Travelogues

15 thoughts on “Travelogues”

1. We were in Miami, my mom and I, on our first trip by ourselves in years. Waking up early in the morning to make the most of this 3-night trip, we drove to South Beach Miami. As soon as we got out of the car, I understood that it was going to be a hot day. My mom was pleased with the heat, embracing the sun. It was only 9 am, but the humidity and brightness from the sun had already made me tired. We walked around for a while, window shopping and looking at the Latin American food restaurants. We were awed every time we walked by a family speaking Spanish and excited to feel at home. By 11 am, we decided to go into the water. I was sweaty and grumpy, ready to head back to the apartment, although I knew that it wasn’t an option since we were staying outside the city. My mom was calmer. Through the sweat, she still enjoyed the moment and was happy to be there. We set our towels on the hot sand and headed to the water. The barefoot walk from the towels to the water burned my feet, yet once again, my mother didn’t seem bothered. The water was the best part, clean and soft. I was pleased to be in the water, but we could not stay in there forever. This was my first time in Miami, and I would not like to go again in the summer, maybe during the winter. As for my mom, she loves Miami; she visits once a year but would never leave there permanently.

2. My first time traveling by plane was to a very familiar place. It would become the only place in America that was not enduring a frozen hell – Miami, Florida.
   My dad was unloading my suitcase from the car, he cursed at the disorganized pile of work tools that was making the job harder . I was too consumed by the coming events to help. I tried to look through the glass for where to go next. After I had everything, my dad looked at me. I did the pat down – passport: check , phone: check and head : still in my shoulder. We gave each other a breathy goodbye under the burning cold of a winter night. I could call him if he needed me. When he pulled out of the terminal, I walked through the automatic doors full of purpose.
   LaGuardia airport was a ghost town. A center of constant influx of people was strangely silent. The endless chasms under my eyes did not mix well with the surgical level lighting in the airport. It was 3 am in the morning- who cares? . We all had matching eyebags. I went through the cycle of every other trip I have done with my family more calmly that I expected. Took my shoes off and took out my laptop.
   After the most anxiety ridden part, I could really start to look around and really feel. The terminal was full of glassy marble and sleek windows. As I walked and people dispersed some to eat some to their gate, I was sometimes the only person for miles. When I passed the food court my stomach grumbled for the variety of places available but not open. Some girls were working the graveyard shift at the single convenience store. I stayed silent for a long time once I arrived , I wondered why I had made it seem so stressful .

3. I’ve never really experienced air that lacks moisture. In Palm Springs, you don’t feel the air when you move through it. It isn’t necessarily crisp as much as it is light. The earth is cracked and thirsty. Thorns sprout from the ground, tempting walkers to touch them.

   Standing in the kitchen, the sun comes in through the window and warms my cold skin. My mom writes in her journal on the balcony while my sister flips through a deck on her laptop. They don’t say much but I can tell that they are holding each other out there. Everything is quiet except for the hush of a passing car and the rustle of a lemon tree. My fingers sweat and stick together as I press down on a fresh orange. The soft whir of a 90s era juicer fills the room followed by the rhythmic splash of flesh into an empty cup. Gramma would love this. I wonder if she gets to have her daily cup of orange juice in the hospital. I would have brought her some if I wasn’t here. But how were we supposed to know what would have happened in December? How could we have guessed that going on our planned vacation would hang in our lungs and pang us with guilt? My mom is hanging on the edge. My sister is waiting to catch her. And I am making orange juice.

