Tag Archives: childhood

Hometown

Posted on by Standard 20
Stamford Train Station: Photo by Noelle

Stamford Train Station: Photo by Noelle

I pass through her shadow much like passing through a lake spring. I catch a glimpse of her in baggy shirt and jeans by the State theater, but it’s only a ghost that passes into the shade of an elm. I felt her pulling my steps into the same sixteen year old’s rhythm on Washington Blvd and I forced myself to pick up the pace. She haunted me at the corner of Summer and Broad where the old Caldor’s Department store used to be. Just thinking about that old five and dime throws my thinking back forty years. I shiver as the closed in feeling of a girl’s bathroom swims into view. Children laughing and pulling at my clothes as they shove me into the stall door. I dressed in hand-me downs and cheap clothing that all the kids knew where it had been bought. I stop walking and let her ghost drift past as I turn my face into the sun on Atlantic.

Caldors marketing stock photo circa 1970

Caldors marketing stock photo circa 1970

I look in boutique windows that I would have never looked in as a child and her ten year old shadow hovers at my hip. We were too poor to buy clothes in such places. Now I dally vaguely window shopping, I suspect because I can, but I need nothing. As I walk past the first McDonald’s in our town I remember my mother bringing home fries once when I was sick. Probably sounds like a curious luxury to a world gone wild on fast food, but in the 70’s it was a big deal. I had strep throat for the umpteenth time with fevers that got as high as 105. She packed me once in ice to bring the fever down and would lay with me running her fingers through my sweaty hair until I’d fall asleep. I often slept on the floor with the fans because it was the only cool place to be in the summer. Even now I remember how unbearably hot I felt and the gallons of ginger ale I drank. As the scent of the fryers comes to me on the street I remember the taste of the salted fries she brought home. She sat with me by the sliding glass doors where a breeze came in and we shared them. It makes me weep to think about it. The ten year old shadow takes my hand and we keep walking.

This is my hometown and yet I could not feel any less at home. Walking along is an immersion in a time capsule. I no longer run from my previous selves, but I feel their weight here. I feel the lack of self-worth and fear she had. So much confusion of how to act or how to be. Loneliness. Isolation. I am a thousand light years from here and yet I find I want to find her on the next street. Take her shopping. Hear her laugh and see that lightning smile. Tell her, as Dr Seuss told us all, “Oh the places you will go, my love. Oh the places  you will go.”

Stamford Train Station: Photo by Noelle

Stamford Train Station: Photo by Noelle

 

By the Lake

Posted on by Standard 19

From adirondackalmanack.com

From adirondackalmanack.com


The crickets were so loud, I was certain, the boogie man could be right upon me before I’d know it. Still, the warmth and brightness of the campfire and my brother close by, made it hard to worry. I couldn’t camp out with all the other kids by the lake unless one of my older brother’s was with me. Mark and Eric were too much older and Chad’s friends too different, my brother Adam, too young, so usually it was my brother Cort. My mother never cut the grass, much to our neighbor’s dismay, so our lawn was the best on the lake to camp on. A rural vibe and more cushion for our beds. Even as I write this, I can smell the tallgrass, hyssop and selfheal that grew there. If I focus but a little, the head of a buttercup can be felt at the tip of my finger.

By nightfall, though, it was all warm glow and the smell of roasting marshmallows. I hardly remember what we spoke about all those summer nights. Yes, some ghost stories, but mostly we just goofed off. We had an old transister radio and in the early 70’s Three Dog Night’s, Shambala was hugely popular. I’m pretty sure I didn’t sing any better then, than now, but I certainly sang with heart. You could see the Milky Way then, as the world hadn’t turned on all its lights. I remember the first time I saw a satellite crossing the midnight sky. I didn’t know what it was and for hours we talked about space aliens and invasions. Someone kept singing the theme song to the Jetsons.

Our house was up on a hill and a wood separated it from the lake. My mother would hoot down to us to check in on how we were doing. Again, much to the chagrin of our neighbors who preferred well-manicured lawns and quiet, cordial discussion, sans hooting. She grew up on a farm. It was as natural to her as breathing and we could be a half mile off and know that sound. It was a comforting sound that brought a smile to your face. She never hooted like that out of anger. She only called this way when she was looking for you out of love.

I was often the only girl by the fire, thus the reason for my brother’s chaperone. The boys were honorable though. When I had to go to the bathroom they all kept their distance. They knew I was afraid of the dark and wouldn’t wonder far at all into the wood. I don’t remember wearing bug repellent, and yet, even by the lake I don’t remember being bit to death by mosquitos. Or it’s a testament to how easily we actually do forget momentary pain. Or maybe it was all the bats that flew throughout the night above our heads or the big sunnies, leaping into the air to catch them from the lake. I’m sure the frogs that sang to each other played their part.

