My Abandonment(57)

Coyotes I hear crying out but I am not afraid of them since they are intelligent animals who eat mostly rodents, insects and fruit.





Every problem I have comes from believing something to be true that is not true.





In the morning it has snowed and the hawks slide back and forth across the sky like they don't know where to go. I slept straight through to dawn with my hat on and I pull it down tighter. It's too cold to get up without going somewhere and too early to go anywhere that I need to go. I read some more even if it's hard to turn the pages with gloves on my hands. Then I fall asleep again and it's later in the day when I wake up.

The sun comes in bright but low and cold. I keep feeling that a wind is about to start up and it never comes but there must have been wind since most of the snow is blown away from the ground around the camp. Snow would make it harder to come and go, I would leave footprints.

My shoes are even tighter with the new wool socks. The sky is darker now so I carry everything with me as I head out to see what I can find and to do what I came here to do.

It's also funny to walk down the hills and onto the streets, back along through the neighborhood in the opposite direction but the same path as Father and I took that night when Della and I were sleeping on the trampoline. Walking now I keep expecting his shadow or the sound of his boots on the blacktop next to me. Still he could see how all this would happen and is trusting in me so it's not exactly like he's not here.

I pass the white brick wardhouse with its spire and all the rooms I know are in there. The big kitchen, the room full of folding metal chairs that can pinch your fingers, the basketball court, all the hymnbooks whose songs I know.

Dogs bark from behind wooden fences where I can't see them. Only their paws below or their snouts sticking through. Dogs bark from inside houses, standing on couches so their noses smear against the windows. I go past the old penitentiary, through Quarry View Park, slanting along toward Hill View, the street I'm after.

None of this feels like a place I've lived, not like I'm coming home. I'm on the sidewalk like a boy from another neighborhood with my go broncos cap and my backpack.

The trees we planted have grown up, at least two feet some of them though right now they have no leaves and look skinny. One day they'll be tall and strong enough to climb. It's been so long since I climbed a tree.

A new part has been built onto the top of my foster parents' house. It used to be yellow and now it's blue but it's the same house. The white car in the driveway is not our red stationwagon even if they could have gotten a different car, a new car. It could even be that they don't live in this house anymore which is fine if this is true since it was never my plan to ring the doorbell or to come back and be their daughter. It would be fine too if they knew how I turned out and were proud. They are not bad people even if the things they believe are unbelievable. They tried to hold on to me longer than they were supposed to, to make me be like them when I am not like them and have places to go.

I only wanted to walk past the house like this to show that I can and that it doesn't make me feel any special way. After all they are not the person I'm after.





If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will pass an invisible boundary. Don't forget this. Don't forget that thinking can get in the way. Forget the forgetting. We seek to forget ourselves, to be surprised and to do something without knowing how or why. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment.





I went to Adams School all the way up to fourth grade. The brick is the same soft orange color as always and behind the school is the swimming pool that is hardly ever open and when it is the water is so cold you can't stand it. There's a twisting green plastic slide called the Hydrotube that you can see through. In the wading pool there are concrete sea lions you can climb on. Now like usually the water is drained and the gates are locked and there's no one in there.

I keep walking. Out in this playground I played four square and tetherball and soccer. I climbed these monkey bars and hung upside down so my hair swept the black rubbery ground. Now I wouldn't even go to this school anymore. I'd be in middle school, almost high school.

Where I'm standing I can see blackboards through the windows and sometimes a person's head, a teacher. I could probably remember the teachers' names. I know some of them are still here since some of the cars in the parking lot are the same: the tan and cream Suburban of Miss Larsen, the PE teacher's fancy red Jeep.

When the school bell rings you can hear it outside, across all the fields and all through the neighborhood.

At first all the tiny kids come out with bread bags sticking out the tops of their rubber boots and their mittens attached together with a piece of yarn stretched inside their coats and down the sleeves.