emlocke

Category: In Retrospect

  • First Urban Snow

    Just when the days start to feel longer, it sinks in that winter has come.  This is the part of the season that makes people complain and move to LA.  After the white and pink of new snow and cold cheeks and Valentine’s Day, there is nothing to do but endure the sullen and gray afternoons and wonder interminably if the sun has risen yet.

    I was waiting in a bubble of people for the light to change on the corner of 54th and 3rd when snowflakes started to come down.  I had never seen it snow in the city before.  That night, from my bed, I watched flakes falling through the streetlights’ yellowish cast and tried to figure out why I felt so unsettled, like I’d had too much coffee on an empty stomach.  Maybe because I’d never watched a snowfall like this from anywhere but my bed at home?  No, that’s not right; I probably saw more snow through the windows of my college dormrooms in Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York than I did in the four years that I lived officially in my family’s blue house on a hill in Southwestern Connecticut.

    I used to watch flakes blow sideways at the windows and feel like I was flying headfirst through space with tiny stars coming straight at me.  Warm and dry in the house, it seemed like the world had grown very still as it hunkered down to wait for the end of the storm.  We kept a ruler stood on end out on the deck to measure all that accumulated over night.  If it keeps falling through morning, it takes half a day for the family-owned plow trucks to roll out.  I always liked looking at my dad’s and my dog’s footprints in the snow.

    Snow in the city is nothing like that.  I couldn’t see flakes against the dark sky because the city sky is never dark.  When I looked at the rows of windows across the street, I more than half expected to see them filled with rosy faces watching, watching, watching, but everyone was asleep.  The sound of a city plow clanking against the curb startled me awake at 4AM.  Snow was still falling, but New Yorkers don’t believe in waiting it out.  No one pauses at the window and holds their breath.  By the time I walked down the street to catch the train to work, nothing but slush was melting in the gutters.

    Slush, I’m used to that.  The way tires churn it like a frothy cake batter.  The way it looks, at times, both solid and liquid, but is neither.  The way it splashes and immediately makes your cringe and think, ‘wet shoes…’  The way, after awhile, the plow shovels are just pushing it to one side of the gray street and back.

    The monotonous days of winter are upon us.  Nothing more to accumulate here.

  • Lately, I’ve been thinking about camp

    It was summer and,
    At seventeen,
    We bickered over who most deserved
    To operate the cotton candy machine at the camp carnival.

    After dark, we took shifts.
    One kept watch for flashlights coming down the hill.
    The rest slipped in and out of the water,
    Breaking the surface of the lake with wet skin,
    Breaking the silence with gasps of laughter and shushing.

    On brisker Berkshire nights,
    We congregated beneath the covered bridge
    To assemble bits of birch and hemlock.
    Sculpting flames like Bernini.
    Our fountain spout fire.

    Some of us smoked up.
    Some of us blew bubbles.
    All with equal authority over our inferno,
    The consensus always, “throw more on.”

    Before lights out,
    We tucked in,
    We dried homesick tears,
    We sang bedtime songs,
    We read insipid inspirational poetry,
    We pointed out constellations.

    After Taps,
    We stargazed two by two.
    With our eyes closed,
    Our mouths open,
    Our hands warm beneath fleece
    With someone else’s name sewn in the collar.
    That’s the buddy system.

    We stayed up too late.
    We smelled like lake water and burning leaves.
    We kept secrets and promises.
    We sang the same songs.

    But none of that mattered
    When it came to the cotton candy machine.

  • My name is Eloise. I go to Pre-K at the Y.

    I thoroughly enjoyed today’s New York/Regional article about the fleet of luxury vehicles that idle outside the YMCA on 92nd street and Lexington, which I read bit by bit on the subway this morning by craning my neck while a man who actually subscribes to the New York Times read an article on the opposite page. It covers the notable increase of these vehicles outside the Y every morning as they drop passengers off on the red carpet that leads up to the pre-school.

