Ripple Effect

handshearts — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Candace Kearns Read

I was driving around what seemed the perfect neighborhood, looking for signs, when I found the sprawling, two-story log house for sale on three park-like acres, filled with ponderosa pines and giant rose-colored rock formations. The location was ideal, with easy access to the highway, yet no visibility from the road. The price on the flyer seemed too good to be true.

•••

Our community is made up of a few small towns strung along U.S. Highway 285, which curls through red rock cliffs and rolling ridges of forest as it climbs two thousand feet in elevation, from the historic two-block town of Morrison, up through Tiny Town, Aspen Park, Conifer, Pine, and all the way to Bailey, Colorado. The speed limit on the highway is 55, but most people take the curves closer to 70. Once you start ascending, you can feel the wildness of it, from Turkey Creek Canyon through Windy Point all the way to Crow Hill.

•••

According to the news reports, on September 27, 2006, sixteen-year old Emily Keyes drove to school as usual, with her mother Ellen and her twin brother Casey in the car. The sun was rising over distant mountain ranges, and they turned the Red Hot Chili Peppers up loud as Emily navigated from their mountaintop home down the narrow twists of a dirt road lined with aspen groves. At the highway, she followed the winding path of the wide, rushing South Platte River. At 7:17 a.m., Emily and Casey got out of the car at Platte Canyon High School, and Ellen drove to work.

•••

The house we were living in, which I’d bought with my previous husband, wasn’t even on the market yet, but we were ready to sell it. It didn’t feel right to live there anymore with all those memories. We needed a new home, but we wanted to stay in this community. It was the kind of place where neighbors watch out for each other, and people still cared.

•••

The 285 corridor and surrounding areas are referred to as the Foothills of Denver, but there’s no doubt that we live in the mountains. In early fall, when the elk start to rut, we can hear the bugling for a mile, and months later, dozens of pregnant females take their afternoon naps in our yards. Deer eat our flowers all summer long, staring at us like the invaders we are. It’s not uncommon to see fox dashing, cat-like, between the aspen. Bears will rummage through our trash cans if we leave them out, and we live in fear of mountain lions snatching our dogs.

•••

Between 8:42 and 11:40 a.m., a dilapidated yellow jeep, later discovered to be the living quarters of a fifty-three-year-old homeless man by the name of Duane Morrison, came and went from several different spaces in the high school parking lot.

•••

I pulled up the long circular driveway on a mild day in October 2005 and there he was, standing next to a weathered gold Jeep Cherokee with a little red light on top. He wore a crisp cotton button-down, broken-in jeans, and cowboy boots; he introduced himself with that nice clean Irish name. The business of real estate can make me uneasy, but I felt instantly that this was a guy we wanted on our side. I was sure my husband would agree. He had a humble calm you don’t often find in sales people, and he mentioned that he had a lot of ties in the community. I later learned this was an understatement.

•••

We are what’s called a bedroom community; most everyone commutes to Denver about thirty miles away, and we run our errands and go to the movies down the hill. Up the hill, there are a few bars, a couple of gas stations, and some small specialty stores. Until recently, there wasn’t even a Mexican restaurant. Most of the businesses are family owned, and you always bump into someone you know at the market. The schools are ranked some of the highest in the state. Crime is practically negligible, and the natural beauty surpasses that of most places. Some might say life up here is idyllic.

•••

At 11:40 a.m., Duane Morrison, who had been living out of his car but had a Denver address, calmly entered the school building, claiming he had “three pounds of C-4.” He was wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt and carried a camouflage backpack. Inside were a semiautomatic pistol and a handgun. Morrison headed upstairs to room 206, where Sandra Smith was teaching honors English. He instructed her to leave, and when she would not, he fired his gun into the air. He then told the students to line up facing the chalkboard and made everyone leave, except for six girls, of which Emily Keyes was one.

•••

In the course of our dealings with the realtor, we learned he was also a volunteer firefighter. When he wasn’t helping people buy and sell houses along the 285 Corridor, he was responding to accidents and other 911 calls, often saving lives. He’d pried toddlers out of crushed cars, fought forest fires, and evacuated the sick and elderly from deathly blizzards. He’d signed up nine years earlier for the excitement. He’d stayed on because it taught him to appreciate that, as he put it, “life is brief and precious and important.”

•••

A code-white alert—meaning a full lockdown—was sounded over the intercom. County Sheriff Fred Wegener began negotiating with the gunman. The sheriff’s son Ben, a junior who once had a crush on Emily Keyes, was in a classroom nearby. Morrison wouldn’t talk to Wegener directly—he used the girls to relay his messages. The only clear demand he made was that the police back off.

•••

I tried to imagine what it must be like to live with a high-frequency radio in your home. We awakened to acres of blue sky above pine-covered peaks, the sounds of an occasional dog, crows cawing and squirrels chattering. Our realtor and his wife must emerge from dreams to the beating static and cacophony of voices reporting drunks, families killed in car accidents, petty thieves, and the elderly having massive heart attacks in bed. Or one morning, as you’re writing up a carefully considered Inspection Objection—as our realtor might have been on the morning of September 27, 2006—you hear words reverberating over that crackling scanner that make you briefly pray you haven’t really woken up at all. “Six students have been taken hostage at Platte Canyon High by a man claiming to have a bomb. The school is being evacuated—negotiations are ongoing.”

•••

Morrison sexually assaulted all of the girls before releasing four of his hostages and keeping two. Fifteen-year-old Lynna Long later said that even though they were all lined up facing the chalkboard, she knew the other girls were being molested because she could hear “the rustling of clothes and elastic being snapped and zippers being opened and closed.”

After the four girls were released, Emily, who was still a hostage, managed to respond to her father’s text message, which asked, “R U OK?”

She wrote back, “I luv u guys.”

•••

In July, our realtor called, asking if my husband and I wanted to join him and his wife for a Rockies game. There was light rain that day, but our seats at Coors Field were sheltered by the overhang of the level above us, so even when it sprinkled, we were protected. We drank beer and ate hot dogs, basking in the relaxation of the ballpark. His wife and I went for a second beer during the sixth inning, but our realtor stopped at one, since he was driving.

“Seen too many accidents,” was all he said.

•••

By 12:10 p.m., all eight hundred students, except the two remaining hostages, had been evacuated. A four-mile stretch of Highway 285 on both sides of the school was closed. Ambulances were parked in the end zone of the football field.

All the parents standing outside the school were urged by authorities to go back to the sheriff substation.

At least twenty parents shook their heads at once and said, “No.”

At 3:20 p.m., the gunman told police that something “big” would happen at 4:00, and that it would “be over then.”

The Jefferson County SWAT Team had witnessed Morrison sexually assaulting the girls, and at 3:30, Sheriff Wegener made a decision. Later he’d say that he made the decision, “Because I’d want whoever was in my position to do the same thing, and that is to save lives.”

At approximately 3:35, the SWAT team stormed the classroom, and Morrison used the two girls as human shields. When she tried to run, he shot Emily Keyes in the back of the head before killing himself.

•••

Our realtor was just one of many who stood by and watched as Emily was carried on a gurney from the classroom to the Flight-for-Life helicopter.

Emily’s father, John-Michael, who had been waiting there all day, hoping to see his daughter, shouted out, “Is there anything I can do to make her more comfortable?”

Someone replied, “No.”

The helicopter took only a few minutes to arrive at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Denver, where Emily was pronounced dead at 4:32 p.m.

•••

The word community typically refers to many people, and sometimes it’s a group so large that it fills a whole highway. On October 7, 2006, close to six thousand motorcyclists rode the forty miles from Columbine High School to Platte Canyon High School in a show of compassion for the victims of the shootings at both schools. After a moment of silence and a balloon release, they rode off beneath an archway of pink balloons. Sheriff Fred Wegener was among them. Proceeds from the riders’ registration fees went to The “I Luv U Guys” Foundation, established in memory of Emily Keyes. This tradition has continued every year since.

•••

Emily’s life was full of accomplishments. According to those who knew her, she was trusting, kind, and fearless. She was active in speech class, worked on the school paper, and played volleyball. The day before she died, she had done such a great job on a world history paper that her teacher had read it out loud to the whole class.

Her boss at the restaurant where she waited tables said she was, “One of the nicest girls. Just a real sweetheart. Always a please and a thank you and a smile.”

•••

On September 27, 2006, our son was almost two, and we’d lived in our new home about five months. This was where we would parent him through his childhood and adolescence, and where, fates willing, he would someday graduate from high school. I mourned fiercely, almost inappropriately, for Emily, so consumed with shock and sadness that I could barely think of anything else for days.

It was as if I knew her, and in some ways I did, for we all drive the same roads, watch the same aspens turn to fiery gold each fall, and notice the same rise and descent of the trout-laden South Platte River, which feeds the same creeks we all drive alongside each day.

•••

Every year now, on the Saturday closest to September 27th, my husband, children, and I walk up the big hill to where our neighborhood meets the highway, carrying a cardboard sign that reads “We Love U Guys” written in bright red poster markers. We stand there waving at thousands of honking motorcyclists, our sign bending in the wind as they pass. From time to time, we exchange the international sign for “I love you”—thumb, middle and ring finger down, pointer and pinkie up, with a rider.

Up the highway a few hundred yards is the fire station, where the tallest truck is parked, emergency lights flashing like fireworks in honor and commemoration of the children killed in our schools and those who’ve leapt in to save them.

Throughout the hour that it takes for all those bikes to go by, I keep waving and smiling, stinging hot salt in my throat, doing my best to explain to our kids in choked-up stutters why we come here each year and pay tribute to a girl none of us knew, but we all remember.

I really do love these guys. I love that they show their compassion with a bike ride up a twisting mountain highway, I love that they all wear pink in honor of Emily, I love that so many of them see us here by the side of the road and answer our hand signals with a wave. But what I love even more is that when they reach their destination at Platte Canyon High School and join Emily’s family, whose foundation now helps schools everywhere enhance their safety, they’ll have carried our message to where it belongs.

•••

CANDACE KEARNS READ is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Morrison, Colorado. She is the author of the screenwriting guidebook Shaping True Story into Screenplay and a forthcoming novel, The Rope Swing. She blogs at lawomantologlady.wordpress.com, and can be found @ckreadwriter, candacekearnsread.facebook.com, and candacekearnsread.com.

The Homes We Drove Past

steps — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Rebecca Altman

I am parked out front of a Cape on Chesterford Road. I don’t know whose house this is, only that my grandparents lived here when my mother was born in the 1940s.

Occasionally, a wistfulness will settle over me, a haze that suspends clock-time, and I’ll turn left at the Hess Station instead of heading home, to the next town over, where I now raise my own children. From the opposite side of the street, I stare at the front steps, imagining my grandmother on the top stair, her ankles crossed and tucked to the side, holding her auburn-haired daughter. Above the stairs is the window in front of which my mother’s crib once sat. I picture my mother climbing the wooden rails to look out onto Winter Pond and the world beyond her windowpanes, decades before a place in her went vacant.

•••

There are children-of-divorce, and there are children-who-follow-divorce, who have their own experience of its aftermath.

