June

She did all the appropriate things growing up and now she was a grown up for so long she could not remember the previous part anymore. That’s why she decided that she possibly outgrown being a grown up (grown old?) and it didn’t suit her curiosity anymore.

Growing back down is as easy as hitting reverse and driving backwards on the road you forgot to the place you don’t remember. Not very easy, it is, and her adult maps were of no help now. Things that used to be her guiding compass - fleeing the nest, getting a cat, getting a job, choosing a fridge, a partner, a vacation spot - they weren’t helping to pull her into her younger years the way they convinced her to grow up when she was still young and easily impressed.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat on a daybed across a bay window overlooking the garden with mature sycamores growing skywards out of lush green carpet, and tried to feel her way back. Nothing, and “this whole idea was silly anyway”, she said to herself. For a while she watched squirrels playing under the bird feeder picking up seeds that mourning doves above them were knocking down. Bluebirds were in and out of their nest, with strings of earthworms in their beaks going in, empty going out. A young deer walked across the yard, nose up in the air, delicately sniffing. It walked behind sycamore in a middle of the yard and for moments his twitching tail was all she could still see on one side of the tree… she waited. It’s been few minutes and it still didn’t reappear on the other side of the tree. Just another one of those visions, she thought, laid back on a pillow and closed her eyes.

…as she walked a long corridor. The floor planks were painted so many times she could see all the layers of paint where a path in a middle was worn down to bare wood. Brown, green, another brown, mustard yellow, what is it, raspberry?what were they thinking??? - and the other layer of mossy green. Interior geology. On both sides of corridor were doors, new and freshly painted were she started, older with paint peeling as corridor led farther. Some doors had scratches under and around handles, like something’s been trying hard to get in. Some doors rattled slightly like something was trying to get out. Some breathed and some had an eye hole with an actual pupil…that feeling of being watched all the time, it felt so familiar. They are always watching. You’re not good enough. You won’t get presents. She’s not opening THESE doors.

There were ribbons of fog slithering into the corridor from under sky blue door and she knew when she opens it it will take her to that chilly morning when her aunt woke her up before sunrise to take her to 5am bus back to the city. She was eight, and cold, and couldn’t quite wake up, but her aunt kept wading through the dark field outlined with willows on both sides, up to her shoulders in low fog, and it didn’t seem she felt cold at all. “How is she not cold? Adults just don’t have any feelings” - unnecessary barb into the back of her hard working aunt who’s been working on a chicken farm all her life and died a few months after reaching retirement. She tiptoed past the door.

…and opened another into a corner of a city block. It was a last day of school, the very last day of the very last school, and an old woman was selling small bunches of lily-of -the-valley held together with ribbons of grass. She bought a bundle and carried it around admiring delicate porcelain bells that smelled like her mother’s favorite French perfume, what was the name if it? Nocturne, that was it, in midnight blue box lined with velvet.

The next door she tried to open slammed in her face. Hmm. Apparently she’s not ready for this one yet - or ever.

Next door opened into a dark night that smelled of wild peonies and fresh cut hay. Soft smile touched her lips. She remembered this night.

There were doors into raspberry patches and apple orchards. The ones that led to spring-fed pond with water so clear and so still and so cold it contained no life, not even mosquitoes. Anything that fell in it stayed preserved in freezing waters forever. Her dad called this pond “dead waters”.

There were “living waters”  too, a small spring that trickled through warm earth and farther down the field, surrounded by cows and dandelions as tall as she was at her six. “Living water” gave life to grandmas garden where tomato harvests were epic with four huge barrels of fermented tomatoes lasting until late April in a deep dark cellar that used to be a bomb-shelter.  It went down many steps into silent earth but all that was on a surface is a surreal structure of a door surrounded by slopes of concrete on three sides with a rusty red rooster normally perched on top of it supervising his flock and letting out long raspy crow every hour and sometimes half hour if he felt it was needed.

One of the oldest looking doors opened into a day of a summer camp - oooohh how bad she hated those - but it was luckily “Parent’s Day” when parents were allowed to come and see their scratched up kids covered in sunburns and mosquito bites. Her parents were sitting close to each other, talking and smiling, not a trace of tragedies that overshadowed their later relationship and finally pulled them apart. She found it was hard to breathe, and closed the door gently, hiding a memory of it in her prettiest, most treasured drawer. When you see wonderful things - and don’t tell anyone - you become your own treasure chest.

More doors, much smaller now, she had to kneel to take a look inside. Butterflies, and fluffy day old chicks, and green frogs that she used to catch and slip down the back of her mom’s navy blue one-piece swimsuit. They’d slide all the way down to the small of her back and dad would have to get them out. His very serious face always gave her giggles.

The last door was the smallest one and the latch was tiny and when she finally wiggled it out and opened the door there was only a wall with a mirror. In a mirror she saw a partial  reflection of her giant face, head too big to even squeeze through the door and she kept staring at familiar yet strange features…

…and opened her eyes on a daybed in her library, former dining room (“no one is dining anymore, we just eat” she said, and that was the end of an argument in favor of library over the dining room). She looked out the window and saw young deer stepping out of the other side of a sycamore tree, ears perked toward the chicken coop where hens got into their evening argument about roosting privileges. She laid there, eyes slanted toward the window until light turned gold, and then thick blue, before disappearing completely, and the sun-powered garden spot lights kicked on biting into settling darkness. She got up, kicking the blanket off the bed and onto the floor, not caring of picking it up and folding it, walked into the kitchen feeling her way in a dark to the kitchen sink. She set dirty tea cup into the dark abyss of the sink, contemplated cleaning it for a while, decided against it, and turned around heading to upstairs bedroom. Mom will get the dishes,  and the blanket too.                                              

Dorothea Tanning, Portefeuille (Pocketbook) 1946