    Yes. Pre-school. Not post-school. Not even school-school. Pre-schoolers are being dropped off for the day in hired cars that cost about as much as a year’s tuition will by the time they get to college.

    This article tickled me so much for several reasons. One, the photograph beside the headline is absolutely precious. A little girl wearing tiny brown sandals and a wide-eyed expression toddles forward, her arms posed as if she might be marching, from the open jaws of a Mercedes SUV. A round man in a very black suit and gleaming dress shoes holds out an umbrella large enough to swallow her whole.

    It is the very picture of a young child about to begin a day filled with chatter, play-dough and animal crackers while her parents are off somewhere else (note that this driver isn’t just waiting in the car, he is also am umbrella-wielding escort) engaging in hoity-toity babble, pushing around dollars and dough, and munching daintily on tea and crumpets. Do they know how adorable their little girl looks on her way to school? Only if they had time to read the Region section of today’s paper.

    I also love the fact that this article contains the phrase, “subsequent research,” indicating first that initial research took place, and second that it did not prove sufficient. And what did we glean from the subsequent research? 1) Most of the escorted children have fathers who work in “capital management.” 2) Most of their parents have been married for at least 10 years. 3) School officials have far too much time on their hands.

    I have to say that I found it quite interesting that all of this effort went in to running background checks on the students’ parents and no one bothered to investigate the drivers, the ones who are actually spending time in a moving vehicle with the kids.

    Finally, I am most fascinated by the letter sent home to parents by Nancy Schulman, director of the apparently famous nursery school at the 92nd street Y. As a former student, employee of my hometown public school system, and camp counselor, I have had the opportunity to skim my share of letters from school officials to parents. Most recently, I had the pleasure of reading lines transcribed from a letter to parents of Simsbury High School students, which included, “Please forgive us for going into detail here,” and went on to describe the “front-to-back dancing” that is now prohibited at school-sponsored social events. Like much of the mail that public school administrators send home to parents, it blamed students and society and encouraged parents to “have a conversation” which their society-ruined students.

    The best part about Ms. Schulman’s letter is what sets it apart from all the rest. According to the article, “The letter…reminded families that one assessment Ms. Schulman and her colleagues are asked to make by lower-school admissions officers is whether the applicant’s parents have been “cooperative” with the school’s requests.” She scolds the parents! You tell ’em, Nancy!

    This whole scenario reminds me fondly of Eloise, the rambunctious six-year-old who lives at the Plaza Hotel with her nanny, Nanny. Where are Mom and Dad? Absent, absent, absent. Meanwhile, their far-from-demure daughter runs helter-skelter about the hotel, generally wrecking havoc in every possible way.

    Now, I know it’s just a picture book and I know nobody wants to read about the Eloise who lives at the Ho-Jo’s over in Jersey City. The point is that, while it’s clear that Eloise loves living at the Plaza, she would be equally happy to wreck havoc on a less glamorous setting. Maybe more so. Little Eloise can’t tell the difference yet.

    I only wish there were a way to preserve the look in that little girl’s eyes as she is delivered into the world from the climate-controlled backseat of her Escalade or Beemer or whatever. I hope that she doesn’t forget that “paper cups are very good for talking to Mars,” as Eloise taught us, the very moment she enrolls at whichever private private private Kindergarten her parents have selected.

  • On My Best Behavioral Impulse

    The Uniball Vision Elite. That’s the name of my favorite pen. It comes in an array of colors, including jeweled hues of pink and purple. The cap makes a very satisfying sound when I click it on an off to pass the time during the weekly staff meeting. But most of all, it has a lovely…there should be a word for this…it has a lovely write to it. A smooth, crisp write.

    I’d say it’s been about ten years since I started having the impulse to color in my own lips with a pen like the Uniball Vision Elite. That’s a very indefinite estimate because I don’t remember the impulses themselves, or when or where they took place, as well as I remember actually having them. How badly I wanted to trace the rise and fall of the crest at the top of my top lip. How hard I had to resist the urge to fill in the curve at the bottom of my bottom lip.

    I confessed my desire to my mother once, half teasing when I asked her, “haven’t you ever wanted to?” She suggested I restrain myself. Then she suggested using a lip pencil to fill the void, but I didn’t bother. If I had been fighting the urge to rub a greasy, flaky crayon across my mouth, I probably would have just gone for it. Pen has a different texture. My bizarre urge is as much about tracing my lips with a pen as it is about feeling the ink run on my skin. And there is no practicing with ink.

    In the last decade, I’ve given this whole situation a lot of thought, and this is what I’ve come up with: There is absolutely no reasonable way to explain my own entirely abnormal thought process and I am certifiably insane and destined to spend the better half of my adult life bound up in a straight-jacket with very, very dark lips. Come on over and take me away. I’ll sign myself in, just give me the damn pen!

    Alternatively, there is the theory that the pen-to-lips impulse may have stemmed from one of two events. It might have started around the same time teen beauty magazines entered the scene and became a regular part of my reading material. Visually impressionable and faced with so many human lips, how could one not fixate on our mouths’ lovely lines? But I tried taking a pen to the glossy girls on the pages of Seventeen and YM, and I wasn’t satisfied.

    So there’s this other thing, and that’s the drawing and painting class I took at the private school in town for two weeks during the summer after sixth grade. I met a boy named Lawrence, who may or may not have been my first gay friend, and I painted two canvases. I still have both. One depicts a rock, a stone, and a pebble on the cross-bar of my borrowed easel. The other is a somewhat warped rendering of my right hand as if it were painting itself. My hand is wearing a different jelly bean nail polish color on each fingernail, just as I was, as every girl who read teen beauty magazines was, that summer after sixth grade.

    I wasn’t really a fan of the painting assignments. Let me rephrase that; I really wasn’t a fan of the painting assignments. First of all, both were pretty steeped in earth tones, so I had very little opportunity to use my favorite colors. Second of all, rocks? Please. Stop holding me back. The next Starry Night could be right beneath my surface and you’ve got me painting rocks. (I never was very good at the whole ‘taking lessons’ thing.) And I didn’t want to stare at my own pink hand for hours on end, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of transferring its likeness to the canvas (I just told you, I wasn’t very good at lessons!)

    My teacher, a man with tough, wrinkled skin and salt and pepper in his long ponytail and in his arm hair, sensed my displeasure. The unrelenting pout on my lips might have tipped him off. One afternoon, he pulled a metal stool alongside my easel in the cool corner of the art room. He watched me press the royal violet paint I’d blended for one of my novelty fingernails against the fibers of the canvas. I was awkward with the brush, unfamiliar with the nature of my media. I was also pretty grouchy.

    “Do you know why women paint their nails, their lips, their eyelids?” he asked me, brushing his fingertips over his own features majestically as he named them. I said nothing, just offered a petulant shake of my head in return for his efforts. “Because all of these things come from the inside. The nails grow from inside the fingertips,” he placed one hand over the other and spread his fingers out like roots sprouting from a seed. “The lips curve out from the mouth,” his fingertips bloomed from where he held them close to his face. “The eyes open up from inside,” he held his hands up, palms out, as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Don’t you think?”

    “I’d never thought of it like that, but yeah.” I could not hide my awe behind my pre-teen sullenness.

    “Oh, don’t listen to me,” he said, swinging one leg over the seat of the stool and pushing it out from under him with the ball of his foot. The metal scraped against the cement floor. “I just made all that up.”

    I was mad at him for tricking me and I wanted to grab him by the elbow and tell him that he was wise and right, right enough to send his ideas in to some magazine so everyone could read them. And now I’m twenty-two and I don’t really read those magazines anymore, but I still think about what comes from the inside every now and then, when I’m looking in the mirror. And when I jot a note or write a draft or sign my name with Uniball Elite Vision, or a pen with an equally great write, I imagine pressing the fine tip to the pout of my lips. Maybe I’ll go through with it one day, just to see what it would feel like.

