Twenty Minutes for My Childhood

I have just had, or am rather smack-dab-in-the-middle, of one of those mornings that seems to mark the panicked and lovely experience of a girl trying to make a beautiful life for herself in her early twenties. I got up at four am (it's nearing 11 am), I have used three modes of transportation at this point, and have been ever so slightly late to all of my commitments. But, there is a silver lining! My hair looks very chic– that type of chic that only happens to 20-year-old-girls who have gotten windswept and slightly sweaty from running to-and-fro in a panic juxtaposed with the very last bit of youthful curl hanging on into the second decade of their lives. Anyways, not the point. I finally made it to my second to last commitment of this busy Friday: the Hirshhorn Museum. I am meeting friends and peers for an aesthetic experience of sorts. I'm afraid, as per usual, I followed precisely none of the directions. I was given a pencil and paper, put my headphones on, and sat at the nearest bench parked in front of a mural about childhood to stop for some much needed rest. 

11:10 “We could never have loved the Earth so well if we had had no childhood in it”-- Did George Eliot say that? She was onto something… 

11:12 The blue is broken by the green hills of the Earth. Black cursive floats off the right 

horizon into the great monotonous white expanse of plastered visceral walls. My focus doesn't want to move from this vignette of safety and nostalgia. I only have twenty minutes to sit here before I have to get back on the train and return to the blank stares from exhaustion and the stomach aches that are only cured by Vernor’s ginger ale and my Mom. I don't want to move. 

11:15                                     moving=change                 and                   change=loss

11:17 The leaves of childhood gently fall from my memory into my lap with their magic and truth. 

~I PROMISE TO ALWAYS REMEMBER AND FAITHFULLY ARTICULATE ~

11:20 Even when you move away from home, you always go back to visit. I can visit the moments that age and ferment into a pungent cheese in my mind. I can slough big hearty swipes of it on crackers and digest them as I sit in reflection on a bench at the Hirshhorn (can you tell I have not eaten since yesterday), But can I visit the “I”s? I cannot count the hairs on that “I’s head" and tell her that she was always enough.  I can only remember her every once in a while. In remembering, I bathe myself in the comfort of the moments when that blue was broken by the green hills with her bare arches running through God’s Good Earth.

11:22 I have a memory of being in my college ecology class feeling sorely out of place next to the other people in the room that seemed like they knew what they were talking about. I was sitting with starched-shirt-types and they were using funny language to describe the Earth. The way they used their words was foreign, and the Earth was known. 

 I had spent my life in the dirt, with the animals, and in the rivers. I must have seemed feral to them. At one point they even deferred to me on the easiest way to tell if berries were poison, because after hearing about my life the professor had deemed me a tree-hugging-wild-child who would know the answer to this question (I did haha). Since the time of this memory I have traded in my denim and my curly hair for ironed hair and black slacks– sometimes when I wake up in the morning and my hair is in ringlets and my freckles are on my nose with no powder, I feel guilty for covering up the evidence of something I hold so dear: my childhood. 

11:24 I knew the Earth when my Mother let me keep a pregnant bunny rabbit and put all of her babies in the pockets of my apron as I went about my chores. I knew the Earth when I would go to Aldi’s for the shopping after Mass with Mama. I felt no shame to have my puppy in a basket on my arm and dirt on my knees, even when people stared. I knew the Earth when I used the grass as tissues, the shade of the tree as a blanket, and the smell of freshly rolled grass and the sounds of cicadas as my anaesthetic at night. I miss the days I felt so much I thought I would explode.

11:26 We share the Earth. I shared the Earth. I shared it with my sister, I shared it with “BFF’s Forever”, and I shared it with everyone I loved a long time ago when I knew what that meant without a single hesitating voice in the back of my head 

When did I forget how to be brave? 

You cannot separate childhood from the Earth. The Earth watched my mom and I rip through citrus fruits to share, she watched “Juno’s Swans” (the faithful companions I spent my girlhood with) leave the passenger seat of the pickup we shared for a dip in the river because the a/c never worked, she watched me sneak to my room stifling cries because a fawn was dead on the side of the road and I finally knew what waste was, and she watched me on that December day when my friend took me to climb the hill and taught me all about the Normans and gave me their  gloves because my hands are always turning blue. It was then I came to understand the speciality and absurdity of friendship. 

 ~PLEASE        DON'T        LET         ME         FORGET~

We are beautiful because we are the Earth. We are the only piece of Earth that will never pass away. We are part dirt, part stardust, and part Breath and Love– Isn’t that magnificent? Human life is neither tragedy nor comedy; it's a silly and brilliantly messy concoction of both, everywhere, all at once, and it's coming right at you. It's good, then it’s terrible. Sometimes it is so beautiful it burns your eyes, and you have to try not to look away–  these are the days we remember. 

It’s 11:30 now, and I have to go back to my nauseating pace, but I am filled with gripping hopefulness that childhood will take me back to the blue horizon cut with green hills again soon. 

    I never have time      —>    but once in a while, I have 20 minutes for my childhood. 

How would I spend them? I'll take the odd 20 minutes for the sunlight that brightens my powdered freckly skin that doesn't seem to be as full as it was this time last year, 20 minutes for lattes and chit-chat with mama, and 20 minutes to remember the ringleted girl that is waiting for her life to begin not realizing that it is all already laid out at her feet.  If only 20 minutes could ever be enough…