My Blue House in the Green State

Four-and-a-half hours out of Yonkers, where I have lived for the last 17 years, the air stops smelling like New York and starts smelling like Vermont. 

Stay a while. Put your feet out of the window and let the sound of pavement-pounding tires wash over you. Gaze at the stain that most closely resembles spaghetti sauce on the inside roof of your car, and wonder how it got there. 

Go on your phone, get bored, switch to your book, and switch back again. Stop at one of those off-road gas stations and get a bag of Lays salt and vinegar chips and Fiji water — you know the controversy, but you are thirsty, so you don’t care. 

Take a nap, drive a little longer, and watch the treeline get greener and denser: The trees double, the city turns to sky, and the flat earth rises into ski mountains. Your ears will pop, you will stare at the clock, and maybe you’ll be like me – I’ve always thought the last 30 minutes are the worst of the trip. 

In our janky, blue 2006 Subaru Forester, Mom, Dad, and I crawl past the wine store and the town coffee shop I’ve never stepped foot in for fifteen years. Our car rolls past teenagers on bikes, and I look away, drenched in the oily shame of unwashed hair and a greasy face. I’m sweaty, my headaches from dehydration, and my body is a painful combination of too sore and too loose. 

“Stop complaining, Aviv. It’s just a few more minutes,” Dad says from the front seat. I watch his blue eyes flick from the front view mirror to my eyes.

“Fine.”

I look out the window, breathing in the pine trees that I can only smell this time of year.

For me, summer has always been synonymous with Vermont. Summer is my golden brown curls, lightened by the sun and the lemon that Amy, my mom’s best friend, once put in my hair. Summer is screaming at the top of my lungs into the woods, letting the freedom of summer’s anonymity erode me.  Summer is shorts and no top, silhouettes of sunburnt bodies dancing along the pebbled shore. 

The car squeaks, Dad switches into first gear, and the car comes to a rickety stop for the first time in hours. I glance above the window, a white sign bordered by green peeling paint greets me: Shaw’s.

My memories of Shaw’s are slim: mostly pale white sourdough bread and sandwich-making supplies. I hop out of the car, struggling to get my shoes on before my parents shut their doors; even after all this time, I won’t go into this store alone.

I click on the screen of my phone. It's 11 a.m., still early. I follow closely behind my mom; the sun beats down on my back as we stand before the sliding door. As soon as the door opens, the icebox-temperature air hits my chest. I run my fingers through and up the back of my hair, letting the air fan my sweat-soaked neck.

“Go pick out some snacks,” Mom says, turning to get a cart.

Though I only come once a year, I know the store like the back of my hand. As I go to the snack aisle, I watch my memories unfold along the crowded shelves. Neoma runs down the aisles, and I follow, as a younger sister is supposed to do. Elijah convinces me to switch the cereal I picked; it’s my turn, but he’s always been persuasive. 

But they aren’t here this year.

“Aviv? Ready?” Mom peeks out from behind the end of the aisle; my eyes switch from the shelved walls to her.

“Yeah, sorry. I zoned out,” I say, walking towards her.

There’s only one cashier slowly clicking the screen this early in the morning, and though my patience is waning, I stay calm. I can’t wait to swim.

I’m back in the car now; my eyes burning from pollen in the air and the sun flashing my face through the window. We turn up the hill, the last leg of the trip. I slide on my flip-flops and gather my bags.

On late nights, when the cacophony of crickets and howling wind seeps into my bedroom, I miss the simplicity of being a child. The house has changed since our first summers here, but I am too old now, and I can’t quite remember what it used to look like. I miss the downstairs tub where Mom ran hot baths, and Eljiah, Neoma, and I used to wash off the quarry moss. I miss Amy telling us stories we didn't know were stories yet and Cola, now dead, snuggling up to us on the couch. 

I’m in my bathing suit now. When I get to Vermont, I always walk. I walk through the backyard, up the knoll, down the beaten path, through the meadow, and down to the quarry raft. I need to make sure nothing’s changed. 

When I get back to the knoll, red-faced and out of breath, Mom is already settled in with a blanket, reading on the bench. I look across the hill and listen to Dad’s narration in my head. I’m only half listening to my thoughts, but I know what he’s saying. He’s been telling me this story for a long time.  

