…racing Ranger across the fields in the shadows of dawn.
…riding up and down our gravel driveway on The Clunker.
…kicking a ball over the barn. (we didn’t get out much?)
…collasping in front of the fan after another humid day.
…watching the fireworks dot the horizon on the fourth.
…raking hay. baling hay. throwing hay. stacking hay.
…mowing with the brake-less, reverse-less Snapper.
…picking peas. and green beans. and strawberries.
…cutting thistles over miles and miles of pasture.
…blistering hot days, muggy opressing nights.
…the whistle of mom’s pressure canner.
…the crunchy sun-burnt grass.
…hamburgers on the grill.
…poison ivy. twice.
…catching fireflies.
…hayfield picnics.
For it to feel like Christmas, and I mean really feel like Christmas, there has to be snow. It’s just how it has to be. It’s not an option. I grew up in Iowa for crying out loud. You know how many snow days we’d get in a year? A lot. It was rare for there to be a Christmas without snow. I got mad when there was a Christmas without snow, because it didn’t feel like Christmas. And dang it, when it’s Christmas, it needs to feel like Christmas.
And then I went to San Francisco a couple years ago for the holiday season. It was a balmy 40 degrees with rain. Everything was drab and dreary, and it did not feel like Christmas. All the Californians were buying their Christmas trees and getting gifts and putting up Christmas lights, and really…what’s the point? It’s California. There’s no snow. There’s not even the chance for snow. That’s how the rest of the world lives? With a Christmas that isn’t white? I don’t want it.
I suppose that’s the little girl inside of me. Sometimes I get irrational about things like the weather. About little details that I have no control over. About the things that really don’t matter that much but are integral to the atmosphere of an occassion. Maybe someday I’ll grow out of that. Probably not. But maybe.
The maybes will kill you. Probably not literally, although I suppose the chance is always there. A big block of wood carved into the word “maybe” could fall out of the sky, land smack dab on your head and no more you. It could…but not likely. Figuratively though? Figuratively, the maybes will kill you if you let them.
The maybes are the same as the what ifs or the could haves or the…song that just doesn’t end. You start maybein’ and what iffin’ and could havin’ and then what? It doesn’t get you anywhere; the things that actually happen and the situations that actually occur are what get you where you’re at.
Like someone really smart said, “There will always be maybes. Maybe I could have been the freaking President, but no one cares because that’s not how it worked out.”
Exactly, my friends. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe I could have been the dadgum, freaking President but no one cares because it’s not how my life has gone down in the history books.
Yesterday, something really good happened to a couple I know. And when I say really good, I mean really good. It’s cheesy fries, high-heeled shoes and movie-ending good. I wish I could say, you know, but it’s something like a secret or something. So I can’t. But it’s r.e.a.l.l.y. good. And I was surprised. Surprised that something like this was happening to someone I knew in real life. Surprised that I got to be in on a little corner of the excitement. Surprised…just surprised.
And my surprise-ment tells me something. It didn’t tell me something yesterday, because I was too busy being surprised. But today? Today, I realized that my surprise-ment was a side effect. When did I turn into the girl who doesn’t believe in good things? Because that’s where the surprise came from. I don’t believe that good things happen anymore. Not like that. Not these fairy tale miracles. Not to me. Not to the people I know. That stuff happens in books and movies and fictional far-out lands. Not life. Not real life. Where did this girl come from? How did she get here?
This girl makes me sad, and I want her to go away. I want to be a person who hopes. I want to be a person who still believes that good things can happen. I want to be a person who is an optimist at 80 years old. I want to be a person who keeps just a touch of child-like wonder in her soul. I want to…I really do want to…but I’m not sure wanting is enough to make it happen.
And yet, I do know where this girl came from. This girl who stopped believing in good things, this girl I don’t like very much, this girl I don’t want to be but find myself in her shoes. Maybe I’m just being too hard on this girl. Maybe it will take more than a few years. Maybe it will take decades. And today, I can be okay with that sentence. Today, I can be okay with the fact that it might take decades for this girl to fade into the background. For today, I believe that the other girl, the girl I want to be, the girl who hopes, trusts, believes in good things and still has a smigden of child-like wonder, the girl I used to be…I believe she’s still inside of me somewhere, even after all these years. I believe she’s still a flickering little flame, and I’m going to keep wanting her to come out and play, and I’m going to believe that wanting it bad enough is going to make it happen. For today…
There’s something so…calming, I guess…about having roots. So familiar and easy and comfortable. The knowledge of a place and a land and a community that can only come from spending decades alongside them. The things and the people and the places you knew as a small child on your way to school, as a teenager edging the line of propriety, as a college kid jumping over that line into all sorts of hell-raising activities, as an adult in the workforce. There’s something about roots.
I’ve not been much of a root person in my life. Not really. Not the type of roots I’m talking about here and, oddly and quite suprisingly, the roots I’m longing for these days. I think in many cases, roots are a mindset. No, not a mindset – roots are an emotion, this thing that beats in time with your heart. One can be in a place for a long time and never put down roots. One can just bump along in their life and never let anything or anyone take much of a hold on their lives or on their hearts.
In the same manner, one can be in a place for a short time and develop more roots than one knows what to do with – especially if that one is not normally a root-person and doesn’t quite know how to handle root-growth.
I was thinking about the town I grew up in earlier today. The place I went to school, where I had my junior prom and my first experience with love. The place I learned how to run – literally and figuratively – and where I became good at both. The place I worked to earn money for college, and the place I left five years ago with barely a step inside the town limits since.
I lived outside of that town for 18 years. For nearly two decades, I made my way around every backroad and knew every farmer and started the journey of becoming the person who sits here today but there were never roots. Not roots. Not the type I’ve finally admitted I’m looking for.
I don’t know why my roots aren’t back there in Rural Midwest. It was the only thing I knew for 18 years, but even when I was there, living it and experiencing it, I knew my roots had never grown. And back then I wasn’t looking for roots. I didn’t want roots. I wanted excitement and adventure and experiences and stories.
I have those now. The stories and the adventures and the experiences. And while I’ve concluded that I will always be one of those people that things just happen to, the thought of all those things happening to me while I live in one place doesn’t bother me like it used to. And if I’m being honest, I’d have to say it is something I want.
Sometimes I look around me and I see people who have the roots I’m looking for. And while I can never have theirs – I know I’ll never be the person who lives from birth to death on the same land (quite obviously) – I’m ready to make my own roots. I think I’m ready…
Okay, so tonight I’m ready anyway. Maybe tomorrow I’ll think the opposite, but I have to say I don’t think that’ll be true. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll always travel, but traveling…I’ve found it’s so much different, so beautiful and rewarding and satisfying, when there is a home and a giant tree full of roots to return to. I’ll say it again, there’s just something about roots.
I was an imaginative child…an extremely, sometimes oddly, imaginative child – I really have no idea where it all came from, and I’m not at all sure I’ve even slightly outgrown it. Regardless, this is what we used to do for fun when we were little kids…
* We made all our own hay and stacked it in long rows near the gate. We (Brother and I) used to race along the top of the bales, jump from row to row, dare each other to try a particularly large gap. And they all seem large when you own short, little pixie legs.
* Every summer we shoveled out the barn. That wasn’t the fun part – the fun part was playing endless hours in the barn and the hayloft. Don’t ask me what we did in an empty barn, but whatever it was, we did it for hours.
* The same token goes for the old chicken house (converted to a catch-all storage shed) and the cement slab next to it. We…I…carpeted the chicken house floor with old shingles and used corncobs for the fire in an old feeder. We even had guns and canteens. And a store. And a saloon. I know you’ll have a hard time believing this, but we watched a lot of westerns.
* We also spent a lot of hours sitting on tractors. And I’m not talking about the have-to-for-work-sitting-on-tractors. No, before we were old enough to drive, my brother and I would pretend like we were farming with all the equipment…while it sat in the shed. On those power-steering tractors, the wheel doesn’t even move!
* In the fall, we played a wonderfully magic game known as Getting Ready for Winter (unimaginitve name courtesy of yours truly). We were pioneers and had to catch fish and hunt and prepare our house for the cold weather and feed our animals.
* In addition to being pioneers, we were also cowboys and indians, homeless people, sheriffs, mountain men, farmers, characters from animated movies (I liked to ride my bike up and down the driveway pretending to be Cruella de Ville) and exchanging turns being Liberty Valance, John Elder, Rooster Cogburn, Old Moze and Tom Dunson (characters in John Wayne movies for the uneducated).
* While most kids are building snowmen in the winter and playing in snow forts, I was pretending to be lost in a blizzard on the verge of freezing to death. Morbid, I know, but I thought it was fun. Sometimes I buried myself in the snow in an attempt to save myself from death. I also played Getting Ready for Winter in the winter. Chunks of snow made great props. To this day, I still have never built a snowman.
* Half a mile back in our property was a small stand of trees where we dumped all of our tree garbage – sticks, cut down trees, branches, etc – Brother and I had our own world back there. We each had built a house – and I mean built – and had trails and clotheslines and watering holes for our horses and…we should have gone into construction because the houses we erected out of old sticks and branches stood for a really long time.
…and now that I’ve read back over this, I’ve realized what a consistent picture is being painted here. I did have one Barbie. Some stuffed animals. I always wanted one of those echo-y microphones. Why, I don’t know, I can’t sing.
My brother always got the cool toys – all the miniature farm equipment and the shooting games and the ropes – but I was the one that made them all come alive. All the tractors had names and personalities and stories. It’s how we could spend hours in a barn or a chicken house and never get bored. When everything is a story – a story you created – it can go anywhere and become anything you want.
I don’t know if my brother ever got tired of my endless imaginings or if he just enjoyed the ride, but this is what we did…
I’m not quite sure when I learned the unspoken rule. I think it might have been the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not cry. And so I didn’t. I learned how to cry on the inside. I learned how to hold those tears back. I learned how to tilt my head away and bat my eyelashes real fast to keep ‘em from spilling over. I learned that biting my tongue made them ease up. I learned that if you knelt to tie your shoe and looked straight down at the ground, you could dump the tears and get nary a watery streak.
And I learned that if you had to cry, if you absolutely couldn’t hold those suckers in, if the dams broke loose and the tears couldn’t be corralled, then you’d best be quiet about it. No sobbing. No wailing. No shuddering breaths full of emotion. If you couldn’t stop the crying, then it’d best just be tears rolling down your cheeks. And it’d best be quick. And then it’d best be done. And that…that’s what I think is the saddest crying of all: silent tears. Big puddles of sad eyes full of pain and hurt and emotion, no sound – not a peep, and tears trailing silently down wet cheeks.
Yes, the saddest tears in the world are the tears that don’t make a single bit of sound.
