‘Insane in the membrane…’
You call me ‘Homegirl’ America spread over you like fake tan.
I want to take your head, smooth it off with impatient thumb.
Later, the sheet curls from a stained mattress. Your bones move apart sounding of a forest.
Trying to sleep in a fluorescent-lit garage, each of us consumed by separate pasts.
Tepee
I wore only a tight necklace, shoes the colour of a rabbit’s inside ear, buttoned over instep.
Sometimes a painted apron with flowers unfurling, spark-eyed heads in profile.
I carried my father’s offerings: pallid, hasty omelets my mother would not touch,
lemon and mint she drank in noisy gulps, painting in the midday sun.
Clay-smudged,
I sat in a manuka tepee.
Voices in my skull, boats bobbing on a river.
When my father left, we made gingerbread people, molasses-dark and crumbling, ate them slowly; an arm or leg, week by week.
I wore my shoes to bed, fell asleep to the noise of hens roosting in the pear tree.
I dreamt my mother was a statue, that I followed her to all the world’s cities, watched her in
pigeons pecking grain from her naked shoulders.
Nearby, an old violinist whose music I couldn’t hear.
Rain Grimes
I was born on the kitchen table. A midwife and my dad comprised the entire birthing team. My pacifist, Joni- Mitchell-singing, vegetarian-to-the-core, ‘who needs shampoo?’ parents did not even briefly consider the sterile experience of a hospital birth. When I finally let go of the embarrassment of that beginning enough to admit it to people, the story always elicited the same response: a wrinkle of the nose and the inevitable question ‘And you still ate on the table?’ It was a glorious moment for my parents, that Octo-.ber day in 1972, when they gave birth to their very own flower child. That kitchen table stood in a tiny cabin with no bathroom in rural Pennsylvania. My parents were both twenty-five and growing most of their own food, raising goats and making their own dairy products. I slept with my parents until I was five, drank goat’s milk and peed in an outhouse, blissfully unaware that the rest of the country didn’t live that way. Every photo of me shows a naked girl-child, sometimes with diaper, sometimes without, smudged with dirt and smiling like crazy. There are photos of me naked in tire swings, naked and spread-eagle in old stuffed chairs, naked and sitting on the dirty floor of our little house. One baby photo in particular was so embarrassing later that I went to great pains to hide it from my friends: I’m sitting on a pile of hay, one of my ears pierced, my smiling face exceptionally dirty, my hair a victim to home haircuts, and my cloth diaper so full it’s falling off my body. No pink velvet dresses and K-Mart balloon backdrops for my family.
When I was a year and a half, my parents loaded everything we owned, which wasn’t much, into a green 1952 Chevy truck and moved across the country to Washington State. My dad had built a miniature house on the back of the truck, and into this they packed our meager possessions, our two dogs and our goat Polly. (After a great deal of arguing my dad finally convinced my mom that there wasn’t room for her beloved chickens.) This picking up’ and moving across the country was a trend that was to continue throughout my young girlhood-a family tradition, of sorts.
Moving is easy when you own almost nothing, and even easier if the things you own are so battered that they become impervious to damage. Everything we possessed had been made by one of my parents or bought secondhand from Goodwill. When I wanted something we couldn’t afford (which was most of the time), my parents would do their best to build or sew it. I lusted after pinstriped jeans in third grade, and my mom valiantly sewed me stiff, ill-fitting pink denim jeans (which proceeded to fall off during a ferocious game of Red Rover). The year that Care Bears were in vogue, my brother and I received the homemade version. My mom was at a loss, luckily, when Cabbage Patch dolls hit the scene. My brother and I wanted bunk beds, and my dad promptly built them. My first bike was a hot pink number with a banana boat seat purchased at the local flea market. We got our first TV from a junk shop when I was twelve. It took me a long time to figure out that we were one step removed from the ‘normal’ consumer chain-and that it was both a financial necessity and a conscious ideological choice for my parents.
We lived my parents’ hippie dream in various New Age communities in Washington ’s Skagit Valley and, later, in Sedona, Arizona. When I was six, we traveled across the country again, this time to Ithaca, New York, in a red Dodge van. Yet again my dad had masterminded his version of a hippie U-Haul camper and built a wooden sleeping platform in the back of the van. We spent our nights snuggled together on the platform under our one goose-down sleeping bag, looking at the stars out the van window and reading The Chronicles ofNarnia over and over again.
Life progressed in a similar fashion-traveling cross-country, sleeping with my parents, being naked much of the time. In Ithaca we lived in another cabin in the woods with no running water. I played in the creek, dodged the mice in our cabin, and passed countless hours melting crayons onto our wood stove. When I entered school in Ithaca, I went to an ‘alternative’ one called Hickory Hollow three bus rides away from our home. My parents subscribed to a theory of education that did not involve being forced to learn things that I wasn’t ‘ready’ to learn-an interesting, if at times impractical, concept. When I expressed my aversion to math to my first-grade teacher, she replied that I didn’t have to do my math homework if I didn’t want to-instead, why didn’t I go play in the corner in the fake tepee? Years later my seventh-grade teacher would wonder why I still didn’t know my multiplication tables.
Being a hippie kid always marked me as different. My family’s food choices were no exception. I was on the bus to Hickory Hollow with the kids from the local high school when it happened: my first public embarrassment over hippie food. My lunch box collapsed and out exploded oh-horrible-hippie-world-nonfat-plain-organic-goat’s- milk yogurt, covering the aisle of the bus, splashing onto the seats and me. And as I stood there, in my puffy green Goodwill coat and holey tights and little patchwork skirt, yogurt all over my shoes, the faces of horrified high schoolers gaped at me like I was an exotic bug. Perhaps other kids didn’t get yogurt in their lunch boxes-and if they did, it came in neat little plastic containers with cute foil lids and fruit on the bottom. This is the first time I can recall being conscious of my differences from other kids-and the moment when the protective bubble surrounding my idealized hippie kid existence first burst. I had been living in a sort of Utopian reality, with total, guileless freedom from worry about what other people thought of me. I realized in that moment that mine was not to be a mainstream existence.
My isolation blossomed to epic proportions when we moved to Beantown, Wisconsin. My parents had two folk musician friends there-and they wanted to start a band. We drove into Beantown in 1979 in a rusty blue Datsun wagon with, yes, duct tape holding on one of the fenders. We parked it in front of our friends’ house and camped out with them for some time. It seemed like months to my seven-year-old mind, and perhaps it was. However
