with sun. I couldn’t take my eyes from the orange leaves in quiet conversation with patches of newly lit sky. It seems that blue is always listening. Lying on my stomach, my chin propped on the windowsill, gaze transfixed on the fiery maple, I was reminded of hiking through a myriad of fallen leaves as a small child, holding tightly to the hand of my father, who urged me to be quiet and listen to the swishing at our feet. I wondered then, craning my neck to see into the highest trees where the most brightly colored leaves still clung to their branches, if the brightest stars are those that are about to fall. I wondered what would happen if a strong wind came and sent those leaves tumbling on air currents changing direction as fast as my small-bodied breath.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a moment when I realize the seasons have changed. Autumn is particularly poignant. In that moment, whether twenty years ago walking through whispering leaves with my father or yesterday morning awakened by the light of the maple tree, I think of myself as a leaf, falling again, sustained by the wind’s direction.
I slow down as I enter the tiny town of Springdale, scarcely more than a row of houses separated from each other by pine trees. The light has almost gone completely now, except for a random streetlight and a few early stars. I notice the first curls of smoke rising from several chimneys. I open the window and inhale the familiar smell of remembering. It is November again. I am the same age my mother was when she married my father.
In the late autumn of 1974, my parents had been married less than a year and were living in an upper flat on the east side of Milwaukee, searching for something they could call their own. My mom was finishing school, my dad working as an adolescent care worker at the County Mental Health Center, when he learned of a related facility in Plymouth, about sixty miles north of Milwaukee. It was October when they found the farmhouse-eight miles outside of Plymouth -situated majestically atop a high hill overlooking the Kettle Moraine forest, a mosaic of crimson and gold at that season. My mom remembers the sun setting as the wheels of their tiny blue Toyota sped along Wisconsin country roads toward the next stage of their life together. She recalls how the light poured from the golden underbelly of a plum-colored sky and she knew it was where she wanted to be. They lived there for the next three years, paying $140 a month for a four bedroom house surrounded by beautiful Wisconsin farmland and forest.
That big white house in Wisconsin is where I was conceived. It was heated by the same wood stove that heated the house I moved out of, eighteen years later. Shortly after I was born in January 1976, an ice storm hit our quiet country home and we were without power for three days. My mother moved my cradle next to the potbelly stove so that I could sleep under the comforting haze of its warmth. Large pots of snow were collected and set on the stove to melt so we would have water. For three days, my parents and their tiny new life huddled around slow stew and candlelight stories.
I’ve heard the tale many times. I listen, still drawn to the way my mother’s eyes deepen when she speaks of waking up early to find the world coated with a thick layer of glass, as if the brightest stars had indeed fallen overnight, leaving ashes softly flickering. I listen because her eyes tell me again and again that I am her daughter. In the country of memory, there is a place that resembles winter. It is here that my mother stands in front of the farmhouse, inhaling the quiet breath of snow. She does not move, for with any tiny movement the delicacy of such a starry winter morning will be shattered. The tightly wrapped bundle in her arms is me, and I am warm against her breast. She calls to a figure some distance away, but I don’t know her words. This memory is silent. The figure is my father. He is scraping ice from the windshield of the car. He looks up when she calls and nods in response, taking a moment to remove his leather work gloves and blow on his numbed fingers. The gray of his stocking cap is almost imperceptible against the sky. Despite the cold, he is at ease. My mother lingers on the front step a moment longer, wondering how the brutal winds of the storm last night could result in a morning so fragile as this.
There is a photograph from my parents’ days at the Wisconsin farmhouse in which my father sits in a worn- out chair, wearing rusty orange corduroys and a brown argyle sweater. His hair, uncombed and shaggy, hangs to his shoulders and his winter beard is just beginning to form. My mom is bent over him with her arms around his chest and her chin on his shoulder. Her hair is dark and rich, coming nearly to her waist. It falls over one side, framing the shared contentment in their faces. The photo was taken twenty-three years ago in the early days of November, before I was born. Behind them, the potbelly wood stove radiates warmth, making their cheeks flushed.