“You know, Aviv, this quarry used to be a mine. Going down hundreds of miles, and hundreds of people came to dig up quartz. But, once the mine stopped being used, it filled with rainwater. You can still find the first few steps, but they are moss-covered and slippery.”

My eyes focus again, and I put my hand above them to shield them from the blazing sun. I look up across the lake. I find Amy, a watercolor dot, on her way back to shore. Kikuchio swims alongside her, treading water and blowing air so hard I swear the clouds move in response. I look at the quarry shore and take it all in like I’ve never seen it before. The cattails are no longer taller than me, and the water does not go up to my chest. The rocks have broken off, and the water level laps the sides of the shore differently than last year.

I remember when all I wore to swim was a life vest and an allergy bracelet. I remember the patch of land where you could catch orange newts, though my sister was always better at it than me. I would sit very still, and the minnows would come and eat the dead skin off my feet. There is no longer a path to that part of the quarry; it is just a grass suggestion I stopped following years ago. 

I look up, very calmly so the minnows don’t swim away. The sun points to the jumping cliff. I am older now, but I have never entirely built up the confidence to jump alone. Today, my sister is not here, so I use her childhood screams as a catalyst for my jump. I imagine bickering with my sister about who goes first. She says she will but is too scared, so I go. I walk to the edge and look up at the sky. I ask for a countdown, but there is no one else there.

“Make sure to jump away from the rocks,” Dad says, already in the water, enunciating the word “away” just in case I didn’t hear him yelling.  

“Dad! I’m scared!” I yell between sobs. At seven years old, the height of the rocks feels much higher, and my legs stand superglued to the ground beneath me. He smiles and continues. 

“Three!” he yells; I take a deep breath. “Two!” I brace my feet, pushing against the rocks, silently praying to God that I will see this sky again. “One!” He screams. My feet leave the ground, and I close my eyes.

When I open them again, I hang in the air. The world goes silent in the two-second gap between leaving the rocks and hitting the water. If you listen closely, I swear you can feel the trees breathe, sucking in great gasps of air, as if they have never seen a young girl six feet in the air before. Your legs have hit the surface now, earth-crushing cold water hugs you from behind, your ears fill with water, and your bikini top is not where a bikini top is supposed to be. 

There is always a split second before my head pops up, where I’m stuck between the skin-burning heat on top of me and the skin-stinging cold below. I would love to remain like that forever, fossilized in topaz-colored sweat and white ice. But I can only hold my breath for so long and have reached my limit, so I push my head above the water and let the sun touch my face in a way similar to the gentleness of a young boy touching his first love.

Now, I swim. 

I swim until the sky is unlit blue and my lips are opaque purple. I swim until I recall what it’s like to be young enough not to know how to swim. I swim until I get so exhausted that Elijah agrees to piggyback me to the house. I swim until Neoma finally stops reading her book and joins me in the quarry. I swim until Amy unclips my life vest and wraps my cold body in a towel. 

Then, I will carry my tired body out of the water because I remember my siblings are at college, and I am too old and tall to wear an orange life vest.

I wrap my arms around my shoulders, shivering as I make the freezing walk back to the house. The cicadas chirp, clapping for me as I walk past them. When I get inside, it is empty. I am the last one awake, so I skip dinner and go straight to bed, exhausted from the sun and the swimming, though I know I will do it all again tomorrow. 

Some Vermont mornings, I wake up in a room with six beds, me in the unmade one and the ghosts of my childhood still sleeping soundly in the other five. I rise gradually, not to stir them, and slip unnoticed outside the room.

We’re halfway through the trip now, and my brain is emptier than it was back in New York. It’s not that I’m having a bad time; I could never have a bad time in Vermont. 

Out of the things we do on our Vermont trip, packing to go home is the most structured. I have always hated packing. It signifies the end of something, leaving people or a place. But not in Vermont; I have always known I was coming back to Vermont. 

But not this year. This year, lying in bed, where I had slept since before I could swim, letting the ceiling fan blow a slight breeze on my face, it hit me that I did not know if I’d ever be coming back. A year from now, I’ll be away at college. Vermont will be a distant memory in my head. 

So I lay there, memorizing how I breathe at this exact moment in time, the way the quarry water licked the rocky shore, and the way the grass sounded blowing against the wind.