Children-of-divorce and children-who-follow-a-divorce often live together in blended families, where they are introduced as his, hers, and ours. There can be whole-, step-, and half-siblings all under one roof, and depending on parental visitation, different combinations of siblings at any given time. I am a child-who-followed-divorce. I have five half-siblings, but I have always disliked the qualifier: half, as in less than whole, so I often would drop it when describing them. But this, too, would feel inauthentic because, when I was little, they weren’t always around or, when they were, they weren’t always accessible: they had other families and homes—homes I only ever drove past. I spent my childhood guessing what went on inside of them.

In fact, as a child, I was driven past a lot of homes.

Even blended families come to share habits, although their origins are harder to trace. The custom in mine is that if you are near a place where you, or some family member, once lived, you ride by it. This doesn’t mean chatting with the current occupants or even stopping to get out of the car. A nod can suffice. A snap-inventory of changes in structure or color, a sizing-up of tree growth, but almost always, one last glance before pulling away, in case what we’ve come in search of may, finally, burst through the front door and chase us down the road, waving at us to turn the car around.

•••

When my father’s mother passes, he organizes the family into a long caravan to drive by the places that he knew as a child.

His father was a builder. They lived in the houses his father built until it was time to sell.

The afternoon after the memorial service, my father drives with his window rolled down, us following behind, and when we near one of his former homes, he slows the car, reaching out the window to point at the one that matters.

I’m not in the car with him so I can’t hear what stories he would have told, but I’ve heard them before. He’s taken me on this tour once, maybe twice, when I was a child and we happened to be passing through Rhode Island. I recognize the white house with the grill over the front door as the one he lived in when he was seventeen and his father died in the den.

•••

Eight years after the memorial service, when my father turns seventy, I ask him if he’d like to take a road trip to see the factory where he had made polystyrene before I was born. I had always wanted to see the old Union Carbide plant, to see where he spent a decade of his life. Before I was born, around the time of his divorce, he left plastics for a career in public service. He had changed religions, too, but he rarely speaks about how he rebuilt his life.

After a false start of my own, I became a sociologist who studies environmental legacy—everlasting things like plastic or pollutants that pose a burden passed between generations. I’ve been trying to understand how I came into my strange fixation with abandoned factories and polluted places. Only now do I see some continuity. I’ve broadened the family habit to include driving by other kinds of places that harbor past hurts inherited by subsequent generations.

•••

It was my father who suggested we add old homes to our itinerary.

So en route from Boston, we pull off the Parkway to see the north Jersey house where I spent my childhood. The maple out front, the one I remember my brother leaping over, now blocks the front window out of which, as a toddler, I waved to my father as he left for his job at Town Hall.

As a child, living in this house, my five siblings are teens. I sometimes ride in the backseat of our station wagon when my father picks up his three kids for the weekend. They live in homes I never see inside, although once, my sister sneaks me in to use the bathroom in her mother’s house.

Mostly, I am alone riding out the tide of my siblings’ ebb and flow from the household. By the time I reach grade school, they have stopped visiting or moved out, two sisters to college, one brother to boarding school, another to mechanic school, and my oldest sister following a boyfriend to Wisconsin. We never get to know the interior of each others’ lives.

When my father steers the car down Webb Court, I feel a pang of familiarity. It is the arc of that curve, that way my body senses the shift in direction as I ride in the passenger seat next to him, rather than the sight of the actual house, which to my surprise, doesn’t induce nostalgia at all.

We drive by, turn around on the cul-de-sac, one more rolling pass and that is it. We don’t stop. I don’t look over my shoulder. There is no need.

•••

The next morning, my father takes me by his first central New Jersey apartment, a slouch-roofed ranch at the back of another home’s property. I try to picture him, a newlywed with his high school sweetheart, riding his bicycle past the junkyard to make polystyrene for the plant down the road.

My father and his first wife don’t stay long then. Neither do we. Before the features of the place can develop into memory, Dad pulls away, heading to the next town to see the duplex, where after a miscarriage, my oldest sister is born.

From there, we press on to Leland Gardens, a complex of red-brick garden apartments nearby. Once inside, he quickly turns around, disoriented by the labyrinth of similar structures that look much as they did in the sixties. He stumbles on the apartment, as if some visceral homing device steers the car to the place where my second sister is born.

Next we pass the Randolf Road house, my brother’s place of birth, where it occurs to me I’ve never seen a baby picture of him.

My father drives on, effortlessly navigating the grid of streets and storefronts.

But as we approach the turn for the next house, I see him slide his foot off the accelerator. Only momentum carries us forward. I look over at him from the passenger seat. He stares straight ahead, one hand on the wheel, the other covering his mouth. This is where I lost them, he says.

He inhales and exhales deliberately, through pressed lips, before swinging the car down Dixie Lane. He ducks to see out the passenger window as we creep along. And when we are finally out front, he pulls over. The tires squeak against the curb.

The conversation stops, but I sense an opening, and I begin to feel my way around it.

The white house hugs the road, its porch covered with a canopy of foliage. A steep flight of stairs climbs from the sidewalk to the front porch. I imagine his feet clambering up them, moving in his family box by box, and within a short time, carrying what few belongings he has back out.

Do my siblings watch his last descent? There are questions I have never asked, and until only recently, probably couldn’t have asked. I couldn’t bear to know the extent of their suffering upon which the very possibility of my life has been contingent.

I inquire about custody. My father’s voice cracks. It was the early seventies, he says. Mothers got custody, without question. It’s raining, and the windshield wipers strain to keep up. I have asked him too much.

Something unresolved still resides in this house. I wonder if its current family can sense its distress the way I do sitting at its curbside.

•••

Two more houses complete my mother’s side of the story. I’d been driven by them before.

On this trip, we don’t drive past the Kempshall Terrace house, the house into which my sister and brother were born. Even without seeing it again, I can picture it. My mother tells me often how on the day she first walks through this house, the owner, a widow, has a pot of baked beans in the oven. It is the homey smell that sells her—the scent of a life she longs to lead within those walls.

The house we do drive by was a trim Colonial on Graymill Drive, where my mother and her first husband move to make room for their growing family and which holds the possibility for a third child. She turns thirty in this house. Her husband has thrown her a surprise party to celebrate, and then the next morning, moves out with the woman from two doors down.

After he has closed the door behind him, I imagine my mother collapsed, fallen to her knees, her hand pressed to the window that she won’t look out to watch him leave. But she can’t wallow. My brother and sister are little and will need her soon. She lives there for a while longer as a single mother on Valium.

My father stops the car to comment, of all things, on the chimney.

When he married my mother and moved into Graymill Drive, the brick chimney had started to split away from the house. They lashed it to the side, cheaper than rebuilding from its foundation. The braces remained more than three decades later. Look at that, he says, it’s still holding on. This is symbolic of my parents, who married into each others’ heartbreak, and remain married, defying expectations, possibly even their own.

I am conceived in this house. It strikes me then that conception is cellular union followed by cleaving, again and again, splitting apart to carry on, until, at last, something whole and unbroken comes into the world. But I am a half-sibling, conceived only after the split and merging of two other families, and born from the fact of their devastation. Sitting in front of this house I realized how much my identity has been shaped by things that I imagined to have happened inside its walls.

Sometimes I would wonder whether some part of my parents still lived in those houses where their first attempt at family fell apart, especially my mother, who still talks about her first husband, their divorce, and the house she left behind, though he died in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, the stories she tells read like scripts. She repeats them often, always with the same phrasing. Sometimes, she’ll launch into a memory, and though I’m sitting beside her, I long for who she might have been had she not been left behind.

Which is why, a year after the road trip with my father, I’ve come back to her childhood home.

From my car parked across the street, I see two teenage girls shuffle out in flip-flops and climb into the Jeep parked in the driveway. They glance at me and are gone. I hear the bass-line from their stereo fade into the distance. A scruffy Labradoodle wanders to the curb, its gaze fixed on me in anticipation. And I realize it’s time to move on.

•••

REBECCA ALTMAN serves on the Board of Directors of the Science and Environmental Health Network and has taught seminars on environmental health for Tufts University. She is working on her first book with Vanderbilt University Press. Other creative non-fiction has appeared in Brain, Child, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She occasionally blogs at tothescratch.blogspot.com.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

girlinwindow — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Kim Kankiewicz

With the first lilting chords of the piano, we take the floor. The snare drum eases into a 6/8 shuffle. We melt into one another as the strings sigh the opening notes of the melody line. The horns respond with a glissando in the second verse, and we are afloat on liquid gold. We are bodies swaying in a collective embrace, in love with every-other-body in this place.

My dress is buttercup yellow, strapless with a sweetheart neckline. The chiffon skirt cascades over a crinoline of nylon netting. My hair is combed into a sleek bouffant, its curled-up ends grazing my bare shoulders. My dance partner wears a white sport coat and a crew cut. His face is indistinct, but no matter; he is not the point of this imagined memory.

The point is the convergence, the enfolding of each of us into all of us. The song, to which I have never really danced, is “Theme from A Summer Place.” In my reverie, we sway to the familiar instrumental recording, Percy Faith’s 1960 orchestral arrangement. But other artists—my favorite being The Lettermen in 1965—have recorded “Summer Place” with vocals. Listen and you will hear a song less about romance than about sanctuary:

There’s a summer place

Where it may rain or storm

Yet I’m safe and warm

For within that summer place

Your arms reach out to me

And my heart is free from all care…

•••

Since childhood, I have cast myself in fantasies with soundtracks from my parents’ youth. I was six years old in 1980, when my family moved to Nebraska and settled into the Craftsman house where my parents still live. The formal living room, unfurnished for nearly a year, was the theater where my brother and I performed “Rock Around the Clock,” “At the Hop,” and other teen anthems from the American Graffiti soundtrack.

In fifth grade, I pictured my sixth grade crush pining for me as I listened to Frankie Valli crooning “My Eyes Adored You.” Carried your books from school, playing make-believe you’re married to me. You were fifth grade, I was sixth, when we came to be. I knew no sixth grade boy would carry my school books—not least because I was the kind of kid who listened to the Four Seasons in 1985—but envisioning such a scenario made the unfamiliar territory of adolescence feel navigable. The same was true in the final months of my eighth grade year, when I sweet talked my dad into deejaying a sock hop at my middle school. With high school on the horizon, I imagined joining the letter jacket crowd, the clean-cut kids with social status. (That the sock hop itself was not imaginary is equal parts mortifying and miraculous.)

At no time were my retrospective daydreams more persistent than during my first year of college. Living in Kansas I was homesick, so homesick. Studying to the oldies and wearing vintage clothing bolstered my spirits, but the image that sustained me emerged from a trashcan in the bathroom of my residence hall. On my nineteenth birthday, I discovered a date stamp on the trashcan’s raised lid: October 10, 1967—the month and day of my birth and the year my mom entered college. Never mind that she had attended a different college; it seemed profoundly significant that this trashcan was installed when my mother was a freshman, seven years to the day before my birth.

The date stamp became my talisman. Glimpsing it as I left the shower each morning, I would borrow my mother’s courage for the day ahead. She too was homesick, so homesick, when she arrived on campus, but she came to regard her college years with fondness. In her footsteps, I would do the same. I was into The Ventures that fall, and as I ascended the stairs between my residence hall and the main campus, a mental guitar loop from their 1960 hit “Walk, Don’t Run” propelled my steps. In my sophomore year, my confidence as a returning student was affirmed when Pulp Fiction made Ventures-style surf rock popular again.