4. The drive from Smith to my house takes about four and a half hours. That night, it was closer to 5 and a half hours. I had offered to drive back to give my Dad a break since he had just done the drive down. About an hour and a half in, things are going well. We are listening to my Dad’s ski playlist(one of six he made for the season) singing loud enough that our voices are filling the car with sound. The air is warm and cozy and the cars on the road fly by us with bright yellow eyes. All of a sudden, I smell something. It doesn’t smell good. The smell was that of burnt plastic and it started to get more aggressive as I realized, I heard something crackling too. Now I’m freaked out. I turn down the music and ask my Dad if he hears the crackling. He, like any good Dad, rather than taking me seriously crinkles the bag of chips he was eating between us and says, is this the crackling you’re talking about? I roll my eyes while he laughs at my expense, a reminder, that I’m still driving. So finally he tells me to pull over, easy enough. Once I pull over he shines a light at me, I notice the smoke immediately. I turn my head to find the driver’s side door smoking and sizzling. I throw it open as my Dad gets out on his side and makes his way around. Both of us can’t help but laugh as the door billows with smoke on the side of the road. This was going to be a longer drive than anticipated.

5. Rows of wide aluminum canoes with their signature bright orange stripes lean against one another, the ones farthest from my tiny toes lean against the crumbling stone wall. The camp is old, really old, but the canoes always appear shiny and brand new, proudly displaying the names of the honorees, my grandpa and mom among them. They sit in the dark brown mud, the earth unable to sprout grass due to the feet of small children.

   Years worth of history is present here, like a photo album or a guest book allowing future generations to wonder about the people behind the names on the dozens of canoes. At least I wondered, at the time. I wonder now if they are ever all used at once, or if they are just there for history’s sake. I know now they acknowledge the leaders of trips of significant length and grueling difficulty.

   I am about to leave for trail: an excursion full of mystery to me. I am about to follow in the footsteps of three generations before me. I am about to learn what my grandpa, mom, aunt and uncles, older cousins, and older sister had been praising for years. Trail.

   I was tiny, having just barely finished fifth grade. With my short, sandy brown hair most likely held back by a headband, I was ready to go. Maybe.

   I had heard of the brownies made only with water and cooked over a campfire. Scrambled brownies. It sounds weird, but they taste delicious. They’re still my favorite. I had heard of the routes, the tents, the new friends that would supposedly last a lifetime. My mom still remembers her Camp friends, but will I?

   We save the canoes from the mud. Our first exercise in teamwork. We move them to the water, careful to avoid scratching the keels on the ground. Our tiny arms work together to carry three boats to the waterfront, then slide them into the slightly rough waters.

   Then come the packs. Practically twice our size, it’s a comical but true testimony of the strength of a Manitowisher. They get hoisted onto our backs, then off again into the center of the canoes, between the seats. They are soon joined by the first aid kit, maps, water bottles, and paddles. It’s time to go.

   I admire Sarah and Iris for taking five 5th and 6th graders on a three day canoe trip. Many of us had never experienced this before. Everything was new. Paddling for so long that blisters emerge on your fingertips; eating summer sausage, slightly warm cheese, and PB&J on bread slightly burnt from the dutchie; steering the aluminum canoes (avoiding sunburn and lily pads at all cost); living amongst thousands of mosquitos; paddling in a straight line (or even remembering to paddle at all); getting in the water with hiking boots and warm wool socks (and then putting them on again the next morning before they have fully dried); I could go on and on.

   Upriver, portage, campsite. Portage back. Note to self: it’s hard to carry a canoe on your shoulders when it weighs way more than you do. I carried one up the small boat launch on our way back. I took six steps, my shoulders trembling in their attempt to hold the weight. It was heavy, really heavy, but I did it. Downriver, campsite. Course set for Camp Manito-wish. We made it. Back home.

6. Traveling at a steady 65 miles an hour the sun blinds my eyes even when I pull the mirror down that hangs in front of my eyebrows. I squirm to the space between the headrest and car door for comfort, away from the beams like strobe lights minus the fun colors. I can feel the car moving so much because every minute that passes, I feel closer and closer to the dreadful campus I must reside at for another 3 months. To the right is the Springfield casino and to the left is that one silver basketball orbe thing that turns red at night. By the time we get off the highway, my dad asks me which direction is the quickest to get up the hill to campus. This is where my anxiety overwhelms me and I begin to cry. I wish I could say this story was about my first semester on campus. Every semester I cry to come back to this place. I can’t believe it wasn’t until my last semester that I was ever excited. Well, aside from the semester that I was returning to a boyfriend but that didn’t last till the spring semester anyway. 1 Chapin Way always made me look around and question how I ended up in this place. I don’t seem like a Smithie if a Smithie had a look. Students walk up and down the hill with boxes and hug each other in the grassy areas with embarrassment that actually look genuine. Most of mine were always fake. I’m not cheery. I would rather hustle to my room with my dad after we establish the quickest way to get my bags from the trunk to the door before struggling to find my key and unlock the unleveled mahogany door before someone says “MIRANDA” and I have to turn and uncomfortably say “Heyyy!”

