I open the back door for one last look at our empty yard and peer out into the noonday sun. Straight ahead are the Woods, a tunnel of old maples, oaks and brambles. Closer on my right by the porch, a small patch of earth is overgrown with mint, three feet high at least.
Mom used to pluck one leaf and plop it into her tea on those beastly (her word) hot summer days when nothing could quench a thirst like iced tea. Through the years, the mint plant had clearly taken a life of its own. One final look before we say goodbye, okay. I wasn’t sure who or what I was speaking to.
I turn to look at our small, tidy ranch house. It seems cavernous now, with everything gone: mom’s coral-coloured velour armchair, the cherry dining table and chairs that were a wedding gift to my parents, my maple double bed purchased from Hubbard’s Furniture Store in downtown Batavia when I transitioned from crib to big-girl bed. All of it has either been given away, stored in my basement, or moved to Dad’s assisted living apartment. In what used to be my parents’ bedroom, the wallpaper is faded, but the spots where Grandma and Grandpa Wolcott’s portraits once hung are pristine.
And yet some memories never go away. I look out the kitchen window to the Woods, which is what my friends and I called it. A messy tangle of brambles and oaks and poison berry bushes with a strip running through it, where we built forts, climbed trees and jumped down, and created pies out of mucky muck. The girls and I would meticulously prepare these concoctions of mud, twigs, pebbles and leaves, and display them in plain sight in the hopes that Meg, a kid from the next street over, would discover them and help herself to a large piece. For reasons I’ve forgotten, we didn’t much like Meg and tried to entice her with the mud pies.
It was mean of us, I know that now of course, but we were kids—good kids—with a little streak of impishness. We were compelled to discharge it in some fashion, and Meg was our chosen target.
Meg was a little different, and upon reflection, there was a possible and plausible explanation for her eccentricity. Her older brother, Johnny, died of encephalitis when he was thirteen, a tragedy that rippled through our small community of Batavia. Meg carried her grief like a mantle of melancholy that she never removed. And we kids, as yet untouched by sorrow and loss, simply didn’t understand her profound sadness and its peculiar manifestations: a quiet sullenness that made her seem a little odd.
Sorrow and loss, I thought, as I walked through the empty house.
My first crush was Chris Voight. He was short and slight and had dark brown hair in a bowl cut, a la the Beatles, and he moved with lightning speed. He talked fast, walked fast, did everything fast. He was a ball of energy, and he was winsome and funny. We went to different schools until we were in the fifth grade. And we were in different fifth-grade classrooms when we landed at McWayne School, but it took me no time at all to suss out the cute guys. I had my eye on Chris from day one.
My interest in Chris wasn’t reciprocated. Like most ten-year-old boys he was oblivious to girls, and he and his friends spent recess engaged in boy stuff like soccer and basketball while we girls flitted from hopscotch to the monkey bars then back to hopscotch. But nothing Chris did escaped my attention, and I made it known to my friends that I was smitten. Chris had no clue who I was and when my friend Anne pointed me out, he paused a moment and without missing a beat, he resumed whatever game he was playing, paying me no attention whatsoever.
Until he finally did. One day after school I noticed that something looked different about my bike – not only had my pink-and-white Schwinn been moved, I had two flat tires, which of course rendered the bike unrideable. Huddled by the basketball hoops, Chris Voigt and a couple of guys were giggling like a bunch of girls. They didn’t say anything, but it was obvious they were the culprits, and instead of feeling annoyed or mad, I took Chris’s prank as proof of how he felt. He likes me! I told myself. Why else would he take the trouble of messing with my bike? But as the school days unfolded –weeks, months and years beyond that moment–I never found out whether he did or didn’t like me.
My memories of Chris come back now as I gaze at the yellow brick ranch house catty-corner from ours, where his family used to live. It was early on a Sunday morning when the call came.
“There’s been a car accident and a couple of kids were killed, Mike James and Chris Voigt,” Anne said, her voice breaking. She spoke haltingly as if drawing out her words would somehow cushion the blow, but I was way ahead of her. My heart leapt to my throat.
I was stunned. I stared out the window at Chris’s house, just across the street. Anne was saying something about the accident, that all they know so far is that it happened out on the edge of town late the night before. She went on for a while, then said goodbye abruptly.
I remember putting down the phone as my grief unleashed full throttle and my shock dissolved into tears. Chris was just a regular kid who played the drums in the school band, one of those kids everyone knew and liked.
I make my way to the back yard, this time around the west side of the house out towards the Woods. The clearing directly behind our home provides cover to indulge my memories privately, unseen by the neighbours’ roving eyes.
I think of strange, melancholic little Meg, how we taunted her with our mud pies, and how so full of sorrow she was at such a young age. Maybe I understand her a little better now.
I looked once again at the house, and in my mind’s eye I see my red metal swing set. It turned brown with rust eventually, but no, this time it was bright crimson. Look- there’s five-year-old me, pumping my legs hard, reaching for the sky. The wooden picnic table with its red checkered plastic tablecloth. Mum, smiling, dishing out bowls of potato salad and baked beans. There’s Dad, lifting hamburgers, hot and sizzling, off the grill and onto a platter. And just as quickly, this memory fades and I’m back in my parents’ old, empty backyard, which is about to become someone else’s backyard.
I take a moment to lean into my grief and slowly close down the house I’ve called home for decades, even when I wasn’t living here. Up the concrete steps to the back door, through the kitchen and out to the living room. How many times have I walked these same steps? I pick up my purse, and let myself out.