I more or less maintained that confidence through the transitions of marriage and motherhood, relocations to Colorado and Minnesota and corresponding career changes. I believed homesickness was for kids and for people who moved internationally or under duress. Even as a college student, homesickness seemed to place me in an immature minority. As an adult, I did not expect to come unmoored when my husband’s career took our family from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

•••

Here is a partial catalog of things that have made me cry since we moved to a suburb of Seattle last year: a parking structure where all the spaces are compact, because I miss the ample welcome of a Midwestern parking lot; the opening page of a novel dedicated to “the great state of Minnesota”; an area car show, because it was to St. Paul’s annual vintage car show as “Rock Around the Clock” is to the entire American Graffiti soundtrack; a photo of John C. Reilly, because I once noticed that Minnesota’s eastern border looks like his face in profile.

I am ashamed of my emotions, ashamed that I am not content to live in a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood between the Puget Sound and the Cascades. Our new hometown has good schools, a downtown with an art gallery and a live theater, hiking and biking trails, a farmers market. Our new neighbors build community in many ways—educating and caring for children, volunteering at the food bank and soup kitchen, protecting natural resources, creating art—and they have welcomed our participation in these activities. We’re surrounded by beauty: trees, lakes, mountains, and a creek where the salmon run every fall. My husband says he is still astonished that we get to live here.

I know how he feels. When we moved to Minnesota, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. We arrived in autumn, my favorite season. I basked in the low-angled sunlight reflecting off St. Paul’s Como Lake, the red and gold leaves crunching beneath my feet as I circled the water. Our family picked apples at a local orchard, watched squirrels and birds at an urban nature center, and met other families at a park where my son learned to ride his bike. In winter, the season that defines Minnesota for people who have never been there, we discovered sledding hills and indoor playgrounds, and the tropical plant room at the free-admission conservatory, where anyone could find warmth and color on a bleak day. We found that we lived among neighbors who would clear our driveway with their snow blowers without being asked.

But I loved Minnesota before I experienced those things. I loved it before I lived there because my grandparents had called it home. I had spent Christmases and summer vacations with them, and with the aunts and uncles and cousins still living throughout the state. I knew something of Minnesota’s history and its coalescence with my family’s history, and so moving there felt like a homecoming. Moving away felt like an evacuation, like being emptied from a vessel made from parts of myself.

I assumed that these feelings would fade after a brief adjustment period. Months after moving, I wrote off my ongoing melancholy as stress or Vitamin D deficiency. When it occurred to me that I might be homesick, this self-diagnosis seemed so implausible that I Googled “adult homesickness” to verify its existence. My search turned up several recent articles on the subject, including an op-ed in The New York Times by a writer named Susan Matt. Based on a decade of research, Matt concluded that feelings of displacement and depression are common among adults who relocate. Yet we are reluctant to acknowledge “the substantial pain of leaving home” in an era that regards mobility as a virtue.

Matt’s byline referred me to her book, Homesickness: An American History, in which I read about homesick colonists and nineteenth-century immigrants. I learned that homesickness became taboo in the twentieth century, when embracing progress meant surrendering ties to the past. What most interested me was the connection between homesickness and nostalgia, which are literally synonymous. The word nostalgia was coined in the seventeenth century as a diagnostic term describing a painful longing for home. It combines the Greek words nostos (“return home”) and algia (“pain”) and remained in use as a medical term through the Civil War. It was only during the rapidly changing twentieth century that nostalgia gained distinction from homesickness—longing for a lost time as opposed to a lost place.

I recognize these desires as twins, but how do I understand twins born years apart? What does it mean that I am nostalgic for a time before my own birth? It’s notable that when I cry for Minnesota, I am moved by my sense of its shape, of a history that predates my life by decades. Like the homesick freshman I was, I am again sustained by popular music of the past. I recently bought a turntable and have acquired on vinyl the greatest hits of Bobby Vinton, Herb Alpert, The Brothers Four—artists who were on the charts the year my dad graduated from high school. My most common earworm, the song that both rouses and soothes my sentiments, is “Theme from A Summer Place.”

•••

In 1960, when Percy Faith recorded “Summer Place,” my grandparents owned a creamery in Fingal, North Dakota. My dad was fourteen years old. His parents had purchased the creamery when he was four and would operate it until 1968, when my dad was in college.

My grandfather was a butter man. He bought cream from farmers, pasteurized the cream in a heated vat, and churned it by the ton. By hand, he scooped butter from the churn into 64-pound boxes that were trucked to school cafeterias and military bases. He kept two boxes from each churning and parceled that butter into one-pound cartons sold locally. The town was proud of its butter, deeming it the best around. Fingal butter was served in restaurants and at the Woolworth counter in Valley City. Fingal natives who had moved to Fargo or Grand Forks filled shopping bags with Grandpa’s butter on return visits. At a reunion just months ago, a former classmate showed my dad a yellow carton with a Fingal Creamery label that she has saved for almost fifty years.

Butter unifies. It absorbs and concentrates flavor. It creates texture and emulsifies, blending ingredients that would not otherwise mix. A man who makes butter connects farmers with townspeople, towns with cities, schoolchildren with soldiers. The butter maker’s family is embraced. His wife is esteemed, his children golden boys and girls.

This is the refuge I seek in my father’s past. I want to know the butter maker. I want to break bread with the butter maker’s family. I want my children to walk to school with the butter maker’s children. I want to be the butter maker, and the butter, melting into the place where I belong.

•••

I have become a broken record. At some point the longing to be absorbed becomes self-absorption. I must reconcile my butter-gold narrative with reality. In 1960, Fingal was homogenous as milk. I imagine it was possible there to feel separate from the world, from the civil unrest churning the nation, from the state’s native population. Even so, I hear whispers of Fingal residents who did not find sanctuary in small-town North Dakota.

Nostalgia is too easy. It saddens me that the Fingal Creamery ceased operations in 1970, two years after my grandparents sold it and returned to Minnesota. But to romanticize an era when mom-and-pops outnumbered franchises is to overlook disenfranchisement. My own comfort and safety are not enough, after all. I am out of my element where I live now, like frozen butter unevenly spackled on toast, and maybe that is the point. Maybe I am here, in this place and time, to be uncomfortable in a culture consumed by comfort. Frozen butter will keep safe indefinitely, but safety is not its purpose. Butter is for flavor and texture, qualities that are lost after too long in the freezer.

In other words, it is time to expand my soundtrack. I’ll always have a soft spot for golden oldies. But there are living voices singing songs I want to hear, street musicians and symphony members I want to know. I want to feel the pulsing of every drum in the beating of my heart. If the asynchrony is jarring, I am ready to be shaken.

•••

This is KIM KANKIEWICZ’s second essay for Full Grown People. While writing it, she discovered that The Brothers Four are from Seattle and are still performing. She has tickets to attend a Brothers Four concert the next time her parents are in town and hopes to hear a live performance of her dad’s favorite road trip song, “Blue Water Line.”

The Accidental Immigrant

budapest stamp — By Laszlo Ilyes/ Flickr

By Zsofi McMullin

My twentieth high school reunion was held at a restaurant right across the street from my former school in Budapest. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to be there so badly. I didn’t love high school—who does?—but what’s worse is that I barely remember it. I have no memories of, well, of anything really from that time, except for one boy I had a huge crush on for four years.

But this story is not about that.

I was repeating the tale of what I’ve been up to for the past twenty years for about the fifth time that evening—this time to a former teacher—when he asked me, “So, did you just decide one day to move to America?” At first I wasn’t sure why the question shocked me. But then I realized that it was because it assumed that there was a decision involved, a moment in time when I said “no” to staying in Hungary and “yes” to becoming an American.

But really there wasn’t. My trip to America wasn’t driven by war or famine, by financial difficulties, or political unrest. I didn’t have to come to America. And I certainly didn’t have to stay.

I was eighteen when I came here and, looking back, it’s hard to imagine how I had the courage to do this. Actually, it’s hard to imagine how my mother had the courage to let me go. She worked at the American Embassy in Budapest and when the question of college came up in my junior year of high school her colleagues encouraged me to apply to American schools. I am sure my parents thought about and discussed the pros and cons of sending me off to another continent. I am sure. But I don’t remember my own thought process, my actual decision about going ahead with the plan. And even if there was a decision, I certainly never considered the possibility that it would have an impact on my life twenty years later. You just don’t think of that when you are eighteen.

Mountains of paperwork, a full scholarship, and a trans-Atlantic flight later, my mom and I were driving through the woods of Pennsylvania to the school where I would spend the next four years. We spent the night in my new dorm room drinking iced tea from the vending machine and arranging furniture. My mom left me there the next day and after she drove off, I went to the bookstore to buy thumbtacks for my new posters.

My one-year scholarship turned into four years. Graduation turned into a job. My job led me to my husband and marriage. Pennsylvania turned into Maine and Connecticut. Jobs, a child, friends, a life.

And now, twenty years later, in that half-lit restaurant in Budapest, I realized that I have become an immigrant. I don’t even like to call myself an immigrant. That word to me somehow means desperation, flight, the life of a fugitive. I became an immigrant just by living my life, doing whatever comes next.

•••

When we arrived in Budapest just a few days before the reunion, there was nobody there to greet us at the airport. My parents moved to the U.S. a few years ago, and so they weren’t there to pick us up or drive us around during our visit. With no close friends or relatives, we were left with a grumpy taxi driver who gave us curious glances hearing me speak Hungarian to my son and English to my husband. We were tourists.

If you didn’t know me, you would never guess that I am not an American. I don’t have an accent. I write and dream in English. The pull I feel to my homeland is invisible to everyone else. It’s a faint tugging feeling in my chest, something empty and burning. I go through life, day by day, even feel happy most of the time. It’s only when I am quiet that I get that uneasy vibe, that feeling that something is not quite right. Something is out of place.

Whatever. Move on.

There is a life to live, things to do. No time to wallow.

I assume all immigrants feel this no matter why they are away from home.

The cruel thing about all of this is that going “back home” does not make you feel better. Suddenly you are a stranger not in one place—your new, chosen land—but two places.

The first thing I did after booking our plane tickets to Budapest was to buy a map of the city. It’s stupid really, because I know—or used to know—the city and its streets by heart. As a teenager I went everywhere by myself—on trains and trolleys and buses.

But suddenly I felt unsure about whether I would find my way from the hotel to the metro station, to the store, to my old high school, to a friend’s house. It was all unfamiliar territory and, like a tourist, I stood on street corners with this little crumpled map in my hands, drawing lines with my fingers from street to street.

Of course, it all came back after a day or two but with a sense of strangeness at every corner: I tried to pay with a bill that’s been tucked in my wallet from our last trip, only to find out that it’s been out of circulation for over a year. Bus stops have moved. Shops closed. Neighborhoods fell and rose. Buildings crumbled. There were new parks and fountains, coffee shops, hip bars.

People have moved on. It was hard to find things to talk about with my former classmates and not just because so much time has passed. I couldn’t really imagine what their lives were like and I assume they felt the same. There were the inevitable questions about America: “So, does everyone really own a gun?” And there were the personal ones about how much money I make or what kind of car I drive—both very American pursuits to the outside world, I assume.

And despite all of that—the feeling of being a stranger in your homeland, the loss of friends—there is a comfort to being “at home.” Old reflexes return, memories surface, the empty, burning feeling of homesickness is suddenly gone when I am on the streets of Budapest. I have no reason to feel at home, yet I do. And more than just feel at home—it all feels right. Settled. Comfortable.