7. As I entered my fourth and final year of college, I embarked on my first ever extended time away from home. I had been in the bubble of Western MA my whole life except for rare, brief outings for family vacations or other necessary trips. I was accepted into a program through school, called the Picker Program, and as of when I left I wasn’t entirely sure if I was making the right decision by going. I applied for the program two years back and I didn’t know if this was something I still wanted to do, but me being eager to get out of Western MA was enough for me to venture out of my comfort zone. Off I went, taking my boyfriend along with me to help me move down. I packed as much stuff as I could fit in my mom’s SUV and the backseat of my tiny car. I planned my trip to DC without even having an internship lined up- a key component of the program I was accepted to. Thankfully, the Friday morning I left, I got an email accepting me for a position that I was previously turned down for. I took this as a sign and I was super excited to see what the next few months would bring. The drive was long and boring- six and a half hours without stops. After what seemed like a whole day, we arrived at my apartment with my mom right behind us. I didn’t know what the future would hold, but I did know that I was ready for anything.

8. I don’t remember the town we went to, but I do remember the car ride there and back. It was just me, Ms. McClary, Asher, Elijah, and her small, oil black car. I’d weaseled my way into this car by convincing Ms. McClary that I needed the service hours, which, to be fair, I did, but this was sort of their thing. Asher and Elijah were very active members of academic bowl, of course they should get to go on the volunteer road trip. But I was also there. I brought my small suitcase to school that morning, and at the end of the day, as we all walked into the chill evening, the sunset over the school parking lot was a luminescent orange, drowning out the light from the street lamps that were on but not yet needed. Maybe that was a sign that I shouldn’t have been worried about the awkwardness, as Ms. McClary cackled at a joke that Asher murmured.
   The car’s air conditioner roared into the small space, blasting heat, until the cool windows became comfortable to rest on. Perhaps it was the lateness, the road only seeming as long as the glow of the head lights, or the fact that every person in the car was restless, but none of us looked at our phones for the next six hours. I can remember the sound of their sharp laughs, and the textured white holes in the car’s upholstery. The taste of midnight cracker barrel, syrup saturated pancakes, greasy bacon, and flaky, buttery biscuits. The rubber aux cord, that passed from me to Asher to Elijiah until Ms. McClary lost complete faith in our generation’s music taste. Afterwards, we listened to the dulcet tones of Bob Dylan, with his creaky almost squeaky mellow tenor, under our conversation about the start of World War I. I’ll never forget the name ArchDuke Franz Ferdinand. Something about a heated, friendly debate gives me the same energy as drinking a third cup of coffee.
   It was 3:00am when we got to the motel, and I wasn’t at all tired until I actually laid down on the cheap mattress. I signed up for all of the academic bowl trips after that.

