It’s the smell that takes me there. When a humid breeze blends the scent of uncut grass with that of smoke from a fire in some distant backyard, it is summer, and I am young, and the world is only that creaky rental house in rural Vermont.
I am behind the house, below the wooden porch with towels and bathing suits draped over the railing to dry. The house itself is all wood, weathered strikingly different shades of brown, and it has the ramshackle appearance of a stick house made by a child or the middle brother of the three little pigs. I am certain one day the glue or paste or tape will break and the whole thing will tip over.
I wander barefoot up and down the strip of grass between the untamed shrubs that lead into the woods on either side of the house. In the setting sun, the trees’ long shadows provide a welcome respite from the heat.
If I follow the grassy runway down the yard, I’ll reach a wooden dock. When the sun is high and hot enough, my little siblings and the friends they’ve brought jump off that dock to swim in the lake. They splash each other and giggle as minnows tickle their feet, and their noise echoes across the otherwise placid lake. Other houses stand opposite the dock, too far away for me to see anything but the colors of their walls.
(I don’t remember the colors. I only remember the hum of the dragonfly who accompanied me the day I took a kayak out to read in the quiet at the center of the lake, and the tingling moment of stillness after the waves of a motorboat passed by.)
As I roam the yard, though, the sun is setting, and the little ones are inside watching Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie. It is a sequel to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, which I watched with them—my two siblings and their four friends, folded over the old leather couch with the stuffing coming out; me, hovering by the ping-pong table, vaguely paying attention to Ivan Ooze’s evil plot as I tried to bounce a ping-pong ball on a paddle one hundred times.
The yard is quieter, but I don’t stop moving. I amble, pace, walk on tiptoe up and down my claimed land beneath the porch and the sunset, humming to myself as I trace with my fingers the veins of a leaf before plucking it from its mother bush and folding it into neat halves, then quarters, then eighths, until it falls apart and leaves my hands sticky with whatever juice lives inside leaves. Chlorophyll, maybe.
My mother sits on the dock, looking over the water. I think Vermont is the only place she has ever been at peace. The air here seems to open her, widening her eyes, stance, and smile. She sips a wine that matches the sunset. I can’t smell her wine from here, but if I get closer I will smell it, and her. Her natural perfume is a faint recollection of wilderness, the scent of an expanse of nature untouched by civilization. It is almost undetectable up here, matching as it does so precisely with the Vermont air. Maybe it’s something inside her, something that makes her take her time at a pace I could never allow myself to slow to, and that keeps her awake in the hours when the world is quietest. Something in my mother calls to this place.
As the lake stretches out before my mother, somewhere past the woods the road stretches out before my father. He’ll be back at some point, smelling of the air freshener in his car that gives me a headache, and calling to me in the volume he got from a childhood drowned out by television.
My mother falls asleep at dawn and my father wakes up. Vermont is the place where she can be still, where my father is too distracted by his own boredom to remember to be the head of his household. He lets her be still here, in Vermont, though we his children aren’t spared from his restlessness.
The driveway, empty more often than not, is a wide path of little stones, too sharp to walk on barefoot, but I do so anyway when my father drags us out because lacing my sneakers takes too long and I don’t like when he yells.
(The rocks might not have been as jagged as I remember; surely they would have popped the car’s tires, and we wouldn’t have been able to make the six-hour drive back home.)
There is a house we pass on the way to town. It has a treehouse in the front, with a tire swing hanging from the branch below, and a FOR SALE sign protruding from the ground beside the mailbox.
(That sign would have been taken down years ago. I wonder if the family took down the treehouse when they moved, if they packed up the tire in the truck or left it for the new owners.)
When we go to town, we go everywhere: to Willie’s Department Store where they sell everything from pharmaceuticals to hammers to string doll effigies of Frida Kahlo, or to Cassie’s Ice Cream where they give you a complimentary bowl of vanilla to feed to your dog, or to the library where they put cardboard boxes outside stocked with old secondhand books they’re getting rid of and want you to take.
After we return home, I am content to rest on the laurels of a quest well completed, but it only takes a few hours for my father to drive off again. He is the city—loud, fast, anxious, determined to prove himself and to see others do the same. My mother is the country. I have both within me. I hope that doesn’t make me the suburbs.
It is hot, but I’m not yet old enough that sweat makes me smell anything more than a little salty, so I am a blank canvas for the portrait of smells Vermont casts on me. Not that I don’t help it along—I pick wildflowers and onion grass and unripe berries, and their odors stain my chubby, curious fingers. Soft dirt leaves its color and scent around my feet, along my shins, beneath my fingernails. In the tangles of my unwashed hair nest the smoky remnants of last night’s campfire. The air is hot and thick, but not so heavy as the air back home. I can breathe.
The breeze passes. The uncut grass gives way to pesticides, the smoke to car engines, the past to present. Vermont is still there, of course. Willie’s might be closed, and someone else lives in that house for sale, and my father has a different car, but Vermont is still there. It sends me greetings on the breeze.