Roses in November
Last Saturday, the day we moved, was warm and blustery. The sky seemed to be trying to make up its mind between frowns and smiles. I remember that a tumultuous rainstorm appeared out of nowhere in the late afternoon, but after the rainstorm came such a smile; thinking of it later in our room, Marjorie said to me, "Oh, the trees were made of gold and diamonds!"'
In the sunset, spangled with rain, our many trees do seem to be made of gold and diamonds. This and warm relationships are the wealth of the neighborhood. People here are definitely of the working class, a degree poorer, kinder, and more dangerous than the self-contained propriety of our old street.
On the way back from getting lunch, an Iranian woman standing on the median silently handed us a card explaining that she was out of a job and asking for money to feed and pay rent so that she and her two children could survive. Having no cash, we were forced to smile our sympathy, apologize, and go on. Her expression was closed and she wouldn't meet our eyes.
There are gangs here, on the streets---little knots of young men in black and bling. I can't help shivering when I see them, even though I know that they are just people, like me or anybody. Then too, it is like being in another country: people speak to one another in foreign languages and have foreign customs. I am reminded once again of the extremely sheltered life I have lived, and of my own naivete. How is it possible that I am almost twenty-five and yet know so little of the world? Everywhere I go, here, I'm different. My skin is too white and my veins are too delicately blue; my English is too pure; I carry myself too straight; I know too much out of books and not enough out of harsh realities---in short, I don't belong.
Only a few things here are familiar, and for the first few days I clung to them. Tall mature trees stretching away to the horizon---In the summer their leaves have been and will be molten emeralds. I embraced them at once. The house itself, though it seems tiny and plain from the outside, is spacious (for a townhouse) and filled with the beautiful furniture we brought with us. My mother makes any house seem a palace. And then, the roses. There is only one sort of rose that I really love, and it is the pale pink one---here both in the front and back gardens there are roses of that color blooming. A sprig that I plucked yesterday is sitting on my windowsill in a bottle made of alabaster and filigree.
At first I felt like the girl in that old version of Beauty and the Beast. Though I am in a strange, foreign, winter-struck place, there are roses that welcome me wherever I turned. I wondered, "Will I have the courage to overcome the strangeness and become part of this culture?" I didn't know. I was only a very little girl the last time we lived in a place like this. I want to touch everything; I want to know everybody; I want to love them. But I feel shy and awkward, and even afraid.
It was odd to find myself once more walking through the once-familiar ritual of transition. I have moved fifteen times now, but it has been ten years since the last one and so I am out of practice. Still, the actions come easily enough. You school yourself to call what was home "the old house" or "the wreck" (after Swiss Family Robinson) and what will be home "the new house" or "home." You don't think about your old bedroom, your old yard, your old haunts. You take great delight in exploring all the new advantages of the place you are coming to; you remember only the disadvantages of the place you are leaving.
The best advantage I have found here, so far, is a secret cupboard hidden in the ceiling of my bathroom. That, and the blue that followed us here. I caused my bedroom in the new house to be painted exactly the color of my bedroom in the old house: a delicate blue that falls somewhere between azure and lavender. Everything in my new room, like everything in the old one, is that color or creamy white, or red like a star bursting, or deep sapphire, or dawn-gray, or rich satiny dark wood.
But on the second night, I was afraid. I sleep on this floor by myself, near a door to the outside, and I had to tell myself over and over "The door is locked. The door is locked. No one can get in. The door is locked." There were also noises from the utility room that make me feel eight years old again.
It is all as different from Middletown Valley as it could possibly be, and part of me is almost sick with longing for that golden sight: the smooth bountiful lap of land like a skirt picked out in criss-crossing patterns of farms, the heady sweet air, the intoxicating heights of the hills, and the feeling that if I were a bird I could tilt my wings up, up, up its cool slopes and plunge DOWN again to flirt them among the feathery grasses.
Oh, to have my horse there in those fields and on those slopes! He and I---we would play a fantasia and measure out the beats of a poem in drumming hooves. We would toss our manes at the sun, so that he would know it was us, and in our hearts laugh fit to rival the bubbling streams, and in our legs run fit to play with the dashing breezes.
Oh, to have a garden there, a flowering garland for one of those lofty-browed hills! "Tell me something I don't know about you yet," Brittainy said to me this morning. I smiled and said, "I love flowers." And I do---I love them passionately. Perhaps that is why the roses were so comforting.
Yet, though I am comforted, I also feel... what's the word... perhaps "intrigued." This place, this place!---it's like a bucket of icy water over the head, or a slap, or a fierce kiss. It makes me tremble with curiosity and a sort of boldness mingled with apprehension. I feel as if I have been wakened up from a long sleep and everything strikes, strokes, teases my senses. There is an electricity in this community where elbows cannot help but be rubbed. I can't keep my distance, not here. I can't hold myself aloof. And that's the strangest, most exhilerating, most terrifying thing of all.
