshman.

Two more things before I go study for my next exam–As my sister pointed out, I can now rejoice in the fact that I’m officially half of a United States Marine. Also, one morning as I was plodding up the stairs out of Pew after a dismal practice session, a music major hurried past me, and as he disappeared down the hallway in front of me, I could hear him whistling Amazing Grace, louder than even I had played it. Just remembering brings me an overwhelming sense of victory.

Growing Up and Life Abundant

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I have been home, and I’m not really sure what to say about this week, except that, for the most part, I was very grouchy. Mostly because I could be. I turned nineteen today, and I still have a lot of growing up to do. I’m very good at playing grown-up, for weeks on end sometimes, (especially in writing,) but that doesn’t mean I am. I still throw an all-out fit when my mama tells me to put on shoes for a walk. I guess I don’t know a whole lot about growing up, whatever it is. The few times I have done it have come and passed without my noticing till much later. I don’t know–maybe I matured seven years today, but who’s to know?

I’ll tell you something, though. I need to learn a lot of things about cheerfulness and patience and swallowing my words (including the thought process that led to them,) but today is Easter. Resurrection Sunday. A day for being new. A day of waking up for the first time to the Real World itself. A day, above all, for being ALIVE. Granted, I have not been very alive today. I been more than a little dead in my sins and trespasses. But the great thing about Easter is that , in a wonderful cheesy sort of way, it’s just Life Awareness Day. A day to be assaulted by the fact that Christ came out from death bearing life abundant for you and for me.

On facebook today someone posted the lyrics to an Andrew Peterson song that calls today “high noon in the valley of shadows.” I should not be sulking today. You know what I should do? I should go put on the pretty easter dress I took off a few hours ago out of stubbornness, and I should climb out the window onto my roof. I should scramble all the way up to the highest ridge pole like Anne of Green Gables and after teetering and giggling in the breeze for minute I should spread my arms wide and grinningly begin to scream, “Hey! It’s high noon! Christ is offering grace upon grace! COME AND GET IT, KIDS!!!” And then I should follow my own advice.

Silly Thoughts

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I’m lying on the couch in my study at home and dinnertime sun and neighborhood sounds are coming in through the open window. It’s a good place to be. I highly recommend it. My brother is downstairs, probably communing with poptarts and the computer, and my dad will be home anytime, and we’ll have frozen pizza for supper. This evening, I may do some reading for school, I may look for jobs (I have an itch to clean houses this summer), or I may watch a movie. Nothing here is really of a particularly high-caliber, except that this is that place called home, and I can sit on my picnic table and watch the sun stream through the thin oak leaves, so new that they’re almost damp. We have a new car. He’s a 1992 navy Volvo, and I’ve named him Horace. I have a crush on him. Right now I don’t really want to go back to school. I just want to lie on this couch for few more decades. Then maybe I’ll get up and wander off into the sunset.

I can feel myself detaching in a funny sort of way.

Mary

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I would like to take this opportunity to say something: On Friday, my sister will be twenty-one. That seems like an important number, and I’m sure it is for many people. But the real age of excellence for Mary and me will be twenty-seven. When she turns twenty-seven, that is when I will throw her a huge surprise party (not that she hasn’t gotten one anyway the past two years in a row…) and bust out champagne and not-the-caviar-cause-I’m-pretty-sure-she-would-hate-it.

Anyway, even though she’s only turning twenty-one, and that’s nbd(no big deal), I still want to honor her, because she is honestly wonderful. There are a lot of people who I can stop and think about, and say, “Wow, my life would be sort of lonely and sad without you in it…” But with Mary, I can’t say that, because I simply can’t imagine being without her. I shared a room with her for sixteen years, and, you know,  that’s longer than many marriages last. One of our favorite things to do together is reminisce. Here are some things to remember:

-the time we made that perfume for all the moms-the time we walked to the arboretum after dark-the time Wheezy married Emily- the time I gave you a tour of Davidson-goofy guy-the 500,000 times Peter quit Monopoly-the time we were singing in the rain and the car didn’t stop fast enough-Adam Nordaker-Sadie Hawkins Dance-“and my sister fell down so then there were only two of us”-time the String Beans did not light candles with the AF-the Protestant Reformation we all looked forward to so much- the time we walked down the whole creek in the greenway and there was a dead fish- the rainy day cd-the flower club-when everyone was in love with Paint-Unwritten-pantyhose- all those picture on our walls- Muzzy-the time you and your weird friend gave Rosie and me nasty water-Person-the guy who gave us the “vahse”-Creve!-when you read me your diary every night-the time I cleaned your desk for your birthday and just made a bigger mess-the time we made Mom and Dad a collage-ALL THOSE SCRAPBOOKS-Pushy Haddin and Grammy’s stuffed animals…

That was a poorly executed list, there were so many more things that happened, and there are also so many more things that will happen. Really. Now, a few more things I want to tell you, sister: “Mary, let’s LAUGH!” “Good job, little buddy, you sang your little heart out!” “Everybody over here says good night to everybody over there!”

I love you so much, and am thankful God has given you to me. You are kind, pretty, generous, and full of grace. I’m incredibly proud that you are my sister. And you’ll be my sister for always….

