My First Swim

Before Jacob I had always been afraid of the river.  My parents spoke from time to time about drownings there and there were always stories about other accidents and even fights breaking out at the swimming holes upstream, just a few miles out of town.  But he took me there once, to a favorite spot of his.  We were alone and he dared me to jump in and I did.  It was cool and thrilling and I felt myself immersed, baptized into the natural world. A part of it all in a way that I never had been before.  I was sitting on a big rock on the riverbank, hoping to dry off a bit so that the bike ride home would not be so cold. Jacob swung from a rope trapeze and threw himself into the middle of the stream.  He surfaced and shook the water from his hair and swam straight toward me.  He stood right in front of me on that rock and spoke.  “I know our rules. And I know that I could say too much, and I don’t want to do that.  But I have to say something or I’m just going to burst, so here it is.  When I am with you, I don’t want to be anywhere else. You are exactly what I thought you would be.  This is exactly what I hoped it would be. I knew that it could be this way.  This is what all the songs are about.  This is how all of it should have been.”

He didn’t wait for an answer or any kind of response from me.  He went back to the trapeze and flew into the river again.

copyright 2024

Rachel Remembers – the Bike

Once he told me to bring a change of clothes to school.  Pair of jeans, he said. And a jacket. I didn’t tell him that I would, but I did, and minutes after the last bell he caught me in the hallway.

“You bring your other clothes?”

“I might have.”

“Put ‘em on.”

“This is a little weird, Jacob. Why would I do that?  What’s going on?”

“Just trust me on this.  You’ll be happy.  You won’t get into any trouble.”

I turned and went opposite to all the outgoing crowd in the hallway and back to the now empty girls gym locker-room, put on shorts and sneakers and a jacket and left my dress and loafers in my locker.  When I came back to the doorway where I had left Jacob he was just outside, on the walkway, sitting on his red motorbike.

“Come on.  Get on.  Time’s wastin’”

Up until then I had had my own ideas about motorcycles.  They were dangerous and loud and show-offy. I didn’t like the culture they represented.  The grease and noise of it all.  But Jacob’s bike was small, and it did not blare or blast.  Its motor sounded buzzy and non-threatening.  But I still hesitated.

“I’ve never done that. I don’t think I should.”

“All you have to do is hold on.  It’ll be alright.  You’ll love it.”

I climbed on the seat behind him.

“You’ve got to hold on.”

I grabbed the strap on the seat. He chuckled.

“No, not to that thing.  It won’t hold you.  You’ve got to hold on to me.”

And I did.  And we rode off the schoolyard and onto the road, still crowded with students waiting for buses and cars.  He wove the bike through them all and in minutes we were on the river road, and he opened the throttle and the engine revved and then buzzed and I held him tighter and there we were flying through the cool air and sunlight with the green river sparkling beside us, my hair wild in the wind.  Right in the middle of it all.  When we stopped at a railroad crossing for an oncoming coal train, a place I had never been, I caught my breath and realized something that in my till-then prim and self-compacted life I had never experienced.  I had not given a thought to where we were and even as I realized that I was not alarmed.  This was new for me. For once I did not care where I was going, where we were going.  It was in that moment that I allowed myself to admit that this must have been the thing that my friends had told me about.  The thing that they said I had been missing all along.  Life.

It was only that night when I was back in my bedroom, still glowing from the day’s ride that I said to myself that what I had experienced was not just the thing my friends had told me about.  It was far more than that.

This trip was one of many beginnings I experienced in those few weeks.  After it was all over with Jacob I worked very hard not to dwell on or even recall the things we had done or the feelings of those hours.  But I didn’t always succeed.  And if there was one emblem, one symbol of our time together, one thing that marked the rare and distinct time, it was that little bike. 

It was our magic carpet.

copyright 2024

A Dark Dawn

Thunder before first light

I wake and feel the house shake

Nod and listen to the pelting rain

Then the hollow gurgling in the downspouts

Here and then gone and now only clouds

Low hanging, covering the valley below

Around the house the trees, still bare

Are black with the early rain

The sky is grey and close

Even the birds are silent.

Copyright 2024

Chapter Three

Rachel Thompson

A week or so after that terrible debacle at the last dance school was over.  We walked across the stage in our caps and gowns and went back to our homes to loll through another summer, this time anticipating not another chapter in the same, all-familiar book, but new lives in college or the service. It should have been a great relief for me as I now would not have to face Jacob day by day knowing what I knew and how he felt and what I could not imagine a way to explain. My dad got me a little job keeping accounts for a service station outside of town, but other than that I don’t have any real distinct memories of those few months, no recollection of any particular happenings.  I just know that I lived in a kind of emotional cocoon then.  Sealed off. Determined not to put myself anywhere at any risk of crossing paths with David Dunnigan, Jacob Eaton, Beth Blevins, or anyone else who might have pressed me on the story.

Mom and Dad were surely aware of my change in mood, but they did not press me on it much.  I never found out how much they knew of my predicament and at that time it was the last thing I wanted to reveal to them. But looking back on it now, from this far away, it does occur to me that they might have understood more than I ever told them.  If that was the case, this forbearance was not only a great exercise in charity, it was wisdom.

