cared for, must be raised, by others. Cannot choose to remain behind as life’s sudden changes take those who love her elsewhere.
When I was ten years old I lost my home. I left the wilderness completely and began to live full time in the city. Twenty-one years later I still define my life history in terms of before and after. How does a child mourn this loss? My home was not broken, it was abandoned in a process that started at age four when my parents separated, and my brother and I began to live half-time with my mother in the city. It was completed six years later, when my father, left abruptly by my stepmother, could no longer care for my brother and me adequately one month out of every two.
The Mid who at age eleven is shocked to discover that people, that a friend, can look one in the eye and lie. Who sits on the steps of the first real school she has ever attended, and weeps at her disillusionment, at the seeming uncertainty of everything, at the changing laws of the universe.
Home is where my family is. When my mom comes in to wish me goodnight and ends up curled next to me, talking over the latest in our lives-I am home. When my father and I work shoulder to shoulder preparing the fire pit circle for guests-I am home. When my stepmom opens the door of her new house to me, one that I have never before visited-I am home. When my brother’s children climb into my lap-I am home. When I lie in my bed, my lover’s head on my chest, our skin damp from lovemaking-I am home.
And yet there is a child who can never go home. A little girl who knew a home that worked its way into each cell, that grew to become the strength of her bones, a part of her skin-integral to the workings of her lungs, her heart. A home that smells of rain and of sunshine on salty rocks. A home that sounds like silence, but which is as silent as a tidepool is empty. A home that tastes like the first salmonberries of spring, fresh-picked huckleberries, dried saskatoon berries too late in the season. A home that feels like the earth under bare feet, the cool woods air on naked skin, the salal scraping your thighs as you push your way through it. A child who, yearning to go back, must learn to turn and face forward.
I dream of holding my own children to my breast. Of leaning back into the arms of my partners, my lovers, and feeling their lives entwined with mine as far into the future as I can see. So often the memory of loss, the pain of past loves’ endings, clouds my vision and I turn from my dreams, frightened by the innocence, the intensity, of my hope.
But I
Rivka K. Solomon
1971 was the year my sandwiches went from Wonderbread to whole wheat with wheatberries. From velvet dissolving in my mouth to gritty cardboard that needed to be chewed forever.
In ‘71, no one in my elementary school was eating PB & J on brown bread. Between bites I hid my sandwich under the lunchroom table.
In ‘71, my family moved in with strangers-people who grew pot on the windowsills, shared hot oil massages in the living room and danced around the kitchen to reggae while boiling lentils.
In ‘71 we shunned supermarkets. We bought groceries from the Unitarian Church weekly food co-op-even all-natural turkey and organic brown rice stuffing.
‘Do I haaave to?’ I whined more now that I lived with strangers and ate brown food.
‘Don’t you want to pay respect to Mother Earth? Do something symbolic with soil on this sacred day?’ Mom asked.
She was serious.
I was nine.
I shrugged and put my mittens on.
It was dusk and so cold you could see your breath. We stood over the frostbitten tomato plants in the garden. Mom read poetry by Native Americans. Dad tried to get a shovel into the frozen compost. (Something symbolic.) Each adult said why she was thankful. My sister rolled her eyes and stomped her feet to keep warm.
‘Didn’t Pilgrims kill Indians?’ I whispered to her.
‘Yeah, Pilgrims were jerks,’ she whispered back. She was eleven, knew more and was much cooler than I.
‘Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving if Pilgrims were jerks?’ I asked. All the adults looked at me.
‘I can’t feel my face,’ my sister said. ‘I’m going inside.’
We all followed, except Dad, determined to get his shovelful.
The mashed potatoes had brown worms mixed in. Or maybe they were just the skins.
‘Most nutritious part,’ Mom said.
‘High in vitamin A,’ said Dad. ‘I think it’s D,’ she corrected. Somebody lit a joint.
I poked a drumstick with my fork. I’d seen a turkey farm on TV that morning. So many birds, all dead now. I thought about becoming the youngest vegetarian in America.
‘Eat your salad,’ Dad said.
It was covered with tofu-tamari dressing. Brown liquid with white clumps, clinging to green leaves. I shook my head no.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
I bit into the cranberry sauce. My face puckered. Saliva rushed to my mouth.
‘Sugar’s bad for you,’ a man from the commune said when I spit it out.
‘I know,’ I retorted and grabbed some pie to save my palate: bland and thick with pumpkin strings.
‘I made that too,’ he said.
Dishes piled, oil heating on the stove, the adults retreated to the living room.
‘Oops, nature calls,’ a woman of the commune said. She rose from the pillows, skipped past the bathroom and out the rear door into the wooded backyard.
I was so glad I hadn’t invited any friends over that year.
The next school day at lunchtime I peeked under the table into my sandwich baggie.
Dead bird.
My stomach growled, but I still couldn’t do it.
In 1971, the youngest vegetarian in America decided brown bread with just ketchup wasn’t so bad.
Suzanne M. Cody
Dear Isabel, aged four and a half months:
