- Four Months After the Move
What can I say to cheer you up? We have lake-effect snow and there’s a fence to climb and woods to explore and a neighborhood cat named Boson who comes around to rub against our ankles. You tell me none of this compares to Connecticut. One night, you and your brother stay up making a list of everything you’ve left behind. For example: driving down Craigmoor Road with the windows down, on your way to Big Y, while Dad rambles on about something and a breeze blows through the van. “You know this is worse for us than it is for you,” you tell me, and you do the math to prove it. You’ve spent nearly two-thirds of your life in Connecticut, and for your brother it’s over four-fifths, while I lived there only about a fifth of mine. OK, but what about the sky? Hear me out. Recently, when the sixty-year-old alumnae were on campus, I overheard two of them talking. “I miss the Indiana sky,” one of them said, looking at the empty expanse over the Student Center, and the other echoed, “Oh, the Indiana sky!” When I looked up, the sky was cold and empty and nothing to remark on, but suddenly it seemed tinged with significance. Yes, it’s dark and cold, and it will only get darker and colder before we come out the other side of winter. And yes, through this whole winter we will miss Connecticut—our life there now tinged with hindsight, the heavy nostalgia filter rendering it poignant and Instagram-ready. I have a list, too. Every time I walk our old haunts in my mind—the frog pond, the redwing blackbird thicket, the big tree—I become lost in grief for the place we left behind, the people we were. But the Indiana sky. Let’s love it, even if it’s the only thing we love this first winter. It’s a start.
- Glaciation
Sunk into the plush seats of a chartered bus, we listened to Garry the naturalist make the flat Northern Indiana landscape come alive: glaciers grinding and slithering, relentless in their trudge from Canada; water brimming everywhere, today’s trickle of creek once a mile wide; unimaginable drifts of sand, an entire steep neighborhood of treacherous streets erected atop a stranded dune; the Canadian rocks that sailed here on the swells and were marooned, still churning up in people’s yards; the astonished well drillers who sometimes hit bedrock a dozen feet down, but other times have to drill hundreds of feet; the terminal moraines and kettle lakes that buckle and pock the land. Picture an English muffin, Garry told us. That’s the bedrock, with its nooks and crannies. Now picture slathering it with peanut butter, filling in those pockets, smoothing it all out. The peanut butter is what the glacier did. In other words: Secret ancient hills slumber beneath our feet. We spent two hours on that bus with Garry, training our eyes to see a lost world. Living amidst the debris of a glacier that shot its fingers down from Canada, we suddenly understood so much—for example, why, when we dug a hole in our backyard to plant a tree, we found vast amounts of sand. In astonishment, we excavated shovelful after shovelful, just a couple of inches below the surface of unassuming scraggly lawn. Even though we live at least forty miles from the shore of Lake Michigan—our nearest source of sand—we found ourselves suddenly at the beach.
- Contents
During our last move, I sifted through a box I had not touched in a decade, the layers geologic strata, going deeper into the past the farther down I went—the kids’ old drawings and birthday cards, notes addressed to Mom and Mommy and then MOMY, growth charts, a set of hospital identification bands, one with my name, the other labeled Baby Boy, then, further down, another set, my own and Baby Girl. I kept excavating, into my pre-motherhood life, finding old essays and certificates of long-forgotten achievements, until at the bottom, I came upon what looked like more hospital bracelets, which puzzled me, but when I read the names on them, Nellie Stevens Holly, Fat Albert Blue Spruce, Acer Saccharum, I recognized them: tags from the trees I planted twenty years and six houses and four states ago. The box, curated by accident, contained the records of creatures I’ve nurtured in the world. Google Maps Street View took me to my old Virginia neighborhood to see again my three trees, and I was reassured that they were thriving, filling the front yard, shading the blank brick face of the house, the sugar maple not yet ready to tap—my dream—but getting there. All of them have outgrown their nursery bracelets, just as the kids have. The bands that once encircled their minuscule ankles might fit around their thumbs now. I told them about all this, but they were unamazed. They only said, “Of course, Mom. You’ve always loved trees.” And the proof is already in our new backyard, where my newest progeny—a white oak and a catalpa, dug up and moved from Connecticut—wait for spring to unfurl their tender leaves.
Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of a collection of essays, Xylotheque (University of New Mexico Press), and a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Terrain, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Blue Mesa Review, The Fourth River, Glimmer Train, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere.