Going Home
from the collection of Transcending Nine
by: Sydney Chaney-Thomas

They say you can never go home again and this is particularly true for me, because both my parents are dead now, but in August, I take my children there, to that place I once called home.

Driving into town at five p.m., the yellow fields are on fire. It's 100 degrees, the air shimmers on both sides of the freeway as we pass. This is annual field burning season in Oregon. Burning is the fastest and cheapest way to purify the soil for the next years growing season.

Clouds are moving in now and the sky is turning lavender with dark gray clouds. In the grass seed fields, the black smoke moves along the ground like a silent locomotive off its tracks. You can see the bright orange flames beneath the smoke. Tractors along the edges of the fields drive along like they are trying to outrun the fire. The next day it will rain leaving a sooty residue over the summer landscape.

After my father died, my mother moved us here, 16 miles and 24 minutes East of the farm. There was just a small difference in distance, but enormous differences lay ahead in every other way. The least of these being that Salem is a city and Monmouth just a small college town. You would think that would be the biggest difference, but it wasn’t. The big difference was that, after the move, my mother disappeared in spirit if not in body.

My children, dog and I stay with my most loved friend from grade school, the one that has helped me to keep my life together as an adult; she is the one that I have two hour phone conversations with from my home in Northern California. This is the friend that I need. It’s uncertain if she needs me, I’m there for other people, but she is someone I might not have survived without. For many years I thought we were the same person, seeing life through the same lens with memories and experiences in lock step with one another, but later she sums it up by simply saying, “I loved my mother, she didn’t threaten to kill me”.

Even my dear childhood friend cannot ease the deep-seated sense of anxiety that persists from the moment I step out of my car with kids and dog in tow. Memories of the dark periods of my childhood, my relationship with my mother – my anger – my sadness – my fears, the ones I push back and out of my life daily. Here they are a different matter altogether, they feel less abstract, the familiar setting makes them real and powerful again, even current. This has been the puzzle of my life and I realize it is this feeling, the inability to get to the truth of it that contributes most to my uneasiness. I ask my friend “Was it really that bad? Or do I just remember it that way?”

“It was that bad,” she says without elaborating and I’m scared to ask for more than what she offers. I feel like an amnesia patient because I can’t remember many, many things that she can. She is my memory, the keeper of our childhoods; our conversations are not unlike those of friends after one of them has had too much to drink. Often, I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember things, that I don’t remember what happened next and I’m scared to ask because on some level I just don’t want to know.

The burning pale fields, the rain clouds gathering, the smoky winds remind me of that time – scared and helpless – the insanity of my mothers alcoholism. I am again, a child looking for a safe place to hide, but there is none, just her voice clawing at the private parts of a young girl, determined to rip away her innocence.

But I want to see the beauty in my mother. I want to find the light in her soul. I’ve been looking for this for a long time now and I’m starting to understand that maybe it isn’t possible to find it, that maybe a reworking of the past is all that I can hope for – not a chance to have a childhood that I can remember. I can only have the childhood that I’m sharing with my own children now. The second chance to see it all unfold, but it is not only this that I long for. What I want, quite simply, is her love, but we can’t have everything we want. I think I’m here to finally learn this lesson. To except what is, to finally believe it doesn’t need to be different.

Our days are spent walking. We walk through neighborhoods; we walk to the grocery store to buy ice cream. We sit together, my childhood friend and I watching the my girls ride the antique Carousel at the park, we stroll through the kid’s museum and go to lunch. At night we watch movies and eat ice cream with my little girls and the girls that live next door. We stay in the sunny apartment, I sleep soundly beside my youngest daughter, until one night I wake up at 1 a.m. filled with sheer panic. I jump up and go to the front door and lock it. My friend meets me in the hallway alarmed, “Sorry I forget to lock the doors sometimes.”

Doesn’t she feel it too? I have been on high alert for the past few days, but trying to keep a calm exterior for my children. Her sleepy face tells me she doesn’t feel what I feel, that it’s only me.

I always, always feel like I can be murdered here in this town, like the ground holds my blood. It certainly holds 95% of all my tears. The next day we walk along with the dog, Rosie and I and our three daughters, the sun is shining, there are a few fluffy clouds in the sky, the grasses around us are green and lush, flowers spill from everywhere, tended gardens and vacant lots alike – the air has a rich heavy feel to it – almost humid, but not quite.

I walk along with unease – dogs bark at us from behind fences – every day and every night I am there I think I have a pretty good chance of dying. There’s no real reason to think this, but I do.

On Tuesday, we drive out of town to Monmouth, to see the farm. We wind along the river – the green banks, the gray river and the blue sky above. There is not a boat or a person anywhere – not even another car on the road, just us. We drive along the ominous River Road, with its famous fatal “S” turns.

Red barns dot the way in contrast with the fields and brilliant green grasses around them. In shadow, tucked away beneath oak trees like hands covering a face, are small houses, with no one in sight. We drive the last stretch of road before we cross the bridge to the small town of Independence.

Vineyards, have replaced the strawberry fields that were there when I was a child. The Fruit and nut orchards are the same and cover the fields down to the banks of the river on either side.

