By Ellen Salovaara
Nine times out of ten, when my mother ventures into my room to wish me a good night, she pauses to stare out of the window flanked by curtains by my door. Sometimes it is raining; sometimes it is not. Sometimes snowflakes are tumbling down into the loosely oval apparatus of our polished and plucked suburban backyard. Nine times out of ten, I press her with annoyed questions, poking at her confusing fascination with the same space day after day. Despite the presence of rain, snow, or sun, our yard does not change in drastic ways. It does not sprout arms out of its towering magnolia trees and pull itself up by its roots to leave.
Childhood remains a vague concept to me. Rosy-hued and blurred by the fleeting nature of young memory, its shadow dances through my consciousness occasionally. The term itself conjures in my mind titles of coming of age movies and rings with media-propelled nostalgia and an almost fictional tone. When I think of my own childhood, I think of blissful ignorance coupled with a steady imagination. I think of playing house with my neighbors, using the glossy red sides of their wagon to “scrub laundry” and pressing “pies” made of the earth into a tin tray. I think of our old house in Silver Spring, my only vivid memories of the place being the starkly red dining hall and the act of pressing my face against the fence to see the big yellow dog on the other side.
This winter, in the shade of my driveway, my friend and I sat in her car, laughing at her thoughtless pull of the knob on the steering wheel that resulted in a spritz of water on the windshield—water that would soon freeze. My father, donned in the yellow winter jacket that he had selected so that we, his family, could find him in a crowd, marched down to the car to pull great swaths of snow from the car hood with a broom. He did so meticulously, and my friend and I watched the snow fall slowly to the driveway he had just shoveled. I waved once, briefly, but the blurry glass and the patches of white fluff upon it obscured the motion. Besides, he was not looking at me. He was looking at the broom, eyes trained behind his fogged-up glasses. When he finished the job, he turned, shook the broom, and ascended towards the house that my mother had grown up in—the house that I was almost finished growing up in. I watched him as his yellow jacket grew smaller. He turned the corner, and I was struck suddenly by the knowledge that he would not be the one leaving in the fall; I would.
I suppose college has been in the back of my mind for a while. I have a visceral memory of thinking last year that I would never be ready to live away from home. I would never be able to be transplanted from the ecosystem that is my world, uprooted from the house that is my life. The college process shoved these worries to the back of my mind. Getting into college feels like after barreling towards a stop sign with blinders on, I just slammed on the brakes, the dust settled, and now I can see the things I will leave behind—the things that I was so afraid to leave behind. I thought I would never be able to leave before-school breakfasts with my brother, twirling around each other in the kitchen in an infinitely rehearsed dance, unshelving cereal boxes and offering each other sizzling eggs. I would never be able to leave driving to school in the groaning and grumbling 1996 Honda, fingers clutching the steering wheel as I hoped that the four wheels would remain attached and the engine would not sigh into oblivion. I would never be able to leave my locker filled with Calvert-inspired color-coded binders, for which I received judgemental comments. I would never be able to leave long lunches with my friends, huddled around our meals and discussing the ins and outs of the day. I would never be able to leave loud family dinners, speaking over each other and laughing until our sides hurt. I would never be able to leave quiet evenings in a room all my own, finishing up homework through yawns and curling up with a book… or Twitter.
Recently, I have begun to take more photos, posting them to different social media accounts and storing them in folders in my camera roll. There’s a consistent push-and-pull in my head over “being in the moment” or “recording the moment for later,” and I have reached the decision that these two states are not mutually exclusive. There’s something special about capturing the laughing faces of friends or the fleeting snatches of afternoon sunlight stretched out on the slats of my front porch and being able to look back at them later. I am there, with my laughing friends, feeling the sunlight on my arms, but I am also calm with the knowledge that I will retain a fragment of the moment for a later time. In mid-April, I looked up at the cherry blossom trees in our front yard and realized with a start that I had not taken any pictures of the white blossoms this year—and now they were turning green. My short window for preserving this year’s flowers in my camera roll had passed.
Recently, a creeping sense of urgency has invaded the recesses of my mind, urging me to take advantage of and appreciate every moment before I leave. RSVP yes for this event, attend this meeting, take photos of everything, and go out with friends tonight. Do it all. But I’m realizing that taking advantage of every moment means sitting with the moments I have now, the ones that I was so scared to leave last year, and the ones that happen, again and again, every day. The breakfasts, the drives, the classes, the lunches, the friends, the dinners, the quiet times, the moments when my parents come into my room to wish me a good night. So I’m making space. I’m taking time. I’m remembering. I’m being present. I’m taking photos. I’m thinking about leaving. I’m holding on without gripping so hard my knuckles turn white.
Two days before Easter, I sat under the warm spring sun to pull weeds in preparation for my family’s annual Easter party and for the coming summer. I put my hands on the soil, gripped each plant by its stem, and pulled. I shook the long spindly roots, knotted together in some places so that the dirt fell from them, sometimes in clumps and sometimes in cascades of particles. Usually, I wasn’t able to pull the entire collection of roots from the ground on the first try. I’d have to push a trowel deep into the earth and scoop the remaining roots out. The heat rippled across the gravel of the driveway like waves, but the breeze cooled my arms. I disrupted the soil as I pulled weed after weed, some beautiful and some not. I saved some of the flowering weeds, placing one with white blossoms and one with pink in a vase on a windowsill, encouraging them to continue growing in this new habitat by providing them with water and sunlight. There was something both beautiful and sad about the act of weeding, uprooting plants from where they had grown in order to make space for something new to blossom. But this happens every year. It was what was supposed to happen. It was what had always happened. In two days, my house would be filled with my family, laughing together, sharing stories, and cheering on the kids in the Easter egg hunt, just like they did every year. So I put my hands in the earth that I had played on, driven by, walked on, fell on, and scraped my knees by ever since I was young–I put my hands on that earth, and I gripped a plant, and I braced for the roots, and I pulled.
Comments