  • What We Walk With

    I caught myself saying something this weekend that I didn’t really mean. I said that, if I could, I would forget everything about New Zealand except for this moment. As if I could wish it all away, which I can’t.  As if I wish I could wish it all away, which I don’t.

    I would not forget the Indian man who owned the one candy shop in Wellington with occasional stocks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He had the posture of a polite bobble-head doll and he came around to lean against his candy counter every time he saw me come down the front aisle to see if the precious stock had been delivered. I would not forget the way he shrugged his shoulders without taking his hands out of his pockets, or Post-It note that he stuck to the side of his cash register with my name written on it. “Emily W.” he scribbled with a penmanship that made my name look like it might be a Bengali word, right above “peanut butter cups,” which might be the most American phrase ever.

    I would not forget adorable, goofy, gorgeous Andred asking incessantly, “Are you happy?” in his gleeful Kiwi intonation, and I will always remember being so charmed that I could only insist, “Yes!” even if it was a lie and even though there were so many other things I would have rather told him.

    I would not forget filling empty apple juice quarts with tap beer at Pak ‘N’ Save for NZ$3, even though I always ended up at StarMart the next morning to buy a new quart of apple juice to nurse my hangover.

    I would not forget possum flu, because as painful and frightening and revolting as it was, it makes a damn good story.

    I would not forget that Bon Jovi came on the fussy NZ radio just as I took the wheel on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road for the first time.

    I would not forget sitting up in the night to feel the world trembling all around me during my first, and not my last earthquake.

    I probably would forget the torment of the daily walk up to a campus in the world’s most hilly city in a body that was not my own, a body weighed down by a world-class binge of emotional eating, a body that I wanted to crawl out of as I practically crawled up the hill to class in Kelburn.

    But I would not forget the day I dragged that unfamiliar body through sleet and alpine winds, over crags and pinnacles and across eroded plains covered only in clumps of razor-sharp grass. I would not forget crouching in the pitch black bush after thirteen hours on foot, waiting for my own tears to fall, only to have the legs that I couldn’t bear to look down at pick me up and carry me forward, leaving the priss who has been ridiculed and who has ridiculed me on her knees on the side of a mountain in the Tararua Range.

    I would not forget the ill-fated experiment of a chocolate bar filled with kiwifruit-flavored jelly, though I would never bring myself to taste it again.

    I would not forget getting to know my dad in the sounds of a mix CD that he had made for me, but to which I had never bothered to listen. When they play one of those songs at my wedding, I will not remember listening to it as I walked alone along the harbor. I will remember that I could hear my father telling me to be brave, to stick it out, that he believed in me.

    I would not forget planting trees on Mana Island. I will think of them often; I hope that they are growing.

    The truth is, as well all know, as Jim Carey and Kate Winslet showed us on a cold beach in Montauk, memory counts for something. It’s supposed to stick and we’re stuck with it. Like a melted peanut butter cup. Like kiwifruit jelly in your teeth. Like a possum in a water tank. Like your dad’s wise words in your ear. I remember feeling stuck in New Zealand. I also remember what it felt like to escape. I walked away, a little weaker and maybe a little tougher, all for the memories that stuck with me. If only I’d stuck a little closer to Andred.

  • Swing

    About a year ago I was living and studying in New Zealand, not blogging because internet was such a hassle and my laptop was fritzing, and this week specifically, I was in the middle of Spring Break Fall Holiday; a road trip around the South Island counter-clockwise, the same way water goes down the drain in lands down under.

    One stop on this journey was Queenstown, popularly recognized as the adrenaline capital of the world. It is my personal opinion that whatever element puts the extreme into any X-treme sport was first divined in Queenstown soil. But I don’t usually hit the adrenaline too hard, so I tuned out when Anne read this in our Lonely Planet guide:

    The new Shotover Canyon Swing is touted as the world’s highest rope swing (109m), where you jump from a cliff-mounted platform in a full body harness and take a wild swing across the canyon at 150km per hour.