When I feel empty or alone I need only travel a short distance in my mind to realize I am neither. I am so full of life and bounty it is a wonder I have any more room for anything new. Life inside me teems with children catching fireflies, boys wrestling down the side of a hill, the smell of fresh lake fish roasting in a pit, or a comic book shared by firelight. A billion lights could be turned on across the planet and still the iridescent beauty of a starry night lives on in me. I have lost nothing. I am a hoarder of beauty and innocence.

Dedicated to my friend, John Wilder, whose photograph of his east Texas cabin triggered a thousand memories of life within me. Thank you, my friend, for the unintended sojourn.

Cliff Face

Posted on by Standard 10
Red rock erosion: Photo by Noelle

Red rock erosion: Photo by Noelle

I lost the trail. It wound into boulders and the further I hiked the more mesermerized by the beauty I became. Cliff anemones and blue flax peaking out along the trail and little critters dodging under boulders. Butterflies, in yellow and lavender, and red elderberry growing between stone can keep the eye moving, forgetting where you are. I turned back to head home and, at first, thought I was taking the right route back. Funny, but all boulders, after a time, start to look the same. I realized, too late, I should’ve paid closer attention. The sun was setting and I knew this was not a place to be crawling around in the dark. Fear began to coil and rattle its tail in my belly. I hadn’t noticed the sweating so much before, but now I felt drenched. If the stone paths didn’t dead end into a cliff, the shrub was enough of a barrier to cry.

I could see where I needed to go. My sense of direction solid. I climbed higher, though that gave me more apprehension, but I needed to see if there was even the vaguest egress down. There was. The cliff face, which was less than ninety, but more than a sixty degree slide. Mostly rock face, but many shale slides along the way would have to be crossed.

Five. Yes, that’s likely it. Five was the last time I crawled, butt first, down anything. When you are five, you don’t think of consequences at all and you certainly don’t concern yourself with injuries. You fall down, you get back up. It’s a simple equation when you are that young and scars and scabs are badges of glory. At fifty-one, I can think of a lot of consequences. A staggering number, actually. Had the sun not begun to stroke the mountain ridge her loving goodnight, I’d have likely turned back to scrabble the boulders again. But time was not on my side, and so, butt down, I began to crawl.

Your body holds five, like it holds fifty. It never forgets any of the versions you have been. So even as my mind was racing on what could go wrong, within a few minutes, my body was crawling down that cliff like a school kid. The body, once it’s done something, never forgets it, much like a dog never forgets a sent. It’s catalogued somewhere. As soon as I started to move, the file was opened, muscle groups coordinated and down I went. I slid, fell and got a bit scruffed up, but each step brought increasing confidence and ease. The cuts and bruises I wish I could say I took like a five year old. I whined a bit… or maybe a lot. Still, for those fifteen minutes or so, I was five and fifty. In that position a thousand other hillsides crossed my mind I had descended in my youth. The river hill, at the bogwalk, at the Bartlett Arboretum. Scaling the backfence at the Stamford Museum. The boulders that ran along the ridge by my childhood home. Crawling under the fence at Laurel Resevoir. I hadn’t realized it till halfway down the cliff face, but I’ve dodged a lot of fences.

That’s the beauty of the body. It holds memories. Some bad, but a lot of them good. When you trust it, it knows what to do and it can show you, in images, that you have done it before. When you have no faith and nothing but fear, the body can show you, it remembers your courage.

Patience and Crawdaddies

Posted on by Standard Reply
Stained glass at Living Arts Center in Denver

Stained glass at Living Arts Center in Denver: Photography by Noelle

As a child I was quite the tomboy, catching bull frogs in the lake behind my house or craw daddies in the creek. I still listen to frogs on summer nights to determine where they are and to what mate they call. I’m especially fond of finding crawfish in the streams that I hike. Spring has been slow to come to Colorado and the creek is running fast, deep, ice cold and swollen with snow melt. Not very hospitable for a crawfish. Still, I look. Today, I was about to turn away after quite some time standing, when it’s tail caught my eye as it scurried across the creek bed beneath a rock. Life! Spring is here!

I meditate so that I may cultivate the quiet, the patience, the awareness and the love for this moment. Even the long waiting part. Even if there’d been no crustacean. Even with the red wing blackbirds that squawk like old Bolsheviks into my ear from the thicket for my intrusion. May you live a long life my mud-digging friend. You lit up my heart tonight.