Everyday Stranger

Floorboards

When I was a little girl, my grandparents had a farm in Iowa. I remember spending a lot of time there, as my parents zinged back and forth between being together and World War III, spending time in the one-level home that smelled of cigars, salt, and the poofy puffed scent of bread when you open the white breadloaf bag.

I think it was always hot there, the sun smell of soybeans and rippling sunlight hanging just around the air, making the ground vibrate. I didn't really have any friends and I never fit in there. I would spend a lot of time with my imaginary friend, a young Spanish boy named Mario who would walk through the cornstalk rows with me and examine the potato bugs and the dry cracked earth, a boy who disappeared without a trace but for whom I am still grateful for his imaginary company.

The thing about the farm life is that it's a number of lives built on a number of other lives. There is no farm land there that wasn't someone else's farmland before, farmers that just drifted away and disappeared. My grandfather owned what seems to my still child-like memory a whole world of farmland, sometimes we would have to get in the old dusty pickup to get to other fields, me riding in the back trying not to touch the scorching hot sides of the truck bed.

Once I went with him to his further-away fields, and while he was busy on a tractor on one of them I walked along the cornrows in amiable company with my man, Mario. We noticed a patch of unplanted ground, a little cove that had thick grass under the shelter of some trees. Investigating closer, I found it was a small graveyard, a jumble of tombstones falling to the side, the names edging their way back out of the headstone, a family of tombstones grouped under the trees, forgotten.

A whole family, buried and ignored for the rest of their internment.

And no one remembered them.

The Iowa landscape was covered in homes whose owners had simply walked out, closed the door, and gave up. I never knew if they had died, moved house, or were the victims of land repossession. They had simply vanished, leaving their homes to sit by the side of the road, the doors hanging off in a silent gory moan, an aching scream that this was the end of the line and that their days of being a cherished abode were over. Some of the houses were more modern-linoleum countertops and drawers with shiny knobs, drawers that hosted families of mice and daddy long legs. Other homes had lost their sheen-stripped of their paint their wood weathered to a dark gray as they slowly slid into a second stage of repossession, that of the weathered vines and cat-piss smelling cowslips claiming the land back.

Sometimes they had treasures in them-an old abandoned telephone provided hours of entertainment for me. A broken china doll on a shelf, its face cracked into four pieces. Doorknobs that I pretended were pirate treasure. I remember walking around in the houses, nudging the ghosts out of the way, saying Excuse Me as I walked into their territory, tread where their couch once was. And when you got to the top floors, you had to tread more carefully, to weigh each footstep, to find the consequences of each motion. I had to walk carefully, thinking about where to plant each footstep and knowing at any moment that one wrong movement and boom! I would fall through the floor.

I think life can be a lot like those houses. When life is going rough, I walk along the floorboards (both literal and emotional) carefully, wondering where the next footstep will land me. Will I be ok and make my way safely across the floor? Or was I not thinking and said something not well thought-out enough, something that will send my leg through the floorboards and lodge splinters in my shins?

I have grown up but still have to ease my way across the floorboards. I have traded in Mario for a little dose of disassociation. And although I am so happy here, it never causes me to forget that I am still broken inside, still in need of some intense, long-term therapy. And still treading carefully along the floorboards.

Maybe I am just like that broken china doll-although my face looks unbroken, lift the skirt and you can see that my bodice was ripped open a long time ago and all the stuffing was pulled out. And all I want to do is make it across the floor without fucking it all up, to get out of the house and out of that farm, to get out of that state and even out of that country, and get far away from the ghosts that still linger in the cornstalks, that whisper in the sunshine and the crickets, and run and run until I know that any floorboard I cross will support my movement.

-H.

PS-Still no broadband, so still limited blogging and emails.

Posted by Everydaystranger at June 9, 2004 08:28 AM | TrackBack