Books were scarce in our house. I reread Heidi so many times I could practically recite it. Eventually, I found my mother’s old books. I enjoyed the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins, but my favorite was Wind in the Willows. I favored books that had places I’d rather be in. I much preferred the winding river that Rat and Mole drifted on, to my squalid little life. When I finally found the Narnia series, I was gone, gone, gone. If anyone I knew in Tennessee had had a wardrobe they could have found me in it praying and pushing on the back, hoping it would fall into a winter wonderland and a lone streetlamp. I didn’t know that these books had something so simple as a “genre” (sci-fi/fantasy) to help you identify and find them. Reading was a secret. No one I knew talked about it. My sister read horror books that scared me to know were sitting on our bookshelves, but the concept of a library as a place where fun books might reside was a novel one to me.
For me, our high school library in Maine was merely the learning ground of the horrifying dewey decimal system and the territory of a mean wobbly man whose name was either Mr. Little or Mr. Small. I accidentally called him the wrong name for as long as he worked there and wondered why he never seemed to like me. One day, I accidentally happened upon the beat up old sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks that resided in wire spinning bookracks. A friend and I were giggling, whispering, and trying to escape the glare of the librarian by picking up random books and pretending to read them. I picked up The Beginning Place and that was the beginning for me. It’s one of Ursula K. LeGuin’s early, and now out of print, novels. Today, it’d be placed in the “Young Adult” section because it featured two teens, a boy and girl, unhappy in their own worlds getting lucky enough to happen upon another. There were bits of romance, secret villages, mountains, and quests etc. etc. But what entranced me the most was that the magical land these teens stumbled into was a place of eternal twilight. The concept is so brilliantly, deliciously romantic and captivating that my middle aged bedroom is painted my interpretation of the color of twilight. I then began reading all of the books on those wire racks, tracing my fingers over the “borrower” list of names of those who had read it before me, trying to see if I could find any kindred spirits.
After my brother left home for college, there weren’t enough books in the world to serve my necessary escape, let alone the paltry few in our high school library. My favorite actual escape became the house of my friend Su. Her house was not bathed in eternal twilight--but it was stocked with seemingly eternal Spagettios, granola bars, fruit roll ups, and sugary cereals--which was close enough. I found safe haven in her house where I spent most of my nights. We were given pretty much the run of the place as her sister was long gone and her parents were often not home. I wouldn’t say Su was spoiled, but I would say her mother lovingly spoiled her in her own stoic way. Her mother was tolerant and patient beyond anything I had ever experienced, and they seemed to have a friendship between them that gave Su and me a lot of free reign. We were silly and spent hours in fits of laughter. We also had hours of quiet contemplation and boredom. We’d dress in sundresses and ride old bikes all the way to my cottage. For years, we drowned out the noise of the world in music and laughter. Our world together was chem-free which was ironic because our world’s outside of each other were not. Together, we formed this little pocket where we needed almost no one (our third musketeer, Angie, had moved away) and nothing but each other...although we sometimes had boyfriends and maintained other friendships. Unfortunately, Su was a year older than me and when she went to art college, I was suddenly left in a world devoid of the laughter and safety that she had provided. I was also still nursing a broken heart from breaking up with my first long-term boyfriend that spring.
When Su came home from college in the fall for the first time, my parents were still at the cottage we rented every year. She came straight out there, and we fled out to the lake in our rickety row boat. There was a silence. Not a silence of awkwardness from our relatively short time apart. But a reverence. A moment of perfection, of happiness, of being whole in the moment. We didn’t talk about our schools or our boys. We rowed out from the cove and Su said a simple, “I miss you.” I paused a minute in rowing and replied, “I miss you, too.” We weren’t much for telling how we felt, but there was no greater truth at that moment. By the time we hit the middle of the lake, we hadn’t said anything more.
It was the kind of afternoon that you write about but can never capture. The sun was strong and warm. The trees had turned orange, red, yellow, but the weather hadn’t turned that day.