    Everybody else made reservations before we even arrived in Queenstown. “Four for white-water rafting, just three for the canyon swing. It costs $30 just to watch your friends, so I figured I’d spend the morning wandering Queenstown and save my energy for an afternoon of rafting.

    We arrived in Queenstown the night before and proceeded with our choreographed hostel-arrival ritual: grocery shopping and package store followed by cooking, eating, and showering, and sleeping tight. Except I was the only one who slept tight that night. The others lay awake, or had strange dreams, or slept fitfully with the Canyon Swing on their minds.

    By morning, my travel buddies were staving off panic attacks and anxious nausea. I was quite chipper and having second thoughts about just how extreme I could be. If I’d decided to go for it ahead of time, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the jump because I would have given myself a heart attack just worrying about it the night before. But on a sunny morning in the adrenaline capital of the world, I found myself at the counter asking to add another person to the Canyon Swing list.

    And an hour or two later, I was barefoot, strapped into that full-body harness, loathing the tears welling up in my eyes…and then willing myself to step off the platform.

    You know how people always say, “What a rush?” What a rush. My pony-tail was swept across my face, my hiking pants billowed with cool air, I swayed between the jagged, steady walls of the canyon and fell in love with white goats grazing on the slope. Those 2 1/2 minutes were probably the most rapturous and satisfying of my whole two weeks on the South Island. The nearly 200-foot freefall felt like bravery, the 650-foot arc felt like grace, and the breeze between my toes felt like freedom.

    I was furious at myself for being so scared to begin with. But in that moment, I knew I was going to make it through.

  • I Need A Ticket to Ride

    My family went to Disney World for the first time just about eight years ago, when I was in the 8th grade. It was Spring Break, right before we got our dog –we had to take the big vacation before we became so emotionally bound to a four-legged creature that we would never leave the house unless we could take her with us and we stopped wanting to go places that wouldn’t let us bring her with us anyway. If I felt like the oldest kid in the Magic Kingdom then, you can imagine how I would feel at age twenty when we went back.

    But it’s a good thing we weren’t one of those families who feels obligated to hit It’s a Small World as soon as their infants can focus their pupils. “Load up the car! She’s ready for her mouse ears!” Taking it all in as a mature and moderately well-adjusted teenager was hard enough. The lights, the colors, the displays, the backdrops, the fake plants, the real plants, the animatronic Beatles concert, the hundreds of other guests within eyeshot and earshot at any given moment (entertainment in itself), all the information in the tour book, the luxurious bathroom at the hotel, the food…

    We ate at this restaurant with a beach theme and great burgers and I have no clue what I ordered but I still remember the exact train of thought that came barreling through my head in the middle of dinner, “This is a great restaurant. I like the decor. Yum. Oh no! What if this is my favorite restaurant in the world? I’ll never get to go to my favorite restaurant in the world because it’s in Florida! On my birthday, when you’re supposed to eat dinner at your favorite restaurant in the world, I ever won’t be able to because my favorite restaurant in the world is in Florida and every birthday from now on will be ruined because I don’t think my parents will let me fly to Florida in the middle of February!”

    There was a lot to absorb and since I’m me, I felt it was my responsibility to absorb it all. I still remember having this feeling that was like “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not seeing everything?” and that kept me from just living in the moment and having a little fun. And then, “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not letting yourself have fun?” I still remember feeling jealous of kids who didn’t take Disney World so seriously, and then scorning them for not being good enough tourists, and then scorning myself because I obviously wasn’t being a very good tourist, either. Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?