This place makes me feel fourteen years old again, having my first serious crush and on the edge of---well---everything!
In the sunset, spangled with rain, our many trees do seem to be made of gold and diamonds. This and warm relationships are the wealth of the neighborhood. People here are definitely of the working class, a degree poorer, kinder, and more dangerous than the self-contained propriety of our old street.
On the way back from getting lunch, an Iranian woman standing on the median silently handed us a card explaining that she was out of a job and asking for money to feed and pay rent so that she and her two children could survive. Having no cash, we were forced to smile our sympathy, apologize, and go on. Her expression was closed and she wouldn't meet our eyes.
There are gangs here, on the streets---little knots of young men in black and bling. I can't help shivering when I see them, even though I know that they are just people, like me or anybody. Then too, it is like being in another country: people speak to one another in foreign languages and have foreign customs. I am reminded once again of the extremely sheltered life I have lived, and of my own naivete. How is it possible that I am almost twenty-five and yet know so little of the world? Everywhere I go, here, I'm different. My skin is too white and my veins are too delicately blue; my English is too pure; I carry myself too straight; I know too much out of books and not enough out of harsh realities---in short, I don't belong.
Only a few things here are familiar, and for the first few days I clung to them. Tall mature trees stretching away to the horizon---In the summer their leaves have been and will be molten emeralds. I embraced them at once. The house itself, though it seems tiny and plain from the outside, is spacious (for a townhouse) and filled with the beautiful furniture we brought with us. My mother makes any house seem a palace. And then, the roses. There is only one sort of rose that I really love, and it is the pale pink one---here both in the front and back gardens there are roses of that color blooming. A sprig that I plucked yesterday is sitting on my windowsill in a bottle made of alabaster and filigree.
At first I felt like the girl in that old version of Beauty and the Beast. Though I am in a strange, foreign, winter-struck place, there are roses that welcome me wherever I turned. I wondered, "Will I have the courage to overcome the strangeness and become part of this culture?" I didn't know. I was only a very little girl the last time we lived in a place like this. I want to touch everything; I want to know everybody; I want to love them. But I feel shy and awkward, and even afraid.
It was odd to find myself once more walking through the once-familiar ritual of transition. I have moved fifteen times now, but it has been ten years since the last one and so I am out of practice. Still, the actions come easily enough. You school yourself to call what was home "the old house" or "the wreck" (after Swiss Family Robinson) and what will be home "the new house" or "home." You don't think about your old bedroom, your old yard, your old haunts. You take great delight in exploring all the new advantages of the place you are coming to; you remember only the disadvantages of the place you are leaving.
The best advantage I have found here, so far, is a secret cupboard hidden in the ceiling of my bathroom. That, and the blue that followed us here. I caused my bedroom in the new house to be painted exactly the color of my bedroom in the old house: a delicate blue that falls somewhere between azure and lavender. Everything in my new room, like everything in the old one, is that color or creamy white, or red like a star bursting, or deep sapphire, or dawn-gray, or rich satiny dark wood.
But on the second night, I was afraid. I sleep on this floor by myself, near a door to the outside, and I had to tell myself over and over "The door is locked. The door is locked. No one can get in. The door is locked." There were also noises from the utility room that make me feel eight years old again.
It is all as different from Middletown Valley as it could possibly be, and part of me is almost sick with longing for that golden sight: the smooth bountiful lap of land like a skirt picked out in criss-crossing patterns of farms, the heady sweet air, the intoxicating heights of the hills, and the feeling that if I were a bird I could tilt my wings up, up, up its cool slopes and plunge DOWN again to flirt them among the feathery grasses.
Oh, to have my horse there in those fields and on those slopes! He and I---we would play a fantasia and measure out the beats of a poem in drumming hooves. We would toss our manes at the sun, so that he would know it was us, and in our hearts laugh fit to rival the bubbling streams, and in our legs run fit to play with the dashing breezes.
Oh, to have a garden there, a flowering garland for one of those lofty-browed hills! "Tell me something I don't know about you yet," Brittainy said to me this morning. I smiled and said, "I love flowers." And I do---I love them passionately. Perhaps that is why the roses were so comforting.
Yet, though I am comforted, I also feel... what's the word... perhaps "intrigued." This place, this place!---it's like a bucket of icy water over the head, or a slap, or a fierce kiss. It makes me tremble with curiosity and a sort of boldness mingled with apprehension. I feel as if I have been wakened up from a long sleep and everything strikes, strokes, teases my senses. There is an electricity in this community where elbows cannot help but be rubbed. I can't keep my distance, not here. I can't hold myself aloof. And that's the strangest, most exhilerating, most terrifying thing of all.
This place makes me feel fourteen years old again, having my first serious crush and on the edge of---well---everything!
posted by Praelucor at 3:15 PM
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