Back to Nine

I’m in the middle of my 49th year, but last weekend, 40 of those years dissolved and I was joyfully back to 9. 


My parents have packed up the VW van with my sister and me and driven us to the school house countless times over the years. It has been sitting on the corner of wide open crop fields in the thumb of Michigan for nearly a hundred years. The school house has been theirs since they were engaged and man first stepped on moon, but before that it was a working school room for local children. Huge east facing windows that reach the 40 foot tall white tin ceilings, everyday scenes painted by the students - fishing and playing outside with big smiles on their faces are faded by the sun. My own memories of fresh air summers spent there are still painted on my heart, but fading as well. 


With the weight of this world wide uncertainty and the repetition of days spent at home - dreams of driving up to the school house kept popping into my head. A new perspective would do me good. I hadn’t been up there in many years and didn’t know what to expect. Would it have changed? How would I feel stepping into the setting of my childhood?


Twenty mile an hour winds were whipping down the long dirt road and bending the pear trees, but the school house was right there, rooted and solid and inviting me in to take refuge for a while. There’s something about tall ceilings and huge windows - not only does it make you feel small, but the burdens you carry are suddenly lifted up off your back and all that open space invites your imagination to be uncaged and take flight. Sparks of illuminated dust particles floated in slow motion around me. Walking across the dark amber wooden floor, straight ahead to the expanse of green chalk board is the route I would have taken as a young girl. It’s there that I expressed myself with dry bits of white chalk in words and mostly drawings.


This one large room now has designated areas for cooking, eating, sleeping and hanging out. Looking around, some of the furnishings have changed but the feeling remains the same. Like a warm hug. Comfort. Acceptance. I feel unwound, unburdened and peaceful. My parents' joys and love is in everything. There’s a list of birds and wild creature sightings handwritten by my dad on the fridge along with a breakfast recipe he created and cooked for the two of them. There’s shelves of silver tools and contraptions in the ‘boys’ bathroom, a place for him to try out his unconventional wind-catcher inventions from found items. He would show me what he was working on and explain it to me. My mom’s scissors are left on a cushioned chair - one for cutting fabric and one for cutting creative shapes out of paper just for fun. Pages of her marker and colored pencil doodles are in stacks. An old church bulletin lays out with penciled notes to my dad indicating her concern for a church-goer now home from the hospital. Thick black records remind me how she would fill the room with upbeat music and we would sing and dance together as green-eyed flies would sneak through the open doors and land on our sticky, unfurled fly-catching strips. 


Outside, the acre of land that butts up against a sugar beet field, the once small trees are now tall and full. I find the graveyard of the swing set laying in the grass that my sister and I played on as kids, rusted and deteriorating. I can’t dwell too long on the sadness of what is gone, as it molded me into the person I am today. All those days spent mostly outside, breathing in nature from the crack of dawn glinting off the silver silos, picking wild raspberries in the forest, swimming at the beach in the heat of the day, making drip castles in the wet sand, visiting the one-stop-sign-town for an ice cream cone, playing games and laughing with my sister, exploring and finding rocks, bugs and flowers filled up my soul. Some days were extended by curling up in a cushion by a soft crackling campfire and having my dad point out constellations in the enormous, inky night sky. Peeling back the silver paper of a chocolate bar for s’mores was exciting and licking the melted marshmallow off my fingers, as we sang and told stories. I was a carefree kid with bangs - before bras, boys or bills. 


Sometimes family friends would meet us at the school house and us kids, united again from our neighborhood would go trekking down the long, straight dirt road for an adventure - always going south which led to a crick that ran under the road. Flat fields of crops and lines of tilled earth surrounded us for miles. From the edge of the ditch we would pick bouquets of Queen Anne’s Lace that had little ants crawling on them and be greeted by large loose dogs wagging their tails as we passed each farm house. From any direction you can see the entire expanse of the cornflower blue sky. This is still the same. My first morning back, I laced up my hiking boots and pondered how I would greet the loose dogs I might encounter. My breath tightened half way to the old crick, as a gun shot rung out, coming from the property I was near. It’s a Sunday Morning, typically more quiet than ever, but two more shots were fired. My heart rate and walking pace quickened, worried that a bullet may find me. I actually thought to my self, “Well, if this it, I will have died happy, here on this dirt road from my childhood.” That’s when it became crystal clear to me how grateful I am. Grateful to have had a life so connected to nature. Feeling so free, so safe and so blessed to just be my self and be loved. 


I approached the old crick and sat on a large rock at the edge.  A steady flow of water rippled over the same bed of rocks. The book I had brought with me on this trip was “You Are Here” by Thich Nhat Hanh. He uses the metaphor of the river in explaining that everything is changing - our physical form, our feelings, our perceptions. Watching the current comb the the wisps of bright green algae, I thought about how impermanent everything is. Despite the school house feeling like a firm foundation to me, one day it may not exist anymore. The crick may dry up, the farm land overdeveloped. I relished every sensation I could soak up in the moment of my Now - the trickling water sound, the bright white birch that serves as lookouts for the birds, the rusty, but still sharp barbed wire I almost lean back on, the dry, crunchy leaves on the ground, the cool breeze and warm sun on my face. 


I am so blessed, so grateful to feel as free, loved and unburdened as I did when I was nine. Before I walk back, I grab a rock the size of a blueberry muffin that was nestled between the roots of a tree and I push it down into my jeans pocket. A reminder. Anytime, anywhere, I can go Back to Nine. 


Beauty is Everywhere
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​- Holly