I understand now

                I should tell you that all I’ve ever wanted to is as light as the seeds on a dandelion.

                All I’ve ever wanted is to float above the fence posts and out towards the bruised sky.

                But instead, I’m sitting here, looking out the kitchen window at the leaves

                Wondering when the rains will come. Wondering when the black eyed Susans will open.

                Wondering when I’ll finally be so light that I can float up into the sky. 

I understand that a person generates fantasies about home and about being a child as well. A home is less an authentic space moored in a place and time than an idea. It’s a series of memories burnished by the years into something golden. The strawberries in the side yard of my neighbor’s house were not just strawberries, but the best strawberries I’d ever eaten. The dappled light in Bidwell Park is not just the dappled light of any park, but the finest dappling of light that I’ve ever seen in my life. You would want to dapple everything in this light, trust me. These false constructions are what make being a human being livable. Imagine if our insignificance was routinely made manifest?

Home is the place where I peed in the backyard. Home is the place where I gathered dandelions. Home is the place where I threw a blanket over a heater and trapped in the warmth. Home is the place where I was loved very deeply and specifically, as it seems to me now, only a child can be loved.

Perhaps I’m just trying to force meaning, for we are animals of meaning, onto a summer devoid of it. Perhaps that summer meant nothing. And yet, I remember deconstructing a deck, pausing on the iridescent glimmer of a snake’s shed skin. And later, after we have finished pulling out the rotten boards, we rebuilt the deck, putting new boards over that shed skin, burying it yet again. For the purposes of the metaphor imagine that the skin did not move, imagine that I am a skin, imagine that a summer and a self are like skin, easy to shed.

            Her name back then was different. It was near Easter. Her cheeks were pale and round. She was wearing a blue dress with white polka dots. We were sitting on the crushed grass in her parent’s back yard, counting the small chocolate candies gathered from plastic eggs. And then, just like that, it’s gone, and the next thing I remember is five kids, her included, wandering onto the train tracks that ran behind her house, though our parents had promised that there would be hell to pay if we did. I remember the older kids talking about putting a penny on the tracks, talking about how that might derail the train. And then, the small breeze of a late April day, thin clouds making whorls as if they are fingertips. We are waiting for the train. Oh please let it come before our parents arrive and carry us home.