(GOOD-night-sleep-tight-don’t-let-the-bed-bugs-bite)

Alice Sans Swing: A Rather Lengthy Entry

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This afternoon, I was at Emily’s house trying to get all my Faerie Queene read, and as Edmund Spenser and I have a little trouble understanding each other, it wasn’t going swimmingly. I stared out her back window at the brick house settled in the snow in the lot behind her. It looked so much like home. Not my home, you know, but home. I started to think about where I wished I was, and the answer came with an almost unhealthy quickness. I wished I was standing in my dining room on a July day at about 5:30. The sun was shining at angle in through the Windexed front door onto the perfectly warped mirror in front of me, the sideboard smelled of Pledge. (How I love my mother!) Then into the kitchen, and the wood floor under my bare feet went from flat to a hilly shine. Everything there was warm and smelled of marinade and red wine. My mummy handed me a pan of wrapped corn on the cob to take out to my dad. Through the laundry room, feet skimming over the tattered rubber threshold, the sound of Daddy’s voice saying to Mr. Wolff, “You know, it’s interesting…” as he gestured largely with a huge pair of tongs. The deliciously uncontrolled slam of the screen door behind me and I was teetering down the rough grey steps which I painted myself onto a rougher patio. I handed the platter over, and was called “Sweetheart” for my pains. I wandered onto the grass, green and sinking, half listening to the laughter behind me. Those two entertained each other like no other. The smoke followed me, smelling of steak and unspoilt backyard. I didn’t mind. “Smoke follows beauty,” my mom always said. I reached for the swing, lifted my knee to brace it against the  weathered blue board–and then I remembered. The swing was gone. The tree was gone. I could not go back.

My first memory (perhaps fabricated, but I prefer not to think like that) is of my father tying bricks to the end of a rope, and throwing them over a limb of our biggest oak tree. He was making a swing. That swing could’ve told more stories than I can, and you can really get me going. We all received ritual lumps on our heads from being swung into when we were a couple years old, and had our hands filled with prickles from a particularly bad rope. Mary had a tomato dropped on her head while she swung, Hannah threw up after trying a new technique, and it displayed a penchant for breaking while I stood on it. Oh, how we loved it. We played Circus and Person and did Merrygorounds and Tornados and Tomatoes and Underdoggies. We snuck seconds on it before church in the mornings, and stayed out long after dark, piffling over turns, and dodging dangerously back and forth in the full glow from the porch floodlight. I knew why I had such a wonderful house: the grown-ups who came to visit liked the wood stove we heated with, even though they didn’t know that if you threw water on it it would make fascinatingly bulbous clouds of steam, and the kids who came, well, the swing was worth skipping dessert. Mary and I had a strong sense of proprietorship which we shared with the Wolffs and the Nealons, because it was a truth universally acknowledged that Hannah gave the best Merrygorounds, and Rosie was the only one who had touched the tree. The swing was the center of our world.

To me, I think it was more than that. All of the euphoria ended naturally as we slowly grew up, of course. Friends still loved it, we still took turns in order, but we did not spend hours. There were no more games. I didn’t mind, though. My best moments on the swing were the wondering, dreamy ones. It was a good for a think. I never sat. I always stood, facing the parking lot, and nudged my hips side to side to side until I was flying. I sang and recited poems quite loudly, I had conversations with people who did not happen to be present, I leaned forward into the wind (though I’d never even heard of Titanic,) I was a princess and the world was mine.

One weekend, the spring of my senior year, my parents were out of town and a bunch of friends came over. We started dinner, then responsibly abandoned it simmering on the stove. We took careful turns on the swing and gave each other pushes. We laughed a lot. A couple weeks later I sat in the upstairs bath at about eleven when there was a sound like thunder. It was a slow, deafening crackling right outside my window. It ended in the most deafening silence. Finally, I hauled myself out of the water, put on a robe, and went outside to see. My parents stood silently in the driveway. There were no words. The big tree filled our large backyard like a bowl. (That’s the way I described it to everyone for weeks–“like a bowl.”) It had been struck by lightning years and years before, and we’d had to have half of the top removed. Apparently the core had rotted out anyway. It was the quietest of nights. There was no other explanation. The fallen trunk, which was at least twenty feet around, lead straight to our neighbor’s back fence like a highway. I was suddenly crushed to know that the baby oak leaves waving in the breeze, whose arrival meant spring at last, were already dying as I watched. And then I knew. My swing was gone. It was unreal. I began to cry. My parents hugged me and said scary, wasn’t it?  I said not particularly, went upstairs and crawled into my sister’s empty bed. I pressed my face into the fan that propped the window open, and bawled myself to sleep. I would be eighteen in a couple weeks and it felt as if my world had promptly ended when all I was trying to do was take a bath.

Anyway, I did not quite make my quota with the Faerie Queene this afternoon. I went downstairs, began to tell Emily about the swing, and suddenly I was crying–not prettily and quietly, but messily and swollenly. I am not over it. I am angry that now, when my father grills steak in July, there is no place for the smoke to follow me. As I got older, I think, and I climbed onto the swing less and less, I loved it more and more. It became sacred. It became, in itself, “a spot of time.” It was magic because when I climbed onto it, even at thirteen, I became beautiful. I was beautiful because of something that was not me. I could give no credit to myself, only to that half-second of weightlessness when the swing changed directions and ceased, momentarily, to carry me. Now, there is a gorgeous little flowerbed where the swing hung, and stump of the tree is a huge, odd island. I cannot go back. I cannot, I cannot. Anyway, sorry this is so long. It’s just that I miss spring, I miss my home, I miss my swing.