nixtress's Diaryland Diary

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A Summer memory

There was a place we lived once, in Pennsylvania. Back in the backwoods, reached only by dirt roads and set up in the hills. It was a big old wooden A-frame, owned by a man who was paralyzed from the neck down. There'd been some sort of accident and he would forever remain a prisoner in his own body.
His gf lived there too, a ditzy blonde who used him for his prescription meds, and her small son. I remember hearing them arguing because his painkillers were coming up missing and she adamantly denied dealing with them, all the while slurring to beat the band.
We lived there free because my mother took care of this man, helping him with his daily upkeep and also helping around the house. I remember we only lived there for a few short months that Summer.
My room was in one of the upper levels, split up and off by a section of staircase unto itself. At night, I'd open the huge window next to my bed and listen to the crickets and frogs singing, smelling the pine trees and watching shadows form between those trees. My mother was always afraid I'd roll over and out that window and so would wait until I'd fallen asleep to pull it flush. I had a small radio, old and stained, with a broken antenna that I'd doctored with an equally old metal coat hanger and some tin foil. One of the drunk men in the bar my mother'd worked in before had given it to me. I'd sing myself to sleep sometimes.
I remember spending days prowling through the woods surrounding this house, climbing on boulders so large they'd been left instead of moved. Moss-covered and slippery with vines, it was fun to see how close to the edge I could stand without slipping off. I found the neatest hiding spaces amongst those trees, places the deer had bedded down. I'd come home covered in pine pitch and smelling like one walking pine cone.
There was a field over and beyond, a huge, open, sun-filled place, with the sorts of wild weeds that grew waist high and thick. No brambles, these, just swaying grasses and flowers. I convinced myself that if I could just figure out how to unlock it, this was the doorway to another place, another time. I spent hours in my head there, pretending I was anywhere else, pretending I didn't have to go back to a house that smelled of invalid and camphor and pot. Back to a house that still couldn't stop my parents from drinking and beating the crap out of one another.
I taught myself to braid the grasses and wild flowers into quirky little wreaths, ones I hung from every surface in my room until they grew brittle and dry and crumbled into dust. I dug holes in that field, for things that were important only to the little girl I was then, silver dollars and bottle caps and half a wooden nickle. I wonder if they're still there.
The ditzy gf decided it would be a good idea to feed the bears that came to the buffet that was our trash. She stood on the back deck, tossing them apples with no regard to her little son inching closer to those bears. I remember my mother berating her for putting him in danger and so the gf came inside the house instead and threw those apples out the window.
I don't remember why we moved away, other than a huge fight between my mother and stepfather. After smacking her face bloody and then shoving her down the stairs, he drove away and she sobbed. We moved in with friends of hers' shortly thereafter, leaving most of our things behind. I'd learned early not to accumulate anything of real value so that wasn't a big deal.
Summertime reminds me of that place, with it's pines and sunshine and relative peace. For a few short months I had the perfect escape---Nature.
I had freedom.
N.

2:28 a.m. - 2005-06-09

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