9. The happiest place on earth. I had always wanted to go as a kid, but we could never afford it. Eventually, I just stopped asking, my dreams stopped reaching that far. I had gotten my first big girl job and saved every penny I had leftover from the biweekly paychecks. I bought all three of us tickets, but selfishly it was just for me. The little girl inside of me still wanted to go.
   Maybe I saw the park through her eyes. Walking into the gates, it was as if everything sparkled. Somehow the colors felt more saturated, and like a separate planet, different from Earth entirely. There were masses of people, smiling happy families, some a little wildly dressed. Normally this many people would bother me, but this time it didn’t. Smells of different foods entered my nose, some sweet, some savory, some garlicky.
   Something about the experience was almost futuristic. With pictures of our faces replacing the tickets, I could almost feel the government taking our information with every beep.
   I didn’t know a theme park could give you imposter syndrome, but it very much can. I had the day planned out to the second, my mind was like a machine. No lines, no wait, go here, go there, eat this at this place, this is how you have the best Disneyland experience ever. You would think with the thousands of dollars I spent, and all the research I had done, that I’d belong here just as much as anyone else. That wasn’t the case, as the ride rose and dropped, my stomach lurched with it. How did I get in here? I never belonged here. My money is no good here. They made a mistake letting me in.
   But suddenly we are all sitting around a picnic table. There are only three of us so it works. Soft flakey fried bread in the shape of Mickey Mouse sat in the center dusted lightly with powdered sugar like a freshly frosted field. I look up and I can see the sparkle in their eyes too, and all is well again. The bread melts in your mouth and the powdered sugar coats your lips while the beaming California sun beats down on your back. I am from Washington, I wasn’t used to this. I couldn’t find it in myself to care though. The cool mint julep made it bearable, I guzzled down the toothpaste-tasting lemonade trying to chase the heat with a refreshing cool.
   I could only afford one day in this little utopian paradise. The night ended with huge displays of sparkling streaks of color in a pitch-black sky timed to some of the only songs I knew growing up. Floats of smiling cartoon characters traveled by as young kids sat on the safe shoulders of a loved one so they were able to get the best view, because even young they’d remember this. I remembered that I didn’t, there were never any shoulders for me. Only a desperate tiptoe.

10. New York, New York. Vegas, baby! Metal jungle, styrofoam dreams, made and delivered at once. You step foot on the faded carpet, one square out of thousands. The smell is instant – cigarettes and cigars and something like grandma’s perfume. You imagine the scent in the carpet, in the walls, sticking in your hair and plastering your skin. A man and a woman pass you on the left, laughing and smoking, three grandparents in a daze, 22 year olds giggling, your parents, no, strangers but like your parents, girls in bedazzled corsets, Spiderman, another cigarette – someone spills their drink an inch from your black and white and slightly brown checkered vans. You feel the heat pet your skin everytime one of them opens the door. You lean on the handle of your suitcase and watch your dad talk to the person at the front desk, his head blocking the Empire State Building in the painting of New York behind the check-in desk. You try to hear what dad is saying, maybe we don’t have two rooms like he thought or maybe he doesn’t have his wallet, but you can’t hear anything except for the white noise of people, interrupted by the dings of slot machines. Someone just won something, someone’s getting married, someone is probably throwing up in that public bathroom that your mom is in but you don’t know that yet. Once you give up on hearing dad, you turn to the crowd in front of you, the carpet like water, the people like fish, the slot machines like coral reefs. You can’t hear a word any of the fish are saying – fish don’t talk, you remember – so you just watch them, one huge private school.

    You’ve never been interested in gambling, but the lines of the carpet that section off walking space and slot machines space are taunting you, and when you walk to your room, you put one foot on each side. You aren’t one of those kids that pushes away your parents but when you are in Vegas, all you do is wait for them to leave. The last time you were in Vegas was one of your sister’s softball tournaments and the whole Golden Nugget hotel was scattered with softball girls in different colors and uniform cuts. Her friends liked you for some reason, and for some reason, she wasn’t mad at you tagging along, so you and her friends and her journeyed through Vegas, shopping and snacking and laughing. One of the friends was tall and perfect and she liked Harry Potter too and so you guys talked and you wanted her to ask for your Instagram. The softball girls would all pile into you and your sister’s hotel room and you would sit on your bed with your computer on, movie paused, and just listen to them talk.