    When I was home and unpacked and back at school, I wore my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt (the shoes, the shorts, the ears, the mouse) and thought about my brother and my mom wearing the exact same one because we all got them together, and when people asked what I did for spring break, I thought about my favorite part of the whole trip –riding Splash Mountain with my dad. That was the best. I couldn’t picture the petals on every single flower at Epcot, but I decided that I had catalogued all of those moments, everything I had seen or heard, in neuro-filing cabinets in my memory and even if I couldn’t recall each and every one at will, they were in there somewhere. If I needed one, it would just be there.

    What really mattered was that I remembered how it felt to sit in a giant log at the crest of the big drop on Splash Mountain, wearing a rain poncho, and peer over the end of our log, into the brambles, with my dad right beside me. I felt too scared and brave and excited to worry about anything else. There wasn’t time to figure out exactly what I should be thinking or feeling at that moment. And with my dad right there, with the same vantage point, in a matching poncho, testing out the same hands-in-the-air roller coaster pose, the pressure to absorb it all must not have been so strong. When we tipped forward, all I had to do was scream. And that part was easy.

  • Job Opportunity: Treehouse Contractor

    My brother and I had a treehouse in the front yard at our old house. Well, we had a dilapidated little plywood box perched precariously in the joint of a tree in the front yard at our old house. It was a ‘home’ we had to share with lots of decaying leaves and a few unidentifiable cocoons (unidentifiable because I refused to look at them too closely in case whatever was inside suddenly hatched right into my face).

    There might have been a bench of a seat of some kind, or you could prop your little kid tush against one of the exposed branches that provided support in the corners. It had two or three squares cut out for windows with flaps that latched closed, one rectangle cut out for a door, and perhaps there was a piece of wood on hinges that swung into place to close the doorway.

    (I very well may have invented that safety precaution, but I’ll stand by it because I think I remember being frustrated that the door shut out all remnants sunlight and it was too dark to play, so dark that you might even wonder if the sun had been permanently eclipsed by a cloud of debris from a giant meteor. And where’s the fun in that, unless you’re playing we’re-about-to-go-extinct-caveman house.)

    Our treehouse did not have window boxes full of flowers (like my dad built for our real house) or gingham curtains (though I’m sure I suggested curtain making to my mom as if it was just another item on the to-do list) or a trap door or a porch or a bucket-pulley system for delivering meals and books and stuffed toys or a mailbox and little address numbers tacked to the door (wouldn’t that have been cute to call it 15 1/2 Woodstone Road?) or a turret or a hammock.

    What it did have was a rope ladder that you could hoist up to keep out intruders. Unless you were afraid to climb the rope ladder. Yes, that was me. So playing in the treehouse involved convincing my dad to get the real ladder out of the garage and hold it steady while I climbed up.

    Rather than renovate, our treehouse was condemmed by my parents (or perhaps a treehouse contractor stopped by?) and torn down.

    It’s not something I think about a lot, but I do love looking at other people’s treehouses to see what feats of arboreal living they have constructed and what whimsy they have dreamed up.

    So I was interested to see Jill’s article at Inhabitat about the O2 Sustainability Treehouse constructed entirely of sustainable materials and installed without harming the tree.

    Since both treehouses and geodesic domes smack of idealism and youthful fun – you know that the two were meant to come together at some point or another.

    Check out Inhabitat and see even more photos in the O2 Sustainability. My favorite is the nighttime shot. It really does look like a paper lantern.

    It also reminds me of the high-tech manual ice cream ball?
    grapeicecream_greenicecream_blueberry

    But don’t even get me started on ice-cream making. Give me a couple of plastic bags and I could have made my own ice cream in my old tree-shack.

  • Te quiero

    Couples and singles alike have been celebrating Valentine’s Day for more than 500 years. I have been celebrating Valentine’s Day for almost exactly twenty-two. My mom still has the Valentine heart that the nurses stuck to my crib in the hospital nursery, delicate and pink, with my new name printed on the front.

    In Mexico, February 14th is “Día del amor y la amistad,” the day of love and friendship. It is with the philosophy of Día del amor y la amistad that I get through every year without a Valentine, without a second thought to single’s angst.