•••

My late grandmother’s apartment in Budapest had a long, narrow hallway leading from the front door to the living room. One the left side of the hallway was the kitchen, a wall with a mirror and coat hangers, and a smaller hallway leading to the bathroom. On the right side of the hallway were three floor-to-ceiling cabinets.

It was a tradition during my childhood that my parents and my grandma would harvest the fruit growing in the garden of our summer cabin, haul it in big wooden crates to our apartment in Budapest, and make jam. For a few days each summer, our small kitchen would smell of apricots or plums or peaches—whatever was in season. Jars boiled in huge pots on the stove, and the floor was sticky with the juice dripping from our fingers as we peeled, sliced, smushed.

Once sealed in jars, most of the jam would make its way to my grandma’s apartment and to her pantry cabinets for storage. She would bring a jar or two with her every week when she came to visit, or she’d use the jam for baking.

When she died last year, her cabinet was still full of jars—carefully labeled with a mysterious system of letters and numbers. For example “08P” might mean plum jam cooked in 2008. On some jars, the writing faded and only after carefully removing the tight lid would we be able to tell what the jar held—the color of its contents darker with age, but the scent of the fruit still potent and unmistakable. Ah, apricots! Is this cherries, maybe? Let’s taste it.

On a recent weekend we were sitting around the breakfast table with my parents, my brother, and my son. This particular breakfast table happened to be in Maine, a world and lifetime away from the summers of jarring jam in Budapest. But there they were: two jars of jam that my parents brought with them when they cleaned out my grandma’s apartment. One jar of apricot and a jar of cherry and sour cherry mixture.

My son preferred the sugary, sickeningly sweet grocery store jam. But the rest of us used long spoons to carefully spread grandma’s jam on buttered toast and savored every bite.

I couldn’t help but think back to the person I was at eighteen—to the people we all were twenty years ago. When my grandma tightened the lid on these particular jars just a few years ago, she already knew that her son and grandchildren would be eating it somewhere far away.

But I didn’t know how much it would taste like home.

•••

I think that when people say that America is a melting pot, they don’t actually mean it. It’s not a huge vat of gooeyness that’s all blended together, uniform, smooth. It’s more like a tossed salad—chunks and bits and pieces of this and that thrown in. It’s easy to fit in—it’s just as easy to stand out. I think that most of us immigrants alternate between those two options—embracing what makes us different, but just as happily disappearing into the crowd.

I have to admit that there is some comfort in the limbo I feel when I am trying to decide where I belong. I can be a bit exotic, a bit different, slightly off-kilter and blame it on my Hungarian-ness. I wonder if this is what I have become, if this is my “thing” now: being different, being from nowhere and everywhere, being two people in one body. Should I let it define me?

But maybe that is the lovely thing about America: no definitions needed. I can be defined by my memory of cobblestoned streets, jars of jam, first kisses along the banks of the Danube. I can also be defined by the life I built here out of nothing really, just the two suitcases I brought with me twenty years ago.

I had hoped that as the anniversary date of my arrival in the U.S. gets closer this summer I would feel more settled with my American-ness and less conflicted about the eighteen-year-old me making this huge decision without realizing what she was doing. But maybe it’s time to embrace all of it—the homesickness, the uncertainty, the double life.

Maybe it’s time to plant some trees and start making my own jam.

•••

ZSOFI MCMULLIN lives in Connecticut with her husband and son and blogs at http://zsofiwrites.com. She’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Pastime

spoons — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Lee Gulyás

Since my father died, my mother has tried to stay busy by selling antiques and collectibles. She fills up her time and clutters her house with dressers, armoires, vintage hats, children’s toys, and books: leather bound first editions, dusty Zane Gray westerns, school primers, old children’s books with full-color plates. All her purchases, full with their history of use, offer my mother hours of escape from a life steeped in the absence of my father.

When I visit my mother, the only meal we eat at home is cereal. A box from the pantry and milk from the refrigerator don’t interfere with the stacks of Depression glass, lead crystal, bone china, sterling flatware, and collectible spoons she has piled in the kitchen to clean and sell. Ultimately, we find ourselves in restaurants for a large chunk of my trip. After carefully considering specific words, as well as the tone of voice I should use, I muster up the courage to ask about her collecting. She doesn’t look up from her enchiladas, takes a swig of ice tea, and shrugs her shoulders.

“Well … it keeps me out of pool halls,” she snaps.

“No, really, Mom.”

“I don’t know. I like it and it keeps me busy,” she says, punctuating the inevitability of her pastime, as if she had no choice in the matter.

I can’t think of what to say next. I envision her old and frail, in a house so filled with things that to walk through it requires navigating through a maze, a system of paths through unknown territory. My intrepid mother won’t seem inconvenienced by the slow switchback trails between the bathroom and the kitchen—she just bushwhacks through the endless underbrush—stacks of books, boxes of costume jewelry, daguerreotypes, stereoscope cards, enamel kitchenware—and reveals the treasure beneath. “Look,” she says. “Look at this Depression-glass cake stand. What a score.” The extensive collection of objects with a past and a possibly profitable future now waits out the present in her midst.

“Are you done?” she says, jarring me back to my unfinished dinner. “I’m gonna go pay the bill. It’s almost time for Antiques Roadshow.”

•••

Each time I go, the initial entry into my mother’s house is pleasant. It still smells like home, even though she doesn’t cook anymore. After I settle in, look through the pantry to see if there is anything worth eating, situate my things by the stairs in the hallway, I check out the newest magazines in her stacks, piles of Southern Living, Country Living, House & Garden, and Antiques and Collectibles. Then, the reality of my surroundings sinks in.

The piles are neat and orderly, but they cover almost all the kitchen counter space. There is enough room for the coffee maker, and we could easily pull the toaster out, if the desire for toast arises. The kitchen table is clear and clean; its glass top reflects carefully placed items on the display shelves above the windows. Vintage biscuit tins, teapots, and assorted ceramic curios tier the room. Grotesque pioneer faces on porcelain mugs look down with a cold, fixed gaze. I turn away from the stern faces, and notice the pocket door to the dining room is closed. I glide over, quietly slide back the door, and see jumbles of overloaded boxes, filled to the brim and beyond, overflowing with so many goods that not a single sliver of tabletop or floor space is visible. The hallway and sitting room suffer from the same condition. The TV room seems relatively clear; my mother can easily get to the couch and television. I circle back to the kitchen, past the wet bar, and my eyes become filled, cluttered with her accumulations, like the rest of the downstairs.

My head spins. This is what she does. She buys things, spruces them up, and resells them at a profit. This is her reason to wake up in the morning. But I can’t stop thinking how all her purchases will be my responsibility to dispose of after she is gone.

•••

I lug my bags to the room at the top of the stairs, my brother’s former room. I glance around and realize I could be in an entirely different house than the one I left downstairs. The upstairs is clean, spare, and light. When my brother and I left home, my mother commandeered our rooms; his became the guest room, mine became her office. I place my things in the bathroom and drift into her bedroom. The walls are now a soft blue. Instead of my father’s desk, there is a white couch, and blue and white china plates hang on the wall in a geometric pattern. Antique, twin, brass beds occupy the place where the king-size bed used to be.

I remember when she started to change the room; it was several years after my father’s death. I was helping her put clothes away in the closet and she still had my father’s bathrobe hanging on what used to be his side. She became quiet, lowered her face against it, and sobbed, “It doesn’t even smell like him anymore.” Days later, she had fans of paint chips and new fabric to upholster a Victorian couch crammed into the garage. Now this room is hers, but it looks unused, sterile, especially in relation to the downstairs, the part of the house in which she really lives.

I venture downstairs and get comfortable on a couch, my mother already cozy on hers with a quilt and a pillow, ready for Antiques Roadshow to begin. Mom doesn’t just watch the show—she participates in the dialogue, interjects comments about the scarcity of a book, or informs the woman that her vase is, unfortunately, not a Tiffany. An expert asks a young computer executive about the piece of furniture he brought for appraisal. Mom chimes in. “That new-money idiot stripped the original finish from that Queen Anne highboy—bet that took about seventy-five thousand off the price.” The appraiser estimated removing the finish reduced the value by ninety thousand dollars.

Yet my mother is not solely interested in the monetary value. She reveres the heirlooms: the handmade rug with family names stitched around the border, the letters from a soldier to his family at home, the solitary item that a young woman retrieves from her grandparent’s estate. She beams when people relate the stories of who owned the item, and how it is important to them because it was important to their family. One woman, about sixty or so, brought a needlework mural that she thought was peculiar. The appraisers proclaim it the finest specimen of American decorative arts they have ever seen. My mother becomes speechless. The woman learns, via the strange embroidered cloth with a village scene of thatched cottages, hay wagons, and children, that her great-grandmother emigrated from England and had faithfully reproduced her former village onto a hanging that would be placed over a mantle. The woman sheds tears of joy, and my mother grows misty-eyed.

I’d like to think that this is the part where I tell her that everything will be okay, that in time she won’t turn around thinking my father called her name from another room, that she won’t absent-mindedly wait for him to pull his Mercury into the driveway. That in time she won’t dread the words Just one tonight? when she musters the will to get dressed, leave the house, and go out for dinner. Although it is hard for me to accept the sudden loss of my father, I have a husband and daughter at home. I worry about my mother alone in this house full of memories, wandering through rooms dense with echoes of family life.

But I don’t tell her it will be okay. I just sit here, next to her. Somehow, in our numb silence, I know she understands.

•••

When my mom dies, I know it will take months just to get everything unpacked, spread over what little available space is left, and what will I do with it all? What’s important to me? I imagine myself emptying a dresser. I pull out a drawer just a bit too far. It falls to the ground and I spy an envelope taped underneath. I open it and see a sepia-toned photograph of my grandfather stashed next to a tiny key. I now know I will have to open every drawer, every wooden cigar box, every container, or I will inadvertently toss out something hidden away for safekeeping. I will have to search through jacket pockets, desk drawers, and shoeboxes, inside vases, books, and kitchen cabinets. I will have to organize items into piles. Piles to keep: family photographs, my father’s watch, my mother’s ring, a few letters, important papers. Piles to donate: towels, bedding, blankets, clothing. Everything else would fall into piles to sell: a multitude of books, furniture I have always loathed (the pair of round faux-Colonial end tables, the tufted brown leather sofa, embroidered footstools) and the hoards of items I neither care about, nor have room for in my own home.

I could look in the phone book under Estates, call people who specialize in selling the entire contents of households, but I stop short of letting absolute strangers peer into my mother’s solitary life, inviting in larger groups of strangers to speculate whether or not she was totally crazy or just mildly eccentric. I could call other antique dealers to come and buy her treasures, but I would constantly hear my mom’s voice chiding me that everything was worth much more and I’m being duped. The alternate scenario—me dealing with the house item by item—scares me so much that I shiver. Maybe I’ll just torch it all.

But I’m lucky—my mother’s still here. Since my father died just one year after his retirement, my mother had to quickly figure out a life on her own, difficult in a society that dismisses women and the elderly. So I tell her how proud I am—of her resilience, her stubbornness, and for proving that you are never too old to start again. She’s important to me. Not her house, or her things, no matter how many memories they may hold. I tell her, but even if I were silent, she would understand. She always does.

•••

LEE GULYAS lives in Bellingham, Washington, and teaches at Western Washington University. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Prime Number, Event, Barn Owl Review, and The Common.

The Little House

clothesline — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Karen Dempsey

We’re climbing the hill where I used to search for arrowheads. But we are in the car. It is night, dark. And we can see only the small patches of road illuminated by our headlights. My father is driving and he knows the turns from memory. In preparing for this trip, I’ve tried to piece together a patchwork of my own memories, to create a full picture of this place, whole. Now, in the pure, expansive darkness, the absence of sound except for gravel crunching beneath our tires, I recall a vivid picture of the farm of my childhood.

We pause outside the car for a moment, breathing in the darkness. I look up for the ceiling of stars I once tried to memorize as I lay on my back on this ground until my mother called me in for bed. But tonight the stars are hidden. Years have passed since I last came to my granduncle Joe’s farm. It is more than the place of my memory, more than the place of my imagination. Yet the hole takes up the most space. I have avoided seeing this place again because I would prefer to remember it instead, to preserve my pictures of it from before the fire. But Uncle Joe is here, in the last years of his life. For him, being here is too hard and leaving is too hard, so he moves restlessly back and forth between this place and Lucy’s, the neighbor down the hill.

•••

He’s at Lucy’s now, and we make our way toward the new house where we’ll spend the night without him. The porch is a tiny cement platform and we crowd on, waiting as my father searches for the right key and works it into the new lock. The old house, we never locked. It had an old screen door that banged, a huge, wide porch that wrapped around the house, torn screens that failed to keep out the bugs. Dad turns the knob, and we move into the small, new kitchen.

This is a house of plastic and vinyl, of fresh-painted walls and furniture donated by neighbors or purchased by my father from a failed hotel. The flypaper is missing from the kitchen. The woodstove is old and beautiful but dwarfed by the imposing one of my memory, the one with the big pot of soup simmering on top. We light the stove to warm ourselves. The burning wood cannot erase the invasive smells of pre-fab modernity that have displaced the smells I remember most. The smell of my Uncle Joe’s pipe. The smell of old books lining the walls and stacked on tables. Of hay from the barn and my brothers’ fresh-caught fish. Those smells settled into you when you arrived and clung to you when you drove away, after two weeks of satisfying long days, in the wood-paneled station wagon with your three brothers and three sisters and your still-married parents.

The new house is tiny; there’s not a lot to see. And it’s late. So, soon, my father carefully extinguishes the fire in the stove and we turn in, my father in one small bedroom, the four of us—my sister Megan and me and our boyfriends—wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags on the cold floor of the other.

The house of my memory is an enormous collection of narrow rooms and doorways: small, comforting spaces. Megan and I slept in the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. She once slid off our bed in the night, when she was about two years old. She fell into the space between the bed and the wall without ever waking. They searched every room for her, only to find her still there tucked just out of sight, in that small space, asleep. I slept through their looking and I remember only the telling of it, but I can see her there, curled up and dreaming.

Uncle Joe’s voice wakes me in the morning. His voice is the same (even now, I can hear him still, saying my name) and I go out to receive his strong, familiar hug. His arms and hands have healed. He burned them throwing water onto the fire, trying to save the house that he’d lived in for more than ninety years. I had imagined a black scar in the landscape to mark its loss, but instead there is just this house. He calls it the little house, as if there is a need to distinguish it from the other, as if the other is still here.

We leave my Uncle Joe at the house to walk the hill with my father, and my father talks about his great-grandparents, the Brennans, of the house they built further up the hill, and the other, the house of my memory, built later for their daughter’s family. From the hill I take pictures of the farm—the sheds and tractor, the barn, all unchanged, the garden, much smaller now and closer to the house.

•••

In the afternoons of my childhood summer visits, Uncle Joe would walk me down the hill to the mailbox. The mailman raised a little flag on the box when he’d left a letter, addressed simply to “Joseph McEneany, New Albany PA.” I wrote Uncle Joe later, from home, just to hold that image of him releasing the flag, opening the box to a crisp white envelope marked with two simple and true lines in my own practiced printing.

As we walked back up from the mailbox one day, Uncle Joe stopped to survey the rocky ground.

“I sometimes find arrowheads out here,” he said.

It was a new word for me, arrowhead, and he described stones worn into smooth arrows for hunting and protection by the people who’d lived on this land long before. I followed him into the house then and he reached back on a shelf in the kitchen, drew out his collection of four or five found stones, and showed each of them to me, pressing their smoothness into my palm. I imagined them bound to sticks chosen for their weight and swiftness. I remember that I felt a grave longing to keep one of those arrowheads, to carry away with me its slight weight, its endurance through time, but I studied them and then handed them back, one by one.

Back in the new kitchen now, Uncle Joe instructs me to pick a zucchini from the garden, a big one, then he follows me out there to tease me about choosing the right one. His laugh is a familiar comfort. At home I have a picture, taken about twenty years before this visit. I’m running alongside my Uncle Joe, away from the camera. He doesn’t yet carry a cane but his walk is stooped. He carries a metal bucket, filled, I remember, with potatoes we have dug from the garden. I’d knelt beside him in the dirt, rooting for the things he’d planted there beneath the surface.

We slice the zucchini into slender green wheels and grill it in butter and salt on the stove. And Uncle Joe talks. His jokes and stories are familiar, reminiscent of other visits. But I’m most conscious of his missing pipe. He must feel its absence, too, enough that he needs to acknowledge it.

“I don’t smoke my pipe any more. Not after the fire,” he says, and stops there, without talking about the ash from the stove smoldering beside the house, or the sight of the flames swallowing it. He complains only about new doorframes, misaligned. He does not talk about the old house.

•••

This is my last visit to the farm with Uncle Joe, and we both know this, I think, when he asks us all to stay a little longer. We drive him to Lucy’s house and dawdle there, until it is time to take our leave and begin the drive back. Joe fidgets about Lucy’s house, distracted. He does not linger over the final goodbye.

A couple of years after this last visit, I will pull out the photos from this trip to bring to Uncle Joe as he is dying. But on the long drive to the nursing home I will remember suddenly, startlingly, that he has gone mostly blind, so I will have to describe them. And I do this, although he has lost consciousness by the time I arrive.

The photos are crisp, vibrant. I took only one of the little house. With the others, I maneuvered the lens to try and cut it from view, but the house creeps in, corners of it, to disturb the past.

•••

KAREN DEMPSEY lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family. She has written for publications including the New York Times Motherlode, Babble, and Brain, Child. This is her third essay for Full Grown People. Follow her @karenedempsey or read her work at kdempseycreative.com.

Desperate Settlers

By Tracy Sutton Schorn

Love will make you do crazy things. Like move to Texas.

If you find yourself moving to Texas, a state the color of dead grass, because you fell in love with a trial lawyer who sweet-talked you seventeen hundred miles from a peaceful existence on the East Coast—don’t blame Texas. Blame New Orleans. Jazzfest in particular and too many rum hurricanes, and the seductive powers of Solomon Burke singing “Cry to Me.” Because in New Orleans, you will meet your fate. You’ll forget that you’re forty-two and single and more likely to be hit by lightening than remarry. In New Orleans everything is possible. Resurrection from hurricanes. Second lines. Dancing on coffins. Love in middle age.

Do not be seduced. Do not think impossible things like, “I could learn to love Texas,” because God will test you. He will send you that man, the one you didn’t think existed. Who is quirky, kind and brave. Who sued a sexual harasser once and demanded his shoes. Because they were flashy, snakeskin shoes, and if that creep could be humiliated by leaving mediation in socks, his victim would feel like she really won something.

He asked, but he didn’t get the shoes. You love him for the asking.

So because of this story, and the sweet talk, and the sex, you move to Texas. God calls your bluff. You remarry.

It happens. I live in Texas.

I’m not alone. One thousand sixty people move to Texas every day, more than any other state. They say it’s for the jobs, but I’m convinced that they are lured here by sweet-talking Texans. One day you could be driving south on 1-35 with a U-Haul. Don’t be cocky.

You think you’ve got more sense than to live in a state with one hundred days of 100-degree weather? Think again. The streets of Austin are clogged with hopeful new settlers.

I love my husband and I cannot imagine my life without him. And yet every day I wonder how I wound up in Texas. I’ve concluded it’s a test from God. He wants to know how bad do I want it—this life, this good man.

Bad enough to give up lilacs, tulips, rhubarb, peonies, quick train rides to New York, art museums, Longwood Gardens, temperate weather, twenty-five years of collected woolens, overcoats, socks, snowballs, wood-burning fireplaces, the color green, autumn leaves, maple syrup… Would I give up water, God wants to know?

Because there is no water in Texas. They think they have water—they have no idea what water is. I grew up in Michigan, the Great Lakes state. We know from water. I moved to Texas from Pennsylvania. I had a house on the Susquehanna River and the five feet of water in my basement once to prove it. I know what rivers are. I know what lakes look like. This trickle of ankle-deep, piss-warm murk they call a “river” is what we non-Texans refer to as a “dry creek.”

I get panicky without water. I feel like I’m going to die, like one of those cartoon characters crawling across a desert. I wonder why more people aren’t stockpiling provisions. Frankly, I wonder why more people aren’t driving north on 1-35 out of this place. Perhaps I’m jaded—I moved here during a historic drought. My husband said, “Texas has droughts. This is normal.”

And then the forest fires started.

But that was three years ago. It’s rained a couple times since then. But when it rains in Texas, it rains all at once. Ten-inches-in-an-hour kind of rain. Deluges. Floods. The hard-baked soil can’t absorb it, so it washes down the streets and gullies. People get swept away. Drought, floods, oppressive heat: the weather wants to kill you in Texas—and it often succeeds.

It makes me wonder why on earth anyone settled this place, including Native Americans. You had to have been desperate. All the good land everywhere else must’ve been taken. Texas was what was left over—a scrubby wasteland the Anglos had to fight Mexico for, although I can’t imagine why. Shedding blood at the Alamo for the privilege of owning millions of acres of useless mesquite? WTF?

Like I said, desperate people. Free-thinking Germans, poor second cousins of landowners out East, eternal optimists. I guess they looked at whatever was chasing them, and figured they’d take their chances with the weather.

Who needs peonies, they probably said to themselves, when I can farm on hundreds of acres of withered grass? I’ll never have to knit another sweater as long as I live! Pretty soon their kid was saying to them, “Eat the jalapenos, Mom,” like that was a normal thing. Like pain was a flavor.

Somehow those settlers learned to love Texas. They didn’t just survive. They overcompensated with a colossal regard for the place. Texans adore Texas. Perhaps they’ve never been to other states, I thought. They have nothing to compare it to? It is, after all, a very large state. You couldn’t blame a person for driving eight hours in any direction and giving up. Damn, we’re still in Texas.

I don’t get it. Delaware doesn’t suffer this kind of conceitedness. Minnesota (certainly a state that matches Texas with weather that wants to kill you) doesn’t brag about how great it is. Minnesotans are far too self-effacing for that. Texas thinks it’s badass? I’m from Detroit. People from Detroit—we don’t talk about it. We just live with the contradictions. It’s like still loving a junkie who’s flunked his sixth round of rehab.

My husband loves Texas. He named his son after Willie Nelson. He drives a quad-cab Ford diesel pick-up truck. He wears pearl-snap Western shirts with no sense of hipster irony whatsoever. It just kills him that I don’t love Texas the way he loves Texas.