During their time in the country, my parents planted seeds that grew into fresh tomatoes, homemade basil pesto and a daughter who was just as nourished by the dark soil as the wild-flowers were. Listening to my parents’ stories, I am filled with a strange sense that I am reliving their experience, caught on an invisible thread that winds itself in circles. I wonder if the time elapsed between generations has made it impossible to really understand each other’s experience. When my parents were my age, this country was in the throes of an influential stage, with an atmosphere of experimentation and rebellion. People everywhere were questioning the basic structure against which many American standards stood.
Although my parents and I have been referred to as hippies countless times, I still don’t know what the word means. It is a label spawned by popular culture during my parents’ youth, but its use has persevered through my own. How can so many scattered concepts over so long breed concrete definition? Of course there is a pile of stereotypes, as with most labels used to define human beings, but my parents were not the strung-out, stoned-to- the-bone drifters on a perpetual search for the next Dead show; they were not the freaked-out screaming radicals, the starry-eyed tie-dyed dreamers or the vegetarian environmentalists whose moral purity could wound the soul. Instead, my parents were calm, quiet, creative individuals who happened to be alive during a dynamic time.
Inevitably, the period influenced the people they are. But while some people might have changed to fit the movement of the sixties and seventies, in my parents’ case, the movement just seemed to fit them. If being a hippie meant wearing plaid bell-bottoms on your wedding day, sporting a dandelion instead of a corsage to the senior prom, protesting the Vietnam War, and smoking marijuana and remembering to inhale, then my parents were hippies once. If it has anything to do with honesty, compassion, appreciating the silence of a winter morning, remembering to listen when the leaves fall and believing in magic, then my parents were, and still are, hippies.
When I imagine the sixties and seventies, I am filled with a sad sense that something important has been lost-something that connected people, regardless of their many directions. Growing up in the aftermath of the ‘hippie movement’ has fragmented youth identity. We are propelled headlong into the age of anxiety, afflicted with tunnel vision and distrust of our neighbors. The powerful influence of the hippie decades on American culture depended on the participation of a great number of people. It was a movement in the true sense of the word, a collective effort toward a common goal: personal freedom.
Now there are only separate movements in opposing directions and a seeming ambiguity of purpose. My generation has been characterized as thoughtless, cynical, unmotivated, apathetic and generally uninterested. Although I have known several people who fit the stereotype, I cannot blame them, but rather the circumstances of their experience. For many my age, our childhood took place just as our parents’ euphoric awakening was drizzling into a confused haze of dissatisfaction. Families broke apart, divorce became common practice. During the past twenty years, technological innovation has become the dominant factor in defining the pace of our culture. Perhaps our brains seem a bit numb because they are saturated with too much information, too many media images repeating themselves in the reflective surfaces of our shiny new world. American culture thrives on appearances, swallows the grit and beauty that lies under its glassy facades and spits out the remains in dilapidated, dirty dollar signs. The disease of overcon-sumption is as familiar as the threat of being infected with HIV. Growing up amid all-you-can-eat buffets and Slim-Fast programs, we were taught early on to follow our appetites rather than our ideas.
As we move closer and closer to a new millennium, I am unsure of the space I occupy. I am compelled to walk away, backwards, away from the cars and blaring artificial lights, away from computer-generated greetings and complacent barstools, away from the mentality that caring about anything equates to naivete. So here I am, driving through a landscape that has seen the last thirty years go whirling by in a blur of ever increasing traffic, rising decibels and thickening exhaust.
If we are moving in circles, they seem to be getting tinier and tinier. Maybe the equator is tightening its grasp on the earth. It’s difficult to remember that we are just passing through, mere vessels complete with supple exteriors to accommodate the shifting states of our souls. When I turned twenty-three and moved to the country, I felt as if I could finally exhale that little bit of breath I’d been unconsciously holding in my lungs. Time is not so