    When you make it to your room, you lie face down on the cold and thin comforter. After a while, you decide that, to properly watch this new episode of The 100, you need ice cream. You walk down the stuffy, cream colored hallway – you are in the cigarette free hotel rooms that your dad always pays extra for even though nothing is cigarette free in Vegas – and run your hand along the ridged wallpaper, leaving your fingerprints numb. You’ve been humming to yourself ever since you parted ways with your parents on the casino floor, you realize. You keep humming because no one will notice in Vegas. As you wait for the elevator, you look out the window at the rollercoaster and the Hershey’s museum and the people in their costumes. For some reason, no matter how many times you go to Vegas, the only version of yourself that you can picture there is a younger you holding your dad’s hand as giants walk past, the ground littered with cards of naked women and cigarette buds and glitter.

    Everytime you enter the New York part of the New York, New York hotel, you feel like you’ve won the jackpot. The floor is covered with fake cobblestone and the divots under your feet make you feel like a video game character entering a new level. To your right is New York style pizza, to your left a New York style jazz bar and all around, New York style fire escapes. The ceilings are low so you can see into the windows of the fake New York style apartment buildings, lamps turned on and plants in the windows. You imagine yourself living behind one of those windows, in a quaint but homey apartment, barely big enough to fit your bed and bookcase. You see yourself curled up in a huge blanket in the low orange light, looking out the window at the cars and the art museums and the people coming home from work. On the streets of New York, you sit for a second before you get your ice cream and listen to a man drunkenly singing Vienna by Billy Joel. You can’t hear the slot machines anymore. You can’t hear anything but the sound of the city and your own humming.

11. I turn myself around, slowly, in a circle, one hand shielding my eyes from the last bright rays of sun as it lowers towards the horizon. In the shimmery golden light, the endless sea of pagodas and temples look as though they are glowing, shrouded in an ethereal light from behind. I don’t think I’m religious, but it feels very heavenly.
    Settling down on rough brick, taking care to position myself in between the spots of bird poop, I dangle my bare feet off the edge of the temple and lean forward. I watch from above like an eagle, observing the streams of people, mostly tourists, weaving in and out between the pagodas in little trails of ants down below. To my right, the sound of a shutter clicking repeatedly tells me my dad has not stopped taking pictures of the sunset. My mom is standing on my other side, her hair being ruffled slightly by the wind, observing the scene below her pensively. My little sister is excitedly pointing out the horses trotting below as they pull little carriages full of more tourists. My sister is not pensive because she is eight, but I am, because I am 11.
    I stare out at the vast expanse of temples that have been there for thousands of years. Some of them are tiny, not much more than eight or nine feet tall, and you can’t go inside. Others are gigantic, big enough for many people to walk inside and go around and around the circular base like a dog chasing its tail, except with overly-excited foreigners. Earlier, someone told us the story of one of the biggest, most famous pagodas, and how the center of the pagoda is sealed off, and nobody knows what is inside. I wonder if inside is treasure or maybe mummies. I want to write a story about a girl who discovers the secrets hidden in the pagodas of Bagan.
    When the sun finally disappears below the horizon, leaving the stretch of land before us hazy and dim, we finally duck back through the tight entryway and start down the tiny, winding brick staircase that brings us down through the middle of the temple and empties us back out onto the dirt road. Silent, reflecting, we blend into the human ant trails and wind our way back through the ancient pagodas as the sky darkens and mist settles. It feels like a scene from a scary movie, and I wonder if a mummy will come out of one of the temples. To my disappointment (relief), only alive people come out from the temples.
    A few weeks later, we are back home, but we hear that all the entrances to the roofs of pagodas in Bagan have been sealed off for safety reasons; nobody is allowed to climb up there anymore. The memory of watching the sunset from atop that temple becomes frozen in time, the only evidence that it ever even happened being the pictures on my dad’s phone.

12. The van crunches into the snowy parking lot. I admire The Lodge’s signage, the rounded font resembling the Google typeface pre-2013 but thicker. It probably is pre-2013; sometime between 2009 and 2014 for sure. I’ve been watching the flakes fall in silence since it got too dark to read. It feels like midnight (7 PM in the New Hampshire winter). Something about how the lampposts are spaced so sparsely here, and how the snow muffles all ambient sound.

