It’s garage sale season in my suburban hometown. Hastily-sharpied arrows litter each street corner; their flimsy paper signs torn at the corners and stained with dirt. People are clearing out stale winter energy and emerging into a spring, flourished. Launching into the future with sentimental practicality.
It seems like these people have lived in the same space for many lives. In the same houses, marriages, and families. Their brutal battles for progress go mostly unnoticed in the hazy humidity of day-to-day life.
I wonder how many small changes can be made before a life, a soul, is no longer recognizable. How long before the facade of consistancy gives way to minute unexpectedness? And then for the inevitable total annihilation that follows?
I walk into my local Kroger and my feet remember where the Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip ice cream is before I do. My favorite breakfast place is now across the street from where it sat for decades.
I hike the local forest reserve. Invasive honeysuckle has been brutally (lovingly?) exterminated. I still remember how sweet it tastes.
I drive through my neighborhood. Green lawns run beside me, manicured and precisely mowed. I long to put my bare feet into the plush grass. My mom still uses Round-Up.
I make it to my best friend’s house from memory but I briefly forget what her neighborhood is called.
After this week’s rain, the earth and flowers look like a lush paradise. The humidity feels like oppressive hell.
I am claustrophobic in a place so vast. Parking lots expand into the universe. Everyone lets you merge on the highway. There is more than enough space, they say. Come, they say, like quicksand.
I revisit the pride of my childhood bedroom, the massive built-in bookcase. Favorites line each shelf, but I have the urge to pick up an old nursery rhyme book. I open to The Babes in the Wood, their souls haunting me from the depths of the pages on the bottom shelf.
It’s easy to connect with my inner child here. Old cravings and behaviors come unwillingly to my fingertips, to the tips of my tongue. Rice Krispies with sugar and banana with peanut butter. Even though there’s nothing to eat in the house but a loaf of bread and some eggs, my body remembers. My mom explains that she’s never home.
The roots crave my nourishment. The roots and futures of polite drivers and useless items sold for pennies on my lawn… for a garden all my own?
I am now a separate entity from the girl before. My love is across the country, her presence sitting with me in a way that gives me pause. Is this that change that makes me wholly new? Is this the change that will finally still the beating of my old heart?
Am I a foreigner to my hometown, sweeping in and baring my teeth and scaring the villagers? My torch is violent, but my innocence just wants to keep them warm.
My childhood room is smaller than it used to be. I long to open the windows and let fresh air in. But the feeling of not-mine still lingers here, of temporary touches and rented rooms. Did it always feel like a hotel in this room I lived most of my life? In this house? My bookshelf talks to me. It’s the only part that screams no(!).
My windows stay closed against the damp air, but I open the curtains.
There are no dandelions in the yard. I loved dandelions until my mom explained that they were unwelcome. “They’re a weed” was all she said. I screwed up my 6-year-old forehead and continued to pick their bright yellow heads, full of sunlight and softness, ready to annihilate them for the sake of beauty. At least in death, they were mine. Even then I understood that a weed by any other name would appear a flower.