    My best Valentine’s Day memory is of my mom, my brother, and a dark parking lot. My grandmother was due in on a flight and her ride fell through. My mom scooped up the heart-shaped boxes of candy and loaded us into the car to meet Grandmom at the airport. I don’t remember inconvenience, impatience or boredom. I remember the three of us waiting in the parking lot, surrounded by dots of fluorescent light, enclosed together in the car eating our heart-shaped SweeTarts.

    “I love you” in Spanish is te amo or te quiero. Te amo translates directly to “I love to you,” or “You, I love.” Te quiero means “I want you.” I want to love you, I want you to love me, I want every part of you, I want you close to me. For Valentine’s Day, I want all the people I love close to me, even if it’s in an airport parking lot.

  • I Still Have At Least One

    I tied a bandana to the end of a stick and ran away from home more times than I can count. Except that usually it was a cloth diaper tied to a yellow yardstick.

    My great-grandmother gave a bunch of cloth diapers to my mom when I was born, but my mom wasn’t a cloth diaper kind of first-time parent, so they all became my blankies. Actually, they became my nigh-nights. The beautiful thing about the nigh-nights was that I got to be the kid with eight or ten blankies. I couldn’t tell them apart, so if one was in the laundry (nigh-nights doubled as excellent juice spill and baby drool absorbers), another was clenched in my fist, pressed against my cheek, or wrapped around a stuffed animal. Soft, white, scrappy squares of woven cotton fibers, all frayed around the edges. I used to roll them into sausages of soft folds, clumping the fine fringe at one end and pulling on it while I fell asleep.

    Once, I spent the night at my grandmother’s house and forgot to pack a nigh-night. I had enough of them, you’d think it would be hard to forget to bring even just one. Without my comfort object, I cried upstairs in bed while my mom sat at the kitchen table, picking furiously at the hem of a dish towel with a seam ripper. Or maybe it was a machete, she was pretty desperate. She brought it to me in bed and I put the frayed edge to my cheek. I loved her for trying, but it just wasn’t the same. I loved sleeping over at my grandmother’s house. I felt safe there. But I needed to hold on to something soft and familiar to help me sleep.

    The day before I came back to school for J-Term, I told my mom that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten very good at this coming and going thing, between school and home. I think I expected going away to college to feel a little like running away, indignantly packing up my things in a bundle and tying it to the end of a yardstick, slamming the door on my way out, calling home only once in awhile, and only just to say, “see, I don’t need you anymore!” That’s how I always felt, running away down the trail in the woods behind my house. Thinking that, if I had to, I could build a shelter in hollowed out tree trunk, catch the school bus from my neighbor’s stop like a fugitive, smuggle food from the cafeteria, even if I had to survive on Pop Tarts.

    Or I could move to Grandmom’s house. After all, I had a nigh-night with me.

    But then I would reach the end of the trail, time to set up camp, and without the sound of my own storming footsteps drowning out anything but childish anger burning in my ears, the woods sounded suddenly too quiet. I’d think about the sky getting dark and realize that I didn’t pack any socks and wonder what I was doing in the middle of nowhere and get just scared enough to go home.

    When my dorm is this quiet at the end of a day when the fog never lifted and I don’t really know what I’m doing here, I don’t feel like I’ve run away with my pride and a Pop Tart tied up in a cloth diaper on the end of a stick. I feel like I’ve been sent to my room.

    So, I’m packing to spend another weekend at home. I found a nigh-night in the hidden pocket inside my little suitcase. I think it’s been there for almost a year; I packed it there when I went to New Zealand, tucking it in my carry-on because it’s one of those things I didn’t think I could live without if the rest of my luggage got lost, and then forgot it was even there. I folded it up and brushed the frayed end against the palm of my hand, and then to my cheek. It’s still cuddlesome and intimately familiar to my touch.