    I load my duffle onto the luggage cart, and lug my skis over my shoulder. Excitement bubbles in my chest. I’m thinking about my pockets and how much I can fit in them. My favorite cargo pants: equipped with a pale pink DS Lite, a faded deck of playing cards, my flip phone (most of the free range kids had one so our parents could summon us for dinner or bed, or find us if we had some tragic accident on the 13% of the mountain that gets cell service), a pen, hair ties, sugar packets, quarters, and a room key.

    My friends are here, somewhere, probably. It’s remarkable how “up in the air” everything was before we became digitally tethered. There are maybe a dozen free range kids, all somewhere around my age. I don’t know their last names. Sometimes I don’t know their first names. There was one small blond boy we just called Quack.

    I scout the sprawling common room, the dusty vending/ice machine room, and the sad excuse for a basement arcade (in our code language: Wyoming, Antarctica, and Hole in the Wall (from the time some drunk guy punched a long-lasting hole in the crumbling drywall). The unsupervised children assemble on Jupiter. We impatiently knock on A205 to find Karate Kid, only to meet an older, bewildered woman instead. Max asks what she’s cooking before we can drag him away down the Cheese Stairs (this one stairwell has reeked of rotting cheddar for two years). We charge down the carpeted halls; each identical brown, ornate floor creates some sort of optical paradox. We throw flightless paper airplanes into Wyoming from the third floor catwalk, and sprint away giggling and crashing through the halls before we can be reprimanded. We hold standing-barefoot-in-the-snow tournaments until our feet go numb (I usually win). We scrounge under the dirty arcade machines for quarters. We sneak from Hole in the Wall to the darkened locker room; Dr. Coconut ducks behind the hallway’s arbitrary pillars and peeks around corners as if we were a SWAT team or a band of thieves. Your entrance to the locker room (codename perpetually under workshop), one of the few uncarpeted swaths of floor, is incredibly important; you must sprint and slide into the room as far as you can before the light sensor detects you and clicks on. We run back and forth for hours, until the dreaded time when our fliphones chime and our parents tell us to get to bed.

13. It’s 4 am, the room is dark aside from the warm yellow glow of a single lamp in the corner, a shadow cast by the dried flower hanging on it. Looking out the window freshly fallen, and currently falling, snow is seen, guaranteeing the coming walk to the train station will need heavier clothes than the ones I planned out the night before.

    The walk to the train station is quiet aside from the occasional car whirring by and the sound of my mary jane shoes crunching against the thin layer of snow. The usually bustling streets are empty, but not frightening, a comforting, almost dreamlike emptiness. Soft, white light beams down every couple of steps from the streetlights and hues of green, gray, and blue illuminate my face from the map I follow on my phone.

    Standing alone at the usually crowded intersection feels strange. Most of the shops are quiet and dark, yet a couple have left the neon signs in their window on throughout the night. There are just enough cars purring by every couple of moments to justify my hesitance to J-walk. I press the yellow “walk” button at the crosswalk numerous times, yet I still wait minutes for the light to change, minutes which are filled with the buzzing sound and animatronic voice responding to my insistent button pushing.

    By the time I arrive at the train station it is still pitch black out, but the wooden train station is shrouded in a warm golden light. The roof of the train platform barely covers the wet bench I choose to sit on, and so I open my holographic umbrella to provide some shelter. Looking through my umbrella gives the world a new hue, one defined by shades of purple and teal.

    The train platform filled up slowly but by the time the train was scheduled to arrive it was crowded with people standing close together, huddling in silence from the snow, a shared grievance over the train’s delay shared wordlessly. Everytime the silence and wind is interrupted with the whistling of a train off in an unidentified direction results in a chorus of heads turning to look down the tracks with the hope that the train may be ours.

    I have to transfer trains at an unfamiliar station during this trip. The next station is far more complex than the single platform train station I came from. It feels like a labyrinth of the same stained tiles arching overhead as I spot dozens of identical entrances to dozens of identical platforms. It takes me a moment to orient myself but once I do I find a screen, slightly cracked and faded with age, that tells me which platform my connecting train will arrive at.