There are few times as a teenager where you are happy, content, in the moment. This actually felt outside the moment of our real lives. It was a weekday. I don’t remember the details, I think she might have just been home for a doctor’s appointment. The next day, I’d be back at school, facing whatever I was facing at that time in high school. The next day, she’d be gone again. But right then, there on the lake, we were two girls in a boat surrounded by water and autumn trees. She was the friend I didn’t have to be something else with. I didn’t have to be smart, or a cheerleader, or a partier. I didn’t have to be pretty, or careful, or funny. In that afternoon, I imagine she found a recess from being at a new school, homesick, feeling a need to be talented, artistic, unique. We were the things that completed each other. We stepped out from our lives in that afternoon.
The sky was clear and blue. I was reminded of a dream I had once after reading the Narnia series. In the dream, I flew up in the sky above the lake hovering high above the middle, blue sky shimmering on the water far beneath my feet. The sky peeled back and beneath it was another world that looked just like this one. The same trees, blue sky, shining rippling waters, only everything was more vibrant, alive. I shared the dream with Su and remarked how it reminded me of a book I had read, The Beginning Place. As I started to tell the story of the land of perpetual twilight, Su began to finish my sentences for me. She had read the same book. In all the time I knew Su, I had never seen her read a book. We couldn’t believe we had both read it and been so inspired by it, but that neither of us had mentioned it. We continued to row across the lake, now telling our favorite parts to each other. I realized we were almost all the way across which was no small feat for my lazy arms. I saw a fallen tree hanging over the side of the lake (we had been searching for a rope swing off the shore, but had not aimed far enough right) and decided to finish our journey across.
We pulled the boat up by the tree and clambered onto it. We took our shoes off and threw them in the boat. We dipped our feet in the warm sunlit water as we kept talking. We talked then about dreams. The kind of dreams that books like The Beginning Place, make you think of. We were still young enough to have them. We were on the tail end of childhood, where magic still seems possible, we were not yet squashed by the world of adults. We snapped small branches off and dropped them into the water to watch them move, tucked our knees under our chins after we tired of swirling our feet in the water. The sun started to go down, falling away from the water first. We decided to head back to the boat. As we walked to it, we spied a small gap in the bushes beyond it on the shore. We looked at each other and our eyes lit up like kids, “Maybe it’s a trail!” We ran over to it, not bothering with putting our shoes back on, sure that our exploration would be short and futile.
We walked for maybe ten feet through brambles, hopeful that we were on a narrow tangled path. As we broke into the woods, our feet were welcomed by pine tree needles and fallen leaves, a carpet of brown and red. We walked forward toward a green opening lit by the bright taunting retreating sun. Our pace quickened in the excitement. As we neared the edge of dark canopy of trees, we could see what was clearly a path.
The bushes on the sides were overgrown and reaching as we passed, warning us with scratches and stings. We rushed through the uneven ground that was now climbing steeper upward, as we began whispering to each other, “It’s the beginning place, it’s the beginning place!”
Ahead the sun broke free onto grass, about 12 feet wide and up, up, up. Grass, mowed, green, framed with woods on either side. The land crested forward to something we could not see. We thought we knew the roads, woods, fields of our area and where we were made no sense to us. We walked a little slower, partially from the steepness, partially from a fear of what would be at the top. Would we reach the top of this hill of grass and realize we were just in someone’s backyard? Would we be transported in the light of the dropping sun into a world of eternal twilight? Both seemed equally possible. We walked on, whispering our hopes and fears, now holding each others arms scanning the woods beside us, moving with slow united strides, just a bounce away from “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!”
We reached the top of the hill and dropped each other’s arms. Our wide path opened up to an enormous empty field. Lush green grass bent in the wind, ending seemingly a mile away in a tree line the setting sun colored the tips of orange. We ran out into it screaming, “Where are we? Where are we?” We spun around in airplane circles, bare feet now feeling the crunch of the stiff grass and the cuts and scrapes the adrenaline had dulled. This was like the fields of my childhood in Tennessee, green and vast unfarmed land. This was the field that I’d been searching for since we moved to Maine. It was the fields I had wandered in last making the solemnest of goodbyes before I stepped into the moving truck. It was what I sought instead of the cornfield remains of my grandmother’s overgrown field, what I wandered through countless thick pine woods hoping to spy. Su and I screamed and ran and leapt like children. We eventually began a slow wander from each other, lost in our own interpretations of magic.