We cross the sleepy river. It is peaceful and beautiful – like a dream of a river. I am lulled by it’s beauty. The scene looks like a painting by one of the Old Masters. There is nothing modern to suggest otherwise and the landscape is almost entirely still, the river moves so slowly that you might think it wasn’t moving at all, the clouds appear completely stationary hanging silently above the river in the thick summer air.

As soon as we cross bridge, and drop down into Independence the lock down on my chest eases and I feel, finally, almost normal. My head clears and I feel I have escaped something. I try to understand why, but the nebulous quality escapes me, it is only that a vile evil thing lives here for me. I recognize this feeling as irrational and I always think – its not really there – will not be there the next time. I think my mom came close to killing me. I remember times when I thought she could or would or might. She would say things like, “I could murder you,” or “I should knock your head in,” sometimes she said these things while hitting me, giving me no reason to doubt her. But later, she wouldn’t remember doing this, so I would pretend it wasn’t true and I was able to convince myself that it was just in my imagination.

Yet now years later, I feel threatened just walking down the street.

The gift of the trip easily is my gratitude for the life I have created with my husband and children. The life in Northern California where the air is just a little drier and the sun shines on my own green lawn, professionally mowed in neat rows every single Thursday for the past ten years. There I am safe. I feel the rooms and the world around me without fear. I don’t wake up hysterical in the middle of the night and lock my doors.

In Independence, I try to remember the exact street to turn down to find the Catholic Church where I had my First communion. Out of the several options, I choose the right street and find it there at the end, looking naturally, one third smaller than I remember. The church is just a simple structure, but beloved by me. Beloved. We sit in the car and stare at it, it too looks deserted, the doors closed and locked.

I turn the car around and we continue our drive to the farm. It’s for sale now. There are workers there from the Utility Company trimming the treetops that border the property along the highway and interfere with the utility lines. We pull up and talk to the 20 something worker, who tells us to come back in a while and then we can pull into the long driveway where their truck now blocks the drive. In the interim, we go to the park in the middle of town. My dog, Rosies grown daughter, the kids and I. My daughters push each other in the same swing set my sister and I played on. They run squealing to the fountain in the middle of the park, but it has long since gone dry. The kids run around and then we climb into the car and head back out to the farm.

I pull into the drive way and stop in front of the steel gate. We get out of the car and stand there, the girls and I and Dagny. The gate is locked with chains and a padlock. We can’t knock on the door because we can’t really jump the fence. I point out the barn, the several small out buildings, and the farmhouse that is devastatingly dilapidated. Before we turn to go, a man walks towards us. He opens the gate and lets us in and we introduce ourselves. Ray has just started leasing the property. He walks around the grounds with us, and with his gentle voice, tells us the barn is condemned so we can’t go inside. It has the look of many barns along this highway in the way it’s leaning and tilting as if it were made of wet cardboard. The trees and wild flowers make up for the sad condition of the buildings, there is an inspiring beauty here that anyone can see. After days of thinking I can’t wait to get home, I start to imagine what it would be like to live here again and I imagine myself fixing this place up, romanced by the idea of horses and cattle and land like my parents before me.

Ray follows us around and talks. He’s only been here two months. The house has been vacant for many, many years. It has no heat. Kindly, he says he wouldn’t want me to see the condition of the inside of it, at least not until he has a chance to replace the sheet rock and get the place in order. He really likes it here he says, the owner, the man my mother sold the property to is in a nursing home now. Ray hopes it takes a long time to sell and he can stay here for a while. From the looks of the place and the price it appears that he’ll be here for some time. He’s a man in his 50’s and lives here with his girl friend. His daughter comes to visit, now and then, but won’t sleep upstairs anymore because of the “ghost”. He laughs and tells us he doesn’t know if it’s true or not, he himself doesn’t really believe in ghosts, but that’s what she says. I’m not surprised. Ghosts were featured in every part of my childhood.

My daughters are chasing kittens, but they run away and hide under the cars parked in the gravel driveway. My dog runs off and defecates happily in the soft grass. I stand and look around. There are no fences now around the house, there is no yard like we once had, just a gravel drive and rambling blackberry bushes and weeds. The pond is even over grown with wild mint and blackberry. I am finally able to orient myself by finding the hazelnut and walnut trees. The apple orchard behind the house has all but disappeared. Only a few trees with twisted limbs remain. The grape vines and their supporting structures are gone without a trace.

Our host jogs back into the house and returns with an enormous bottle of warm milk with a teat on it so my girls can feed his calves. My dog chases one calf through the trees while my daughters take turns fighting over the bottle, one winning out at a time and finally they manage to feed both as I talk to Ray. He takes me to one of the out buildings, which are in surprising good shape compared to the rest of the property. I step into the darken cavern of the building and he shows me an old wringer washer that had belonged to my mother, and then an old oxygen tank, used by my father in his final days. They are still here. These are the parts of them that remain - like old artifacts.

As I stand talking to Ray about the real estate market and fixing up the house I glance over to see my daughters and beautiful Dagny standing together in front of the old gate that leads into the pasture where the pond is, the gate is overgrown with blackberries now, impossible to open. My ten year old is covered in red juice, she’s laughing and licking her delicate fingers with their red tips, my little eight year old carefully pulls the fragile fruit from the branches and pops them in her mouth without a mess, and there between them, I see myself, the ghost of the girl that I once was, at nine.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.12.2009

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