I do remember the day I left town for college.  The looming reality of that great change weighed more heavily on me as the day approached.  Up until then I had regarded or forced myself to regard the prospect of leaving it all behind as nothing but joy.  These bad endings would all wash away, be soon forgotten as mere juvenilia as the days on campus would bring me new associations, new experiences, and greater knowledge and insight.

But as the days dwindled down to hours, I could not quash the natural anxiety that any major change must bring.  And in my case what was only natural must have been amplified by my guilt, my anger, and the undeniable fact that I had left undone that which I ought to have done.

What stands out most vividly in memory is the moment we drove by the Phillips house on the way out of town to school.  We had a six-hour drive ahead of us, the interstate highways were not finished yet, and so we left a six in the morning with dawn justy starting to break in the east.  We were stopped at the traffic light now in place in front of the great house and my mother looked over at it.  I remember what she said, word for word.

“It’s a shame about that place.  The Richardson’s have really let it go.  Now they’re going to try to sell it.  How will they ever find a buyer in this day and age? Who could possibly afford to keep that place up?  Who would want to?”

And at that moment my image of that house changed.  Now that blue lamp in the foyer was no more a symbol of romance and adventure and far-away things.  Now it was the perfect image of home.  That blue light was the light of peace and permanence and order and the life I knew I could have lived if the world was not the way it was.

copyright 2024

Beginnings

Chapter One

Rachel Thompson

This story is about first loves.  And my first infatuation, rapture even, was with a house.  I knew it from my earliest days as the Phillips house and I walked past it every day on my way to and from school.  Our town was like any other little town in West Virginia in those days – tree-lined streets and avenues and rows and rows of little frame houses, all of them about the same. 

Main street was active then, still in its first life, with drug and hardware stores, clothing shops, a barbershop, a couple of lunch counters, and a movie theater.  All of those things were good, and all of them could have been seen in much the same dimensions and proportions in any little town in our little state in that day.   But the Phillips house stood apart like something from another age, another part of the world, the product of another vision; one that was completely foreign to everything else about our town and my little life there.

In my childhood, I thought of it as a castle. Built of red brick that had been made on site during construction, with stone lintels over every tall window on every floor.  It rose three stories high with a turret at one corner that rose one story higher.  It had a real balcony on the second floor, a long, covered porch that wrapped around the other front corner, and four intricately fashioned chimneys, two to a side. The front fence in those days was made of tall, wrought iron uprights, each topped with fleur de lys. The north-facing windows on the second floor were leaded glass and bore the crest of some Austrian noble house.

It fronted on the river road, one block above Main Street, its grounds spanning wide on every other side, the back lawn terracing all the way down the entire city block to the riverside. I learned that in its earliest days, each of the terraces had its own purpose.  The top level, nearest the house, had been the place for flowers, the next level was curated shrubbery, the next a vineyard and the last, nearest the riverside, for apple and peach trees.  Only the rudest remnants of all that careful cultivation remained when I first knew the house, but in the spring the amethyst wisteria blossoms hanging from the pergola would break into the winter grey first, like life amid death, like something that had just been shipped in from paradise. 

I was fascinated, even carried away by the romantic look of the place, but its spell over me only deepened as I learned of the family that lived there.

copyright 2024

Dreams

I can’t remember my dreams

But I know that I did dream

Then a turn of the head

A moment’s waking in morning light

And they vanish, like wind through a net

Only the whisper of their going remains

.

But what disappears in evening darkness?

Those dreams not of the night before

But those born decades ago

In the days of youth

They bleed away in silent streams

As our strength fades and cannot hold them

.

Will we wake to them again

On some new morning?

,

.

.

copyright 2023

A Quiet Moment

Waiting for guests to arrive

Relaxed, we are, having completed that long list

And now strangely settled for just these moments

Before the cars come down our lane

*

The house is sparkling and smells of pine and candle scent

And in this instant of neatness and order

We see what we have.

copyright 2023

December 22, 2023

From my window I see an oak that was here long before me, or my house or my window.  It will be there, barring storm or disease, long after I, my house, and my window have gone the way of all flesh.  It is bare now, this month of December, only trunk and branches catch the morning sunshine.  The grey squirrels streak in spirals around and up.  Grey on grey.  They stop, still on a high branch, and flicker their tails, caught up in some primal attraction to each other, some hunger for the carpet of acorns below, and some innate, subconscious, physical need for this glorious light.

November 21, 2023

Now five weeks from the winter solstice we have long darkness on both sides of the day.  We now hurry to and from the car, dressed in rain gear, and our feet no longer touch the earth.  It is a season of intermittent windshield wipers and heavy hoodies.  Flavor is bland.  Color is muted.  We don’t even understand how much we miss the light.  How much we miss the warmth.

October 30, 2023. Ten AM

This first cold morning the sky is white and the now almost bare treetops nod in the faint breeze and point their tiny fingers heavenward, like flames.  I hear the random tapping of water drops, the remnants of the rain that fell before dawn and I spy in the maze of branches a solitary Blue Jay perched on a wet, black limb, his wings and head drawn in.  Even those bold colors are muted, almost dun, in this sunless scene.

copyright 2023