    Both my first and second train ride provided me with the same sights and sounds. Rows of blue cushioned seats, rows of trees whizzing past outside, and silence aside from the sound of the train against the tracks. I initially sit with my head slouched against the window, feeling the coolness of the glass against my head and the slight constant bump that came with the movement of the train. Upon entering my second train I sit straight, trying to remain upright, so as to not disturb myself to the sleeping passenger I now sit next to. They have a dog I can scarcely see through the sheer panel of the carrier on the floor, its beady dark eyes staring at me with cautious curiosity.

    I reach my final station in one piece, ignoring the scenery around me, as it feels all too reminiscent to the dark underground subway stations back home, making it unremarkable to myself. I greet my grandma and the first distinct scent of the day overwhelms my senses, my grandmother’s nautical perfume.

    I have made the journey to my grandparent’s house for thanksgiving countless times, but this time I took a different path, and I took it all alone. The path traveled differed but the destination remained the same, and upon stepping into my grandparent’s house I was greeted by the ever familiar comfort of the sun pouring through the windows stretching from floor to ceiling and the hum of the local news playing idly in the background. The same sights and sounds I’ve heard once a year for my whole life replace the new experiences from the day of traveling with something I’ve always known, the comfort of my second home.

14. I remember their balcony most, the one with countless wind chimes overlooking the cold beach less than a mile away.

    High high up on a very very steep hill (I remember feeling like I was going to fall backwards when we parked on the street), perfect view for the fireworks when the fog wasn’t in the way.

    Carpet, soft and dark brown and free of the staples that riddled the edges of ours back home.

    Colorful peanut MnMs (my favorite part at 12 years old) in old glass dishes placed around the living room. Caution around the glass coffee table’s metal corners (ours at home is wooden).

    A 100 second walk to the nearby park, empty save for me and my brother’s laughter as we stand on the swings and get way too close to the edge of the huge cliff facing west. So so green, from the moss and my knees and the jealous love that I had for this beach-driven cold that seemed to chill your bones before it did your skin.

    Dark, dark red wine. Words like tannins and aerator and wine key, swirling spirals and full laughs and glasses clinking crystal clear. “I love you”s instead of cheers. A tiny heart warmed.

    Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac in the kitchen. Hands squishing tomatoes apart, because even though Dwight and Linda had only known us for a few years out of their 80-something well lived ones all across the country, my mom’s artichoke spaghetti was their favorite meal.

    Soft wrinkles and white hair. Rough hands and tender hugs. Warmth alongside the cold. Pale blues and seaglass and held hands.

    Dwight passed away two weeks ago. Today, mom visits Linda and I await their call. I watch the snow while I wait. I listen to their playlist. I imagine them crying, like I am.

15. The mid-morning sun falls onto the birches watching from either side of the trail, casting thin shadows past the spindly white-barked trees and turning the undergrowth of ferns into bushes of rough-cut emerald. With each step, a little bit of dust kicks up around the soles of my sneakers. The trail’s surface is packed down, but not so much as to prevent fine grains from puffing up to cling to my socks. They’ll be a pain to put through the wash later.
    For now, upwards.
    My dad, my sister, and I hike up the side of the mountain, passing between the affectionate heat of the sun and the cooler caresses of shade, zig zagging through the bristly clusters of birch and the wide slanted segments of what are, in other seasons, ski runs. But right now it’s summer, and instead of frigid snow the mountain boasts bright green leaves and grass. The wind accompanies us up the peak, a soft shadow of sound, not intrusive but simply wanting to be included.
    I cannot hear cars from up here. Sometimes I can see them through gaps in the treeline, traveling across the base of the mountain in neat ant rows. But I cannot hear them, only the wind and the responding rustle of leaf and fern and the steady footfalls of my family as we walk on and on. And I cannot smell them, no exhaust, no oil, only the refreshing washes of greenery and height and clean stream water. And dirt. Honest dirt.