Bits

I almost didn’t write it. It seemed, at the time, a story that was perhaps tragic, comic, amazing, but certainly not worth the time it would take to put on paper. I kept it inside, and told it out in bits and pieces to people I met. I heard it too many times, though. They said I should write a book.

I knew that someone would read it who knew me then… someone who remembered. And with that knowledge was the realization that the past would always drift through me unless I put it down for you. All the dark, almost forgotten, repressed, if you will, details.

I have, of course, changed the names to protect the guilty. No innocents here. Not unless you count the children… but I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, or before.

How to start before the beginning, you ask? A history, if you will pardon my use of the word. A search and a delving into generations past… Perhaps their lives will tell me why mine pointed in the direction it did, or shed light on why some primal and mighty works of God; the peaks of the Rockies, the endless waves of the sea, the vast and rippling prairies, humble me. There arises in my heart a wave of joy and emotion too vast to name when I stand in the presence of God’s creation.

To some, history is a vague mist, impossible to imagine and harder still to internalize. They hear the word, and their eyes glaze over. Boring. What do they care what some moldy, ragged sailor lived and felt all those years ago? Why should they wonder about some long-dead, unwashed woman who lived in a rough cabin and carved her life from the wild? Yet, I wonder it…are my tendencies to migrate passed through my genes? I hear stores about of my great-grandfather, who stowed away on a ship bound from England to the United States. Does the restlessness still run through my ancient memories, and give rise to my own tendency to put down shallow roots? And how do I explain this pull toward gardens and birdsong and wild walks through dripping green and leafy tunnels, of my joy in scrambling over rocks toward the top of a mountain to stand at the highest point and scan the land falling away below me, wind in my hair. Not all people know the path taken by their ancestors and relatives to arrive at this moment in time, and not all wish to disturb sleeping memories full of pain and sorrow. I want to peer into the mist. I want to discover what blood flows in my veins, what lives, whether well-lived, or eked out of existence, have shaped the telling of this tale.

So I will begin with the happy days. There were years of them, stretching out together through hazy summers and shivery, slushing winters. We lived in a two-story brick house, tucked around a gentle bend in the well-traveled main street of our town. Our house was the first on the right, a taller-than-it-was-wide house, with tall, symmetrical windows and a small stoop that curved over two brick steps in the center and led to the front door. Three small windows at the top of the door admitted light to the living room and stairway of the house. The front walkway was cement, and decorative furrowed lines in a crazy quilt pattern ran through its length. Well-trimmed yews with small, slimy red berries grew happily next to the foundation, and larger boxwoods shadowed them. The one car garage, on the right and opening to the front of the house, had two tall doors made of painted wood with small windows. Built in the 1930’s, in this small development each house on the street resembled the next, although some were faced with stone instead of brick.