Essay Sample
Walking Home
Even though it is still August, the air is blowing sharp
and cool through the window screen tonight. My
visits from
Twenty years ago I moved far away from my childhood home in
Though we are all still living, none of us live in those places today.
I’ve visited
My own children, four of them, could drive themselves to the Wisconsin home where my father grew up. They each have a blackened chimney brick we picked from the rubble of their great grandmother’s farm house, and they’ve walked the corn fields my grandfather plowed in his youth. But they’ve never seen the home where I grew up or climbed the trees where my brother and I swung as Tarzan and Jane.
Why then, am I here tonight?
After all these years of visiting Wisconsin, this is the first time I’ve come home. The wind moving my aunt’s faded floral curtains is blowing from the east and riding over that old home. My nose recognizes the bouquet of Milkweed and Indian Paint Brush. My ears tune in to the symphonies of frogs and crickets, the great-great grandchildren of the creatures I once caught, loved, and released from my small hands. My legs are restless. I’m fidgeting, longing to walk familiar paths.
At five, ten, twelve, fourteen — I walked at night under the stars which were in the exact configuration they are in tonight. The moon was just this shade of green-white, and the trees made this precise sound as the wind blew through the forest. I was never scared, just amazed at how big and free life seemed when the sky opened to that nighttime eternity of timeless stars and space. But tonight, I am afraid. There is a spirit peeking from behind each tree; she is lounging lazy in the grass, and flying on the wind, tethered with kite strings to this earthly spot. In the daylight, I was sure I came here just to face her, but tonight, I’ve changed my mind.
Instead, I burrow under the blankets, head and all, just as I have always done when the world opens up a bit too large for the limits of my understanding. Safe, I sleep. Sometime in the night, my face pushes out from the stale bubble of blanket air and I dream with the cool air of home weighing against my eyelids.
Morning comes as sure and certain as too few things on this earth. It rises in me here the same as it does in my new life in Arkansas, and I’m just as slow to welcome it. I’m not one to greet the sunrise, always preferring the sunset and the solitude of night hours. I find safety in the darkness. Today, I sleep until dawn gives way to full light, and the heavy northern dew sparkles like a snow memory across the grass.
My aunt Charlotte has gone to work, always smiling, always just with her mouth. Like me, she is filled with grief. I am alone in this unfamiliar house and take my breakfast out to the screened porch where I can see the things I know. A mocking bird bounces on the clothesline and sings a parody of his neighbor’s songs. There, by the birdbath, a gopher skitters down into a hole, his cheeks puffed with stolen birdseed. Fog merges with the field next door as the sun cleans night things away.
My bagel is as dry as sawdust, but I eat it anyway, nibbling like that gopher would. Even though I reheat my cocoa, it can’t get hot enough to bake the goose flesh from my legs. I end up inside on the sofa, piles of photographs spread around me once again. Quickly through one stack and then the next. So fast that I can register familiar details and people only after one photo has passed on to the next.
I keep finding myself like this, and I know it’s why I’m back here now. I’m looking for someone who went missing without a proper mourning, a spirit in these piles of photos. That same spirit who was out haunting the trees, the grass, and even the sky last night when I should have been walking. Photo after photo, she is almost there, but not quite. Here I see the outline of her hand around a doll, there is the silhouette of her head, I’m sure that muddy footprint was hers. And here, peeking out from behind my brother, her blue-green eye looking into the distance.
Applauding my own courage, I finally dress in layers of warm over cool, tie my running shoes extra-tight, and close the door of my aunt’s home. The birds are singing, and I recognize all their voices. That robin is the ancestor of the tiny, flightless bird we put back into the pine nest behind the barn. And there, that crow is a cousin to the injured bird we tried to teach the word “hello,” and then decided, tearfully, to set him free.
Along the edge of the gravel road, there is a small depression of gray-brown mud. It is the slipper mud we used to coat our bare feet for protection in the summer time. Before we went to the field or down the crooked farmer’s road, we ran through a half dried puddle of slipper mud three times to form three layers.
Today, I touch the toe of my running shoe to the mud and smile. I could take my shoes off and feel the cold salve meld with my skin. A flash of color to my left pulls the smile away. I’m sure it was a young girl weaving expertly through the pine trees, following the small, rabbit-chasing mutt who sleeps at her feet every night. Despite the clipped and empty photos, despite the lack of evidence, I know the girl was here— I know this is where I lost her.
Further down the road, a concrete milk house stands within a crop of elderberries. Filled with adventure, my brother and I sat inside, eating picnics of nothing but chunks of salt smacked from the neighbor cow’s salt lick, parsnip roots, and those sweet, purple elderberries. I stare intently at the bramble, half hoping, half frightened that I’ll see her, berry stained, standing bravely in the sun. My head turns sideways as I pass the ruins, but refuse to look away. Truthfully, I’m avoiding what is to come. I know that from this spot on the road, if I look straight ahead, I’ll see my house.
Slowly, without any courage at all, I turn toward the house, getting a good view from my peripheral vision before I face it full on. At first, I don’t even recognize it. The colors are all changed, and Mama’s flower bed is gone. Huge trees shade the drive, which is paved instead of gravel. Then, yes, there are the gooseberry bushes, and the garden still has ripe tomatoes. The concrete mushroom stools are tilted near the fence. The ditch still fills with water for the dogs to cool and splash, and here is the old oak where we buried Pal and then Charlie too.
The house is quiet and alone, and I feel no kinship to it. All these years I’ve been frightened to step this close and I feel nothing at all. My feet are starting to cramp inside my running shoes, so I wiggle my toes and wait. Still, no spirits beckon me, so I turn to walk to the back of the house. Forty acres that held a universe, surrounded by a barbed wire fence that couldn’t hold us in. The Field. And there she is, uncombed hair matted at the nape of her neck, mismatched clothes, bare feet safe in mud slippers. She runs up and over the hill.
I follow with half a smile, remembering the way the breeze felt in her hair. I’m not frightened any longer. When I walk over the hill, she is waiting, just as I expected her. She’s not looking at me, but wrapping my favorite doll in a long rag-blanket made from Gramma’s old curtain. I know what she will try to do next, and I kneel beside her and help her strap the baby to her back like an Indian papoose. She looks at my feet and frowns. Together, we walk down the hill to a small pit of brown mud. I tie my running shoes together and balance them on my shoulder like a purse. Silent. The ritual of slippering. Three times. Three layers thick.
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