I found Su after the setting sun began to cool my feet, in a smaller side field off of the main one. Alone in this field’s center was a huge ancient twisted oak. Its power emanated and pulsed. Su was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, quiet, in stony silence, staring out past the tree. I sat beside her and from this vantage point I could see through the slopping trees the water of our lake, rippling and dancing, reminding us we had not traveled too far. The air here was chillier, haunted. I felt, unwelcome. In hushed tones, afraid the tree might hear me, I whispered, “This place scares me,” to Su. She turned and looked at me, her eyes widening as if I had just called her bluff, “Me, too!” We scrambled and ran out of there like that tree was chasing us.
We explored further toward the tree line that was now a darkening shadow. To the left farther up was another field. It was covered with wild blueberry plants and low rocks and small birch trees. It was a magical meadow.
When Su and I stood at the entrance to the meadow, we could hear traffic. We wandered through trees toward the sound and found a crude driveway off of route 17. We stood there in the twilight, watching traffic go by, each car dissolving, shattering our illusion that we had been transported to a magical world. We were silent with disappointment at the mundaneness of such a trafficked paved road for only a moment before Su said practically, “Well, this will make it a lot easier to get back to.” I laughed in agreement. I wished then we didn’t have to walk through a dimly lit field and woods barefoot and row across a lake I was sure would be swooping with bats. I actually don’t remember the walk back across our field that we had dubbed “Our Beginning Place” or the dark long row to the cottage, into a night that I would have to say goodbye again to Su.
Su and I agreed we would only go back to the field together. But I went back when I was sad or lonely. I found her there, when I bundled up and read books I thought she might like. I would sit on the rocks alone, reading more books from the library, running my hand over the borrower names, seeing the neat careful handwriting of my ex-boyfriend with a date stamped a year before our love story. Another part of me had been unknowingly a kindred spirit member of our secret sci-fi/fantasy club.
Su and I soon began a new ritual of confessing when we had gone to our field without the other. But we liked going there together best. We swore we’d never bring anyone else there. A promise we kept until the next summer when we were dating best friends. Tall, lumbering, artistic types who were just the sort of boys you would want to bring to a magical field on a full moon night when you were girls wearing long black dresses. We did just that. But their laughter, their jokes and kisses, they belonged in a different world of magic. I never brought my boy there again.
I went to the field on the day I thought I would break up with my boy, but discovered I couldn’t. Su found me there, crying. Whenever the other one would disappear or was troubled, we would pull into the hidden drive and search or wait. Our need to visit the field that summer became limited. That was the best summer of my youth. The kind of summer that makes you look up the word halcyon.
Six years later, after Su died, I searched for her in our field, in Our Beginning Place. I went there on the first warm day when I was home. I walked into the big field and whispered her name. I looked down the vast empty field. Its magic was gone now. I felt if I walked deeper in, I would still see her sitting under that ancient tree, and I’d want to run and warn her. My feet wouldn’t take me further, my heart wouldn’t take me further, an invisible force field of fear of all that isn’t magic in our adult world froze me. I stepped instead into the magical meadow and whispered her name. A monarch butterfly alighted on my finger. In all of our time there, I’d never seen a butterfly. I think Su would have hated being a butterfly. She would have much rather been a spider or a bat, but she wouldn’t have wanted to scare me, so maybe...
I started writing this piece about a book and in the writing process, it became a piece about Su. It’s been 21 years since we lost Su. Today is her birthday. I’ve always felt hindered in my ability to write about her. I felt it had to be a perfect tribute. With age, I’ve been freed from the notion of perfection. She wasn’t, I wasn’t, and at times, our friendship wasn’t. She doesn’t have to be a legacy, a butterfly, or my muse. I could write volumes on our years together, so many times that came before and after the day of Our Beginning Place. For us all, she lives on in countless memories. I see her in that day, on the lake, amber preserved in the fall sun, as we discovered our beginning place and stayed ‘til twilight. She’s perpetually in my twilight, caught in a day, in a memory, in that moment of magic.
2 comments:
Linda,
That was beautiful. A perfectly imperfect tribute to your friend.
xo,
Kristie
Thank you, Kristie.
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