But I love him. I especially love the way he killed the five-foot long rat snake that slithered under our front door and curled up on the living room rug one day. He escorted the snake to the porch and then hacked it with a garden hoe. The snake did not improve my opinion of Texas. Nor did my mother-in-law’s nonchalance one-upping us when she related how a rat snake once fell on her from on top of the pantry. “They’re harmless,” she said, as if falling Texas rat snakes were as benign as cherry blossoms.

“People love Texas,” my husband admonishes. And judging by the Austin traffic, I know he’s right. I know I’m a freak for missing freezing rain and snow days. And I know in the grand scheme of things, the majority of people would rather have endless summer than lilac bushes. People move to Texas for the opportunity. The places I love—the woods of northern Michigan, tiny villages on the Susquehanna River, verdant green patches of New England—there’s not much opportunity there. It’s pretty, but as they say, you can’t eat the view.

My husband was once married to a woman who cheated on him for two decades before he found out and divorced her. I was briefly married to a man who was also a serial cheater with a double life. It was my second marriage. I thought I was done with love and commitment. There was a time in both of our lives where we thought these experiences would kill us. They didn’t kill us. They made us appreciate opportunity, the kind of opportunity that shows up in front of a four-hundred-pound soul singer in a purple suit crooning “Cry to Me.” That gets drunk in New Orleans and sweet-talked to Texas.

If I’m honest about Texas, I know I belong here. Because I’m a desperate sort of settler, too.

God asked, “How bad do you want it?”

I answered, “I guess I’ll take my chances with the weather.”

•••

TRACY SCHORN is a journalist and runs the blog www.chumplady.com.

Crunchy Floors

By Antonia Malchik

“Thank you for a lovely dinner, Mummy. May I please leave the table?” John, who’s six, is going through a cute super-polite phase that I know probably won’t last but enjoy anyway. The “Mummy” is a bonus I get for having an English husband and kids who are into watching Peppa Pig.

“Thank you for asking so nicely, sweetheart. Yes, you may.” John stands up. Before he runs off, he carefully brushes down his shirt, pants, and, briskly, the bottoms of his feet.

I wish I could say that this regular post-meal action is the result of sensory issues left over from his early years. John spent his first month in neonatal intensive care as a premature baby. We were warned of preemies’ extreme sensitivity to touch of any kind, and the likelihood that it could become a lifelong trait. Pretending that it’s his choice would shield me from admitting to people that I’ve trained him to be hyper-conscious of tracking crumbs or sticky bits of rice from the table to anywhere else in the house.

His sister Alex, who’s three, copies him a few minutes later but neglects both the “thank you” and a few pieces of brown rice stuck to the hem of her pants. While I take their plates to the dishwasher and begin wiping off the table, I keep track of where she’s jumping and rolling, so I’ll know where to run the vacuum cleaner later. A pointless exercise, as I know perfectly well I’ll run it everywhere.

When my children go away to college or vocational school or just away, they will have two mantras drilled into them: “Clean up after yourself” and “Food stays, always, on the table or counter.” They are in serious danger of thinking their mother vacuums for a living, and of developing nervous tics related to dropping crumbs and eating over their plates.

I try my best not to imprint them with neurotic hyper-awareness of bits of grit and cat fur on the floors, or the tiny sticky spots of a squeezed lemon sprayed onto the counter, but I’ve given up trying to change myself. When I am eighty and cranky, nobody will be allowed to eat in my house. They might not be allowed inside at all.

•••

Domesticity has been called a trap, a cage for women, a tool of the patriarchy. This can be true when imposed from outside, but if it’s a trap for me, it’s one I’ve made myself, and I don’t look at it that way. I wish I didn’t have to do all the work. I wish dust would just cease to exist, and that some invisible little machine would suck up all the crunchy bits of cereal from the floor before I ever had a chance to haul out a vacuum cleaner, that all my houseguests ate over their plates like I nag my children to. (How hard is that? Seriously?) Whatever way it gets done, though, I want the place clean.

This obsession—and let’s be honest here—stops, thankfully, at my doors. I don’t care what the lawn looks like, as long as we keep chemicals off of it, and I don’t give a crap what condition your house is in. As far as germs go—let’s just say sterility isn’t my top priority. I try to make sure nobody gets salmonella or toxoplasmosis, but my adherence to baking soda and vinegar as cleaning substances will only go so far.

This limit makes up for the fact that, when we have houseguests, I daydream about exactly what my cleaning routine will be when they leave—how I’ll strip the bed and do every bit of laundry as one enormous mass and mop up the basement and vacuum under and behind all the decrepit furniture and purge the kids’ toys while I’m at it. It relieves my allergy to knickknacks. It alleviates somewhat, I hope, the need to see No Crumb Leave the Table. But it probably doesn’t make my husband any less exasperated when I go around wiping the kitchen countertops after he’s already done so.

•••

At the end of the movie Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman and his family, and all the Jews of the region, are being evicted from the country. They are given three days to pack up their belongings and trudge out to new worlds, foreign lands: Jerusalem, Germany, America. I always feel a strong connection to this story because my father’s parents came from similar Jewish ghettoes in the Ukraine, although they were never evicted. They ended up in Soviet Leningrad, leaving my father to emigrate decades later.

As far as the religion and traditions held so tightly by Tevye’s world, I can sympathize with but not relate to them. What I do relate to is the behavior of his wife Golde. Just before they and their remaining daughters leave the village forever, Golde tells Tevye she has to “clean up, sweep the floor.”

“Sweep the floor!” says Tevye, incredulous.

“I don’t want to leave a dirty house!” she snaps.

That’s me. When the apocalypse comes, whether it’s zombie or post-oil or religious, the barbarians will be at the gate and I’ll be telling my family to go on ahead while I finish up the dishes and sweep the floor one last time.

•••

I read a tremendous number of mystery novels. Dorothy Sayers, Laurie King, Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Nevada Barr—they and their cohorts have gotten me through some very hard times and very long international flights. A few years back, I noticed a common theme slipping through them, as if it were a requirement of the genre aside from a murder, a sleuth, and adequate red herrings: a fixation on a comfortable home. Starting with Lord Peter Wimsey’s leather-bound collections of rare volumes surrounding the perfectly harmonious and elegant upper-class London bachelor pad, on through Nero Wolfe’s made-to-measure enormous desk chair and favorite globe in his Manhattan brownstone, and into the modern shared household of Deborah Crombie’s Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid, with its scrubbed pine table and grand piano and dining room furniture with “an air of Provençal,” mystery authors linger, sometimes without seeming to be aware of it, over descriptions of welcoming homes and perfect rooms. Sometimes it belongs to a side character or a main suspect—a bistro in a Quebec village (Still Life, Louise Penny), an artist’s isolated house up a mountainside (A Grave Talent, Laurie King)—but still the hallmarks of comfort work their way into outsize place in the narrative. Gleaming wood, beeswax, squashy armchairs, bookcase-lined walls, the smell of good cooking coming from the kitchen, order and routine balanced with cozy softness.

It’s as if these mystery novelists are actually writing in search of the ideal home, as if their pursuit of mystery writing is itself a controlled flailing toward safety in a world where evil things happen and control is, in the end, an illusion—writing their way through the chaos to a place that’s nurturing, comfortable, welcoming, warm, intellectually and creatively stimulating. In the ideal homes of mystery novels, there are many, many books, a proclivity for crackling fires and candlelight (but no dust). The inhabitants always know how to value quality and beauty over show or cost.

I wonder sometimes how many of these authors are in command of their own homes. How many of them have solid wood tables of heart-warming beauty, smelling of beeswax, and soft leather armchairs where they read hardbound literature; and how many long for such things while looking around at their IKEA dressers, mildewed trade paperbacks, and broken hand-me-down sofas that the cat’s peed on way too many times?

Dig back into the reading history of many modern mystery authors, and you’ll find common loves: Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, Dorothy Sayers’s novels. Books in which a home is something alive, something that holds its inhabitants, builds a symbiotic relationship with them. A place that nurtures, to be nurtured in return. The Secret Garden, where the house is dark and unwelcoming, only drives home the point: this is not what a home should be.

These houses of waxed floors and cherry-wood furniture, the smells of stews and the warmth of candles, promise a slower, more rhythmic life, a world where love is gentle and the pains are universal but where there is always a place for everything and everything is in its place.

•••

The house I grew up in had the love but not a place for everything. My mother was strict about the housework performed by her three daughters. We had age-dependent chores every Saturday: vacuuming, dusting, laundry, waxing the dining room floor, watering the plants, ironing, mowing, raking leaves, weeding the garden. As training, it was a good foundation. As cleaning it was ineffective.

For one thing, cleaning out the cats’ box (or finding where else they might have designated “toilet”) seemed to be nobody’s job at all. For another, that house was full full full of things—so many things and in such varieties that it still makes my throat clog to think of it. I dusted around stacks of New Yorker and Harper’s magazines collected over many years, scrubbed the bathtub around shampoo bottles that had gone past vintage and were into antique, made my bed with sheets covered in cat fur, polished the thousand scrolled crevices of the silver tea set that everyone loved and nobody ever used. The kitchen, in which piles of opened and unopened mail teetered next to old telephone books and days-old glasses of water, didn’t seem complete without over half the counter space being taken up by empty crock pots inherited from the wheat ranch my mother had grown up on, decorative bowls of sugar caked with coffee drips, antique tobacco tins, and a rack holding old, still pungent, spices (when someone tells you that you have to replace your cinnamon every year, don’t believe them). It’s impossible to truly clean a place with three kids and rambling cats and several families’ worth of stacked and scattered possessions.

We visited my mother last summer, and had an embarrassing couple of days where John would wander around her house saying things like, “You know Grandma, if you put some of these things away people might not trip over them,” or “Grandma, if we organized all of this, you would have more places to relax.” He tried to be as polite as possible, while I kept hissing at him to zip it. I took away treats and his Angry Birds playtime but still he couldn’t stop himself. Finally he looked at me, all wide-eyed and determined, and said, “But, Mummy, it’s good to tell the truth.” I tried to explain to him that everyone likes their home kept in different ways and that it wasn’t polite to criticize it and could even hurt someone’s feelings, but clearly this was one case where actions triumphed over words. My cleaning and de-cluttering routine had come a long way from my childhood, sometimes neared extreme (I do know that some of my vacuuming habits could qualify as a problem), and had obviously worn a deep track for at least one of my children. I was relieved that a habit of tidiness was becoming second nature for him, but I wasn’t sure if I should be ashamed of that relief.

My mother says that the reason I don’t like all the stuff in her house, what I call clutter and she calls life, is because I don’t know the stories behind it. That’s not always true. I recognize scrap paper where someone wrote down a phone number twenty-three years ago, and the torn shrink-wrap, which has been torn as long as I can remember, surrounding a vinyl album of loon calls, which I know she values because it was a gift from her father. I know the enameled tin mugs from Finland, the jam-making equipment from the Eastern Montana homestead, the wicker armchair where I used to rock my baby sister. I know the stories of a thousand things. And I do understand what she means. It’s just that I prefer my stories, instead of collecting dust as physical manifestations, typed up and filed away where they belong.

•••

There’s a passage in Natalie Goldberg’s classic book on writing, Writing Down the Bones, where she takes a swing at writers with tidy studios. Disorder, she says, shows a fertile mind, “an indication of … someone that is actively creating.” Essentially, in a clean desk, she knows she’s looking at a writer who’s not working.

That passage is the reason I don’t have a copy of Writing Down the Bones in my house.

I have tried to “let things go,” “relax,” and “don’t worry about it,” as so many well-meaning people have advised. Most of them seem to think that I keep my house tidy because I want to impress them. (These are the people, along with those who walk around crunching chips without a plate, who don’t get invited over for dinner again.)

I’ve set up personal boundaries for my cleaning habits (I never clean windows, for example, and as a result never think about how dirty they might be) because otherwise I truly would get nothing else done. But aside from that, I don’t seem to have an in-between toggle. I’ve tried just keeping the dishes washed and the floor basically swept. But I’m aware, nevertheless, of the coffee grounds that migrated to the back of the counter, of the cats’ additions after rolling in a spot of sunshine on a rug, of the bits of salt left on the stove after my husband did the post-dinner clean-up, of the rice my daughter has tracked into the TV room, where she’s sitting on the floor playing “picnic” with her stuffed dogs. I’m conscious of all of it, and if I don’t take care of it I literally cannot work. A “why bother” washes over everything I’m supposed to do—pack in the laundry, brush the kids’ teeth, sit at my desk and earn a living as a copy editor, send a check to the preschool, order heating oil, call my mother, much less work on my novel or memoir or tackle a new essay. I either escape to a coffee shop, where it’s someone else’s job to clean up and therefore I don’t care, or huddle in a few maintained outposts in my home—the bed, my desk, the ironing board—and binge-watch The Big Bang Theory.

My husband asked me once why I felt such a need to wipe down the kitchen counters and sweep the floor before clocking out for the night. I told him about the coffee grounds, the sticky spots, the grains of salt. “Knowing those things are there is like having another person tramping around in my head,” I said. They’re making noise and disrupting thoughts and generally being a nuisance. It’s incredibly uncomfortable.

I can take an obscene amount of messiness in my own psyche, in my relationships, in my work. But only if the floors are clean, the toys are put away, the kitchen has been wiped down and, preferably, the cats are outside.

•••

A number of pictures are tacked on the wall above my desk: a watercolor of a bare tree in a cold Russian forest, a postcard of a painting of Judi Dench, a photo of moonrise over Glacier National Park, which keeps my homesickness at bay.

One is a belated birthday card that my mom sent me almost twenty years ago. The painting on the front, Deborah DeWit Marchant’s The Artisans’ Cafe, depicts a girl looking somewhat as I might have then, down to a long brown French braid and sloppy afterthought clothing, with an empty pie plate in front of her, a full cup of coffee, and an open hardback book lying flat on the table. Her cheek is propped in her hand and she is clearly engrossed in whatever she is reading.

Articulating my feelings about this picture is difficult. I look at it and I see a moment when all the chores have been done, when nobody needs my attention, when all the crumbs are only specks of potential energy in a bag of bread. When the only part of the world that I have real influence over is at rest, if only for a few hours.

I know perfectly well that this kind of peace is unattainable through control over my physical surroundings. My food-free floors will not save the planet or hedge against my children’s future health and safety, or even negate the need for ongoing chores and errands.

But this is the only place I have, my only home. Critics can go on all they want about the new domesticity and how women still need to be freed from the hearth. But there is so much in the world I have no control over. I do not know if my son will still be asking politely to leave the table in a year’s time, or if my daughter will get over her obsession with dogs before she gets old enough that I feel obligated to get her a puppy. I do not know if my car will survive another six months, if another Sandy-like hurricane will trap us in a powerless house this fall, if the cats will ever, ever, stop peeing on the furniture.

I don’t know if the planet will survive climate change, if women’s rights will have to be fought for all over again, if my father’s homeland will use its foothold in Crimea to drag Ukraine and the wider world into full-scale war, if wildfires will make the air of my Montana hometown unbreathable this summer, if a friend will die of cancer next year.

I spend an enormous amount of time in my home. The only thing I can do, at this moment, is ensure that it feels like a place I want to be.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK’s writing has appeared most recently in Creative Nonfiction, The Jabberwock Review, and ParentMap. She’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People. She recently finished My Russian Condition, a book about her lifelong relationship with Russia, and is working on Against the Grain, a memoir about motherhood, woodworking, and striving for the lost competence of her pioneer ancestors. She can be reached through www.antoniamalchik.com.

Real Estate

house and sky — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Zsofi McMullin

For days after we sold our house, I felt uneasy. It felt like the house was still somehow attached to me like a phantom limb—heavy and itchy and restless—and I had to remind myself constantly that it was none of my concern anymore. I didn’t have to worry about shoveling the snow in the driveway or fixing the leaky window in the dining room, and I no longer had to grumble about the cold, creaky wooden floors.

We bought our house eight years ago, just weeks before the housing market collapsed. I don’t think it was love at first sight, but more like comfort at first sight. We could see ourselves living there, hidden among the trees of our wild backyard. We could imagine our furniture in the living room, our pots in the kitchen, our bed upstairs, a crib in the second bedroom. Our small family—not yet in existence—would fit in this small house neatly, comfortably.

Right before we signed the papers to buy the house, we ran into its owner, a middle-aged woman who inherited it from her mother. She lived there with a huge, white dog whose fur we’d keep finding in the most unusual places even years later. “This place really needs a young family,” she told us, waving towards the gray house behind her. I had never owned a house, but I knew what she meant. I knew that this was the place where it was all going to happen—where we would become a family, where we would settle down and be happy.

And it was mostly true. We were mostly happy, mostly settled. We battled with the wild raspberry bushes in the yard, with the ice leaking through the old roof, the paint chipping off the shingles. But the place was ours and I was surprised by how much that mattered to me and comforted me. I felt anchored, secure.

Then we decided to move to another state for a new job. The house was on the market for what seemed like decades, various strangers walking through our rooms critiquing everything from the ceilings, to the size of the kitchen, to its location. I felt insulted and protective of our little nest but also a bit resentful of its stubbornness. Why couldn’t it just let us go? Yet when we finally received an offer on the day the moving truck arrived to pack up our boxes, I felt no relief, no joy. The financial burden was lifted, the responsibility gone, the worry relieved.

Our tether gone, we were free to go. And yet…

I walked through the empty rooms one last time the day of the closing. I only cried when I got to my little boy’s room where he and I spent so much time awake in the middle of the night. I was taking the little boy with me obviously—he was sitting in the car outside—but I felt like a part of me was left behind among the soft yellow walls and the baby blue closet, and the view of the yard.

•••

I grew up in a large, cold, crumbling apartment in the center of Budapest. At one point my uncle, his wife, and their new baby lived with me, my brother, my parents, and my grandfather. There was nothing unusual about this—a lot of my friends lived with their extended families. Once my uncle and his family moved out, my brother and I no longer had to share the tiniest bedroom and my parents did not have to use the living room as their bedroom. These changes felt like huge luxuries, and my brother and I reveled in our new furniture in our bigger—still shared—bedroom. Our desks faced each other and we passed notes and giggled as we did our homework each evening.

My mother grew up in this apartment, rented from the local government. At one point each floor had just one apartment that was later chopped up into three. We lived on the third floor, in one of the larger places. The rooms had tall ceilings and windows and big, double doors. The bathroom was heated only by a gas heater on the wall, so whoever was the unlucky first person in the bathroom in the morning had to turn it on and wait for the temperature to become bearable for a shower. The kitchen was heated only by the oven so we always had to dress in layers for meals in the winter.

During the political changes in Hungary in the 1990s, our apartment building became sort of a no-man’s-land. The government no longer cared for it, but the occupants didn’t own their apartments yet, so maintenance was non-existent and the building declined slowly, paint chip by paint chip. I remember giving this explanation to many visitors before they figured out a polite way to ask about the state of hallways, the elevator, the courtyard.

My parents purchased our apartment after my grandfather’s death. That was the first time that my family owned real estate. Now at least the crumbling walls belonged to us.

When my parents moved to the U.S. a few years later, they first rented out the apartment then put it up for sale. It’s still on the market, along with dozens of similar apartments on our street. I think about it often—I think about buying it, renovating it, living there in some other life, finding comfort in the familiar neighborhood. But the place is a burden on my parents right now, and I wish for them to be rid of it. I wish I could be certain that selling it will feel like a relief—a lifetime of history and stuff packed up, thrown out, passed on to a stranger who can start there anew.

•••

“Is there anything you want out of your grandmother’s apartment?” my father asked a few months ago as he was distributing her belongings among his cousins and other relatives. She died the year before and, by the time I arrived to Hungary for her funeral and saw her apartment for the first time after her death, her clothes were already donated, including what I wanted the most: her red, flowery scarf and her big fur winter hat.

It seemed silly at the time to make a fuss about this—and it still does because I know that what I truly, really want can’t be mine: the smell of Wiener Schnitzel wafting from her apartment into the hallway on Sundays; the scent of freshly ironed linens as she opened a cabinet to pick a tablecloth for lunch; the tap-tapping of her slippers as she walked back and forth to the kitchen down a long, skinny hallway; the clinking of her china on the table; the gurgling of her ancient coffee pot; the cold air that swooshed into the apartment when she opened the balcony door to retrieve the fruit salad that she kept cold out there.

I couldn’t pack up any of these things.

Her apartment in Budapest sold almost the same day as my house in Maine. My parents traveled there to sign the closing papers, and I watched them unpack their suitcases just a few days later when they returned to Maine to their small, rental condo: Ten bottles of homemade jam, a metal key hook, a couple of framed drawings, books, a ceramic trivet, a decorative plate that used to hang in the kitchen.

•••

Lately I think a lot about these three pieces of real estate and about how they came, went, and yet somehow always stayed in my life. Are the walls they held around me just that? Does the weight of owning these walls matter? Do they just hold our stuff, or are they places where our life collects, that place where babies come home from the hospital, where dinner is cooked, where parties are held, where nothing or everything happens? Is there freedom to be had by not being attached to these structures, or does their absence weigh heavier?

I like our new—rented—apartment. It’s modern and much bigger than our little house was. Groundkeepers shovel the snow, salt the driveway, fix clogged pipes. Our furniture gets lost in the big rooms and under the tall ceilings. It’s easy to live here, detached from history, from responsibility, from what comes next.

But I miss the weight, the burden tying me firmly to one place to call home.

•••

ZSOFI MCMULLIN is a recent transplant to Connecticut. She works in publishing and blogs at www.zsofiwrites.com.

Under the Bed and Dreaming at Hillside House

reader — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jennifer James

About thirteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Miss Elizabeth, was moved to an assisted care facility. Initially, it seemed surprisingly nifty. There were big screen televisions, prepared meals, and lots of friendly staff members. Except for the occasional funky smell and confused outburst, it felt a lot like a geriatric college dormitory setting. This was a happy surprise—I had anticipated grungy green walls, stained linoleum floors, and rows of abandoned bodies anchored to wheelchairs. Instead, I walked into an open, airy atrium, decorated with large, luxurious Boston ferns and a spacious bird cage, home to a few brightly colored finches. Two cheerful ladies sporting tight perms and meticulously coordinated track suits greeted me as I stopped to look more closely at the finches. I was not crippled by sadness, walking into this place: a genuine blessing under the circumstances.

