It was always summer in the northwest woods of rural Wisconsin. The days were long and sunny, silent but for the bird song from deep in the trees. The milkweed lining the driveway had not yet opened to release its seedy fluff to the cooling autumn air, and I had not yet opened to who I would one day become. The deep freeze of winter had long since passed, and I never witnessed the early green of spring, only bursting into being in this place when summer had already made the woods thick with leaves and shadows. Even during the few months we lived with my grandparents, when lightning struck my uncle’s barn and I cried all day at school because I didn’t know how to take the bus home, summer still clung to the edges of everything. Every summer was the same on this farm where time seemed to stand still even as I arrived a different person every year.
There were stories here that felt like folktales from another era. Stories of the music that used to fill the farmhouse. My grandpa had played banjo, my grandma had played the old out of tune piano where I plunked out tunes with a single index finger. My dad and his siblings had been in a band called The Echoes, fitting as all that remained of the music was the echo of the past in the quiet of the well worn furniture. These stories told of a house that held the laughter, tears, and music of a family with six children, their chaos and noise filling the space of what was now calm egg yolk mornings and jigsaw puzzle afternoons.
They had once raised mink and corn in these woods. The stories telling of mean, smelly mink and chores no one wanted to do. Of late night suppers when the mink had all been fed and the moon topped the roof of the empty barn. All gone before I came along and the corn fields were rented out to other farmers. The only sounds coming from the mink house were from my uncle working on an old car with REO Speedwagon pouring from an old stereo. Later, when the farmhouse had been sold and he was living in the mink house, he would kill a squirrel to only later find a nest of babies, of which only one would survive to live in my grandma’s new house in town, and eat whipped cream from a plastic tub on the dining room table where once her children had eaten those late night suppers.
The once full corn crib only held the dust of past harvests, and a few leftovers from all of the children who had used it to whisper secrets into the sunlight slanting through the cracks of the wooden slats. A yo-yo, a doll with matted hair, an old comic book or two littering the floor, signs of life in a space that had only ever held slowly dying harvests. I learned to blow bubbles from bubble gum in the hush of that dusty corn crib, and I learned what it was like for an only child to pretend for a few weeks out of the year that these cousins were siblings, that I was a part of something bigger.
For one afternoon out of every summer the house would once again be filled with children and laughter. Lunch eaten from paper plates on the steps of the wooden staircase, parents who had once been children catching up with remember whens, the house welcoming back the chaos of a family grown larger while the house grew emptier. After ice cream dipped from round buckets, hands sticky from the drips down the side of the cones, we headed down the driveway to play. A taste of freedom from the adults filling the air with talk of neighbors we never knew. We ran past the barn where we were never allowed to play, past the woods where we weren’t supposed to go because of bears, down to the sand pit and the old, rusty metal digging toys that would help us hit water with enough digging. Here our grandma would bring us to pick the wild strawberries that grew next to the sand. \ Sometimes we could convince her to let us visit Gramps’s cabin. Gramps was another folktale in this place, only his cabin remaining to keep watch over his metal bed frame, the old wood stove he had used for warmth, and a scattering of things we were never allowed to touch as time had crumbled them into litter and eventually the woods swallowed the shack whole.
As the conversation wore down on these family reunions, as the grown ups started their long goodbyes, we played one more summer night game of “Ghost in the Graveyard.” Children joined by history and generational trauma we would never quite be able to give a name to, before we grew older and more brittle, before we fell into politics and disconnection, before we no longer felt the warmth of a summer night lingering between us in the darkness. Eventually the last car started out down the long driveway and I was once again an only child in an everyday place that sometimes felt magical in the way it was so different from my home far away. The quiet would once again descend and the past would once again fade into dust and old linoleum.
After The Tonight Show, or if it was a weekend Saturday Night Live, I would lie in my aunt’s old bedroom and thumb through copies of Seventeen magazine, studying the newest styles of a decade past. I would try not to think of the animal sounds in the attic, or the bears in the woods, or the weight of the silence and whether other things lurked in the corners I couldn’t see. Fear left over from years before when my uncle had looked in the window wearing a Frankenstein mask and made it so I couldn’t sleep for days. Fear of being away from parents that I couldn’t be sure really missed me or wanted me to come back home. I tried not to think of how we were going to the river tomorrow to swim and the path would be lined with poison ivy. I tried not to remember the blood sucker on my toe the last time I had braved the river current. For all the light of a summer day, it seemed there was nothing darker than midnight alone with my imagination. I told myself I was too big to sneak into my grandma’s bed and take comfort in the country music playing softly from the tinny clock radio.
Most afternoons were spent as an only child seeking a place to fit in this place where I was both stranger and family, playing in the dirt of the driveway and eyeing the tree line for the outline of bears waiting to attack. Swinging back and forth on the old tree swing like a pendulum marking time, before growing bored and heading into the house where my grandma would be peeling the skins of carrots onto the floor for the dogs to eat, dropping the remaining vegetable into a pot for stew. I would wander upstairs and choose a book from the huge bookcase at the top of the stairs. No one to censor what I read, I made my way through the Victorian romances my grandma had loved once upon a time, the remaining day lost in a new adventure until the TV announced the evening news and time for dinner.
Every summer has to fade. Every wildflower has to stop blooming and become a husk of memory. Eventually my parents would arrive down that long driveway, the milkweed waving in their wake, to collect me for the long trip home and another impending autumn. I would cry all the way to town at the memory of the old piano, the bookcase at the top of the stairs, the baby duck my uncle had found and tried to save, but who instead drowned in a tiny saucer of water. The way the past was so close in every story my grandma would tell. The way the future seemed so far away until it wasn’t and everything had shifted yet again, from spring green to yellow summer, to the red of another fall. Everything was suspended in a childhood, in an afternoon, in the middle of the woods in Wisconsin, before the milkweed exploded into fluff and sent seeds out into a future shaped by the way a gentle wind decided to scatter them across a lifetime.