So my parents move quietly, pulling the drapes before switching on the lava lamps, keeping bottles of air freshener on the coffee table in case a neighbor knocks. They have made a few acquaintances, all younger. They do not know where Michael and Caroline are; at times, my mother insists they are dead.
For all intents and purposes, they are. But a breeze continues to blow through the window that they opened.
River Light
Thirty-one years ago a baby girl slipped into this world. Spoon-fed love and wild ways, she grew to be a rag-tag tangle-haired woods baby. Small child thriving on the seeds of rebellious plants, rebellious ideas. Child encircled in the arms of a culture running counter to concrete streets, camouflaged intent and white bread, white sugar ideas.
Who I am is informed by, but not defined by, the fact that I am a ‘hippie kid.’ I stand in too many camps for only two feet, and the camps are not always at peace. I am an avid feminist and an anti-censorship, pro-sex ‘pervert.’ I believe in decadence, but cannot become passionate about money. I am a dyke who wants children, a woods baby living in the heart of the city, a pacifist who has taken self-defense.
We were the golden children, angels of the woods.
My stepmother (long since left my dad) worries that I do not prepare for my retirement, while my father (still the hippie radical dropout) worries that I do not prepare for the fall. My mother, burned by ‘free love,’ worries that I’ll be stung by the polyamory that I embrace, and my stepfather keeps his own counsel.
The child whose first word was ‘hot,’ but whose second was…possibly not fit for the company of grandparents. A child who understood the concepts but who, stretching at the applications, still asked, ‘Is this one of those times I don’t say ‘fuck’?’ The child who ate with four forks, three knives, some spoons, but mainly her hands. Who now reads entire books on manners (the last one titled, appropriately enough, Please Don’t Eat the Doily). The one who now prides herself in knowing how to formally introduce.
I come from two ‘failed marriages.’ But with each separation and subsequent addition, those who cherish me grew in number. And my love for my original parents did not diminish. I had ample for all-and so do not believe in the scarcity theory of love. I do not believe affection is finite, because that has never been my experience.
The child who would climb into anyone’s lap, even if only just introduced, because a friend is a friend regardless of how long the acquaintance.
Nothing lasts forever. Each friendship, each relationship, must change, flow through its cycles, transform endlessly into new gifts, new treasures. If we resist this movement, the relationship shatters, like ice in the moving tide. But if we are open to re-creation, then we become stronger with each new turn.
Child brought up on Gandhi. Who presumed good intent, and love as the common denominator. Child taught to move gently through this good life-that each action, no matter how small, affects the whole.
I can no more write of the deadening pain of loss than I can of the breathless confusion of new love. Love’s ecstasy is like being stoned on almost too many mushrooms: Those who’ve never tried it have no comparison; those who have still do not share a common experience. Each trip takes you down a different path. And to paint a picture of true loss is to create something that is indecipherable to the uninitiated and unbearable to those who have felt its paralysis deaden the senses.
The child who, for all her strengths, all her freedoms, is nevertheless but a child. Still must be fed, must be cared for, must be raised, by others. Cannot choose to remain behind as life’s sudden changes take those who love her elsewhere.
When I was ten years old I lost my home. I left the wilderness completely and began to live full time in the city. Twenty-one years later I still define my life history in terms of before and after. How does a child mourn this loss? My home was not broken, it was abandoned in a process that started at age four when my parents separated, and my brother and I began to live half-time with my mother in the city. It was completed six years later, when my father, left abruptly by my stepmother, could no longer care for my brother and me adequately one month out of every two.
The Mid who at age eleven is shocked to discover that people, that a friend, can look one in the eye and lie. Who sits on the steps of the first real school she has ever attended, and weeps at her disillusionment, at the seeming uncertainty of everything, at the changing laws of the universe.
Home is where my family is. When my mom comes in to wish me goodnight and ends up curled next to me, talking over the latest in our lives-I am home. When my father and I work shoulder to shoulder preparing the fire pit circle for guests-I am home. When my stepmom opens the door of her new house to me, one that I have never before visited-I am home. When my brother’s children climb into my lap-I am home. When I lie in my bed, my lover’s head on my chest, our skin damp from lovemaking-I am home.
And yet there is a child who can never go home. A little girl who knew a home that worked its way into each cell, that grew to become the strength of her bones, a part of her skin-integral to the workings of her lungs, her heart. A home that smells of rain and of sunshine on salty rocks. A home that sounds like silence, but which is as silent as a tidepool is empty. A home that tastes like the first salmonberries of spring, fresh-picked huckleberries, dried saskatoon berries too late in the season. A home that feels like the earth under bare feet, the cool woods air on naked skin, the salal scraping your thighs as you push your way through it. A child who, yearning to go back, must learn to turn and face forward.
I dream of holding my own children to my breast. Of leaning back into the arms of my partners, my lovers, and feeling their lives entwined with mine as far into the future as I can see. So often the memory of loss, the pain of past loves’ endings, clouds my vision and I turn from my dreams, frightened by the innocence, the intensity, of my hope.
But I will stand, one day, at my own hearth. A hearth encircled by the people of my present, of my future. A hearth not haunted by ghosts.
Rivka K. Solomon
1971 was the year my sandwiches went from Wonderbread to whole wheat with wheatberries. From velvet dissolving in my mouth to gritty cardboard that needed to be chewed forever.
In ‘71, no one in my elementary school was eating PB & J on brown bread. Between bites I hid my sandwich under the lunchroom table.
In ‘71, my family moved in with strangers-people who grew pot on the windowsills, shared hot oil massages in the living room and danced around the kitchen to reggae while boiling lentils.
In ‘71 we shunned supermarkets. We bought groceries from the Unitarian Church weekly food co-op-even all-natural turkey and organic brown rice stuffing.
‘Do I haaave to?’ I whined more now that I lived with strangers and ate brown food.
‘Don’t you want to pay respect to Mother Earth? Do something symbolic with soil on this sacred day?’ Mom asked.
She was serious.
I was nine.
I shrugged and put my mittens on.
It was dusk and so cold you could see your breath. We stood over the frostbitten tomato plants in the garden. Mom read poetry by Native Americans. Dad tried to get a shovel into the frozen compost. (Something symbolic.) Each adult said why she was thankful. My sister rolled her eyes and stomped her feet to keep warm.