All kinds of folks landed at Hillside House, as I’ll call the facility. Elizabeth had been diagnosed with some nasty “female” (it was, in fact, uterine) cancer six months earlier. She had most likely been ill for some time before the cancer had been detected, but she had ignored some symptoms, assisted by well-intentioned physicians along the way. By the time her illness was acknowledged and diagnosed, it was statistically unlikely that Elizabeth would recover. Her treatment plan was labeled “palliative,” designed to give maximum comfort and healing without subjecting her to rigorous procedures and quasi-lethal medications. Reluctantly, the family agreed that she could no longer live independently and Hillside House seemed the least-terrible option available. Which didn’t make it any less terrible for Elizabeth.

•••

When I first met Elizabeth, she was in her late fifties and I was engaged to her grandson, Ed. Ed and I had met in college, fallen quickly and completely in love, and caused our parents all kinds of consternation as a result. Especially Ed’s parents. My parents were divorced and disorganized and fairly unconcerned with societal expectations and judgments. Sure, they hoped Ed was not secretly a serial killer with a collection of severed Barbie doll heads under his bed, but he seemed respectable enough, with his gentle Southern accent and aspirations to become a high school English teacher. On the scale of crazy in our family, he was hardly a blip on the screen.

Ed had grown up in a small, rural community, where your life was fodder for community review sessions, courtesy of your friends, neighbors, and your very own respectable family members. What they knew was this: I had not been raised in Virginia, my (ahem…divorced) parents were both Yankees, and I had been baptized in the Catholic (aka “Papist”) church. I could have come with more familiar credentials, and certainly, a more civilized bloodline.

Still, Ed seemed to like me fine, and that was good enough for Elizabeth: she fed me right along with the rest of the family. Ed grew up three miles down the road from his grandparents and spent many happy days eating freshly fried chicken and as many ice cream sandwiches as he could manage at their kitchen table. Elizabeth didn’t talk about how she felt, or how you felt, or what was wrong with the world today; she was busy putting more potatoes on your plate and checking to see if you needed more chicken. She was a pragmatist, by necessity—dreamers in her time didn’t have a great survival rate. After all, there was too much work to do: there were parents, and grandparents, and if you were very, very lucky, children, to care for. Elizabeth did what was expected of her: she tucked her own dreams away and nurtured those of her children.

And Elizabeth loved children. She taught them handwriting and prayers and how to slaughter a chicken neatly. She fried piles and piles of salt fish and potatoes at four-thirty a.m. on winter mornings so “the boys” (she’d had two, three counting her husband) would have a good breakfast before they set out hunting. Both of her sons married spirited women who may have wanted their husbands home on chilly winter mornings, and as the years passed, Elizabeth found herself preparing fewer and fewer early-morning fish feasts.

When I came to the family, Elizabeth and I developed a heartfelt, if timid, affection for one another. We didn’t really speak one another’s language, but eventually I learned to shift my conversation to weather predictions and local news, and she learned that I was not judging her on the tenderness of her chicken or the tartness of her fig preserves. We became allies in the muddy world of multi-generational family allegiances, and by the time Elizabeth became a resident of Hillside House, she was much more like my own grandmother than any kind of in-law.

About three months before Elizabeth got sick enough for anyone to notice, I learned I was pregnant with my first child. This was a considerable relief to everyone involved. Initially, our families feared that our lickety-split trip to the altar indicated that a “six month” baby was on the way. After a year, there was no baby. Several years passed, in fact, with no baby, and family members began to wonder whether we were incapable of reproducing or just too selfish. Ed and I kind of wondered ourselves, so when we learned a wee one was on the way, we leaned into the future with happy resignation and notified our parents and grandparents accordingly. The ensuing excitement was tinged with achy sorrow as Elizabeth’s illness unfolded parallel to my pregnancy.

•••

So there we were: Elizabeth, wondering how she’d ended up in this silly establishment full of old people and food without nearly enough seasoning, and me, wondering kind of the same thing.

One afternoon, as we sat in a sunny spot on the back terrace, a tiny, hunched-over woman who I’ll call Miss Emily shuffled by. As she went back in, she threw us an accusing look, as if we’d just pelted her car with raw eggs or something like that.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Are we sitting at her table?”

Elizabeth snorted, coughing a little in the process. “Aw, don’t worry about her. She’s always on a tear.”

“Why?”

“I don’t rightly know, honey. She won’t talk to anybody. She just rushes around here like somebody’s after her.” Elizabeth sipped her chamomile tea. “It sure is aggravating, I’ll tell you that.”

I saw her point.

•••

A few weeks later, Hillside House had become much more familiar to me. It felt less like a college dormitory, and more like the set for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At first, everything had seemed pretty normal. Which I guess it was, since aging and death are normal realities. Still, it’s outside the norm to find a whole building purposed for housing folks in this chapter of life, and there was a certain sensibility that colored the residents and their visitors accordingly.

For example, we’d gotten used to a woman I’ll call Miss Agnes, who sat on the loveseat in the corner, singing, “I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready for my ice cream.” Sometimes she got a little pissed and sang louder, in a growly tenor: “I’m READY. READY. READY FOR ICE CREAM.” And so on. The nursing assistants spoke to Miss Agnes gently, and would sometimes guide her to the next activity or simply let her chant the day away, dreaming of ice cream.

One afternoon, Miss Emily skittered by the periphery of the room we were sitting in, and I asked Elizabeth if she had heard anything that might account for Miss Emily’s strange behavior

“Oh, honey,” Elizabeth sighed. “Miss Emily is nuttier than one of Grandma Sutton’s date bars.” That much I knew.

This was her story:

Miss Emily was a book thief. Since her first day at Hillside House, she’d been collecting printed materials. She started with a stash of brochures at the front desk and soon moved on to the large print Reader’s Digest magazines. Because she only took a few at a time, nobody noticed at first. God knows, no one ever saw the woman sitting, much less settled in with a good book. Two or three weeks into her residency, however, Miss Emily’s secret was uncovered. The staff tried to keep the old lady relatively happy, while quietly culling her print collection from time to time.

I was impressed. I wasn’t sure I’d be innovative enough to snatch reading materials like that.

Elizabeth let out a very soft harrumph and said, “Well, Jenny, I don’t know what in the world that crazy old woman is thinking. What is she going to do with all those foolish books anyway?” I said nothing in response, but thought I knew exactly what “that crazy old woman” was thinking. Exactly. And I tried not to hold it against Elizabeth.

•••

Books are not a nicety for me; they’re a necessity. Books have always been my friends. There were long periods of time in my childhood when I was surrounded by lots of unhappy adults and books and not much else. The books made excellent allies, even the duller ones. Also, since the adults involved were pretty busy being miserable, they didn’t have too much energy to squander policing my reading selections. I learned a lot about sex (a few choice scenes from Peter Benchley and Ken Follett) and frontier living (Laura Ingalls Wilder) and deeply disturbed loners (Edgar Allen Poe) at a tender age.

As I grew older, and mercifully, gained access to a broader selection of books, I glommed onto young adult fiction. At a certain point in time, I probably could have recited full chapters of Judy Blume books from memory. I loved a book called The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger. I am still moved to tears by Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. The clueless (if loving and well-intentioned) adults in my life had very few helpful pointers for a chunky teen with poor social skills. If Judy Blume couldn’t teach me how to talk to boys, who could? Who would?

In the end, if you’re a reader, it doesn’t seem to matter so very much what you read. There is magic in seeing the world from another point of view, regardless of whose it is. And yet, there are some people who never quite get the magic. Elizabeth was one of those people. She read when obligated, but reading held no special pleasure for her. Maybe it correlates with the “no dreaming” environment she survived; her life had been shoved into external experience. Reading was an activity only the idle could afford, and she was too busy making sure that everyone was equipped with clean undies to read some trifling book. And hell, who really knows what batty Miss Emily was up to? Maybe she was just an elderly hoarder. She never said.

I like to think she read everything she took, though. Especially the Reader’s Digest. When it’s me, sitting in the determinedly cheerful atrium of Hillside House or Young at Heart, or wherever I end up in my final days, I hope I’ll have books to read, and I hope they’ll be my books, and not crappy little fliers and magazines stashed around the assisted care facility. I can see the fun in skittering around and snatching things too, though. It doesn’t matter if you call it a nursing home or an “assisted care facility” or the geezer house. What it means is, you can’t live by yourself anymore. Because you’re too old or too sick. And the next benchmark is not a new car or Hawaiian vacation. Even the crazy lady singing for ice cream had to know that. So you might as well enjoy the ice cream and read everything you can.

•••

I never did talk to Miss Emily, and Elizabeth lived for ten whole days after our baby was born. On the way home from the hospital, we stopped by Hillside House to introduce our new boy to Elizabeth. It was quite an event. Elizabeth was very sick by then, and spent her days drifting in and out of awareness.

Ed and I walked into the familiar atrium with the baby, hope and despair in equal measure bubbling around in our hearts. The old ladies gathered around to coo at the little one and to give us hugs. I was sobbing before we even got to Elizabeth’s room. The rush of raw joy and sadness coexisting made everything seem so terribly fragile.

We walked into her room. One of her sons sat beside her bed, holding her hand and quietly weeping. My husband and I sat down on the other side of the bed and she shifted her head slightly so she could see us.

“Oh, Jenny,” she said softly. “He’s just darlin’.” Then she managed a wink and a tiny chuckle. “Little boys are the best, you know.”

She was too weak to actually take the baby in her arms for long, but I put his tiny body down in the crook of her arm and he stayed like that for a minute or two. Then the spell broke and the baby cried and we had to leave.

We saw her one more time after that and the baby cried from the first moment we walked in. Finally, someone took the baby into another room, and Elizabeth took my hand.

“Jenny. Jenny, do you think I’m dying? Do you?”

In general, I like to think I’m okay being near very ill people. I think it’s because I am gifted in the finest nuances of denial and can carry on a quasi-normal conversation with the dying. I can discuss the weather, their medication, other family members, etc., etc. The problem is, I don’t want to scare the dying person. If they don’t know they’re dying, I don’t want to be the one to break the news.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I think that’s between you and God, Elizabeth. I don’t know. But either way, it’ll be okay.”

Elizabeth coughed slightly and squeezed my hand. “I expect you’re right, Jenny. I expect you’re right.”

Just then, my husband walked in and reached for Elizabeth’s hand, resting his on top of mine. “Grandma, we’re going to have a little boy running around our hill again.” My chest caved in. She would never see our little boy run down the lovely, green hill that lay behind our house. It was the same hill she’d run down as a tiny girl, and that her children, and her grandchildren had called home. I thought I might smack my husband in the gut for reminding her of what would never be.

Of course, Ed was just as frightened as Elizabeth was, probably more so. And all he could imagine was how much she’d enjoy feeding another little blonde boy with an enormous appetite and smiling eyes. I think he was so happy and proud to have our little dumpling of a person to show his grandma that for a moment, he forgot that the story would go unfinished for her.

Elizabeth smiled again, the perfect grandma, wanting to comfort one of her boys one last time.

“Oh, Eddie,” she said softly. “I’ll dream of it.”

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her husband and three children in rural Virginia. After graduating from William and Mary in 1989, Jennifer moved to Gloucester County, where she found work as a teacher’s assistant and veterinary receptionist until 2000, when her first child was born. After an approximate decade of diapers and interrupted sleep patterns, Jennifer started writing with purpose in 2010 and has been at it since. A good story is her favorite thing.