The Golden Egg

As a child, the highlight of the Easter season for me was the Easter egg search. I understood that the holiday was a time of religious renewal, but the thrill of the hunt spurred me into a spiritual fervor in a way that hymns could not. My mother misunderstood my restlessness as a manifestation of spring fever after the seemingly unending dormancy of winter.

Easter Sunday arrived with a burst of sunshine after a week of overcast skies and the menacing threat of a torrential flood. My body hummed with anticipation as I jammed my arms into my jacket. I was eleven years old, and this was the last year that I would be considered a child in my church. There would not be another chance, no more Easter egg hunts after this.

The lines of the parking lot had long since been bleached into obscurity by the indomitable sun. Cracks spidered across the pavement, forming slender chasms which sprouted weeds and wildflowers. My Mary Janes slapped loudly against the concrete as I ran inside the church to seek out my comrades. Unfortunately, the youth minister was ill, so the children were forced to remain with the adults.

An eternity passed. The incomprehensible sermon buzzed around my ears like a swarm of mosquitos I longed to swat away. I balled my hands into fists and was about to shriek when Pastor abruptly drew the service to a close.

Pastor’s wife instructed all of the children to migrate into the parking lot for the hunt to begin. We received our baskets and instructions. As I listened with half an ear, I took careful notes of which eggs I could see already, and I planned my route accordingly. Nevertheless, a blurb of speech entered my consciousness.

“There are many eggs, but there is only one special prize. The Easter egg hunt begins now!”

I hesitated for a moment and sought for clues as to where the special prize might have been secreted away. A ring of brush and trees surrounded the parking lot; the willowy branches were already sprouting small green buds. Renewal. A small discoloration at the edge of my survey caught my eye. There was a tiny glimmer of gold in a brush pile on the perimeter of the parking lot.

I raced across the asphalt, the lacy layers of my pink dress frothed about my knees as I ran. I jumped heartily into the brush, twigs and vines snatching at my delicate stockings. I rooted through the debris like a pig searching for truffles, flinging dead leaves and dirt around without care. I could see it, the flash of gold beckoned like a siren’s song.

After a tussle with a particularly nasty handful of decaying vines, I was victorious! A shower of russet soil sprinkled my brow as I held the golden egg above my head. Each fleck of earth washed over me like a baptism of triumph. Pastor’s wife smiled indulgently at me while the other children stared jealously.

“The egg is only a placeholder. The real prize is waiting inside.” She told me as she brushed some of the dirt off of my face.

I walked into the church a champion, proudly displaying the egg which I refused to place in my basket with its more unrefined, plastic brethren. I followed Pastor’s wife into the half-lit children’s room which had been unused that day. She carefully handed me a large book, a collection of stories from the Bible. I cherished it for many years, remembering my victory fondly whenever I lifted its purple cover.

The Highway

I have reoccurring dreams of the highway.

Every so often I start out inside an already moving car, but they all end the same way. I’m running down the divided road, looking straight forward. Sometimes the road curves and my course curves with it. The rhythm of my footfall tattoos a beat on my soul.

As the pavement undulates, I pass the idea of cars. I do not see the cars before I pass them; I can just feel them behind me as I run–a hot breath on the nape of my neck. My pace increases so much that my legs blur, and I am no longer certain my feet are touching the black tar. The trees and grass crowding the sides of the road seem overly bright, like the sun has soaked into them and changed their essence.

I never turn around to see what lies behind me, and it’s not even a possibility. The pavement weaves an ebony thread across the emerald expanse of lawn and forest, and I follow it. My breath is even and steady; the cadence does not change.

On ramps and exit ramps connect and divide from my course, and sometimes I diverge to follow one. I am completely disconnected from the ground now. My whole body curves through the air as I separate from the highway momentarily. I fly mere inches above the pavement, and the wind embraces me as I travel along the ramp. The ramps all reconnect to the highway, and I fly on till waking.

Rakes Will Hit You in the Face & Other Lessons

July was hotter and stickier that year than we ever remembered. We spent more time lazing about on the merry-go-round than zipping past the neighbors on our bikes, pretending we were Zack and Ivy on the prowl for Carmen Sandiego. Adam and I lay on the teal disc with our arms dangling off the sides, lazily pushing ourselves to keep a light breeze.

“Do you think that you can really slip on a banana peel?” Adam inquired as I watched the russet wood chips pass by under the questing tips of my stained fingers. It was an intriguing question, and we hadn’t had a decent experiment since the time we disastrously tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk. After procuring the fruit in question, Adam consumed the banana while I watched with disgust. I had never developed a penchant for the bland, mushy produce.

We carefully placed the banana’s flayed skin on the sidewalk and proceeded to stride across the yellow peel with great gusto. We were unable to get even the slightest bit of movement out of it; the grooves of the pavement gave it too much traction to slide. Disappointed with yet another botched endeavor, we left the playground for the backyard.

We reclined beneath the apple blossom tree and watched the emerald leaves sway in the wind. The gate creaked as a gust jostled the latch. A delicate sprinkling of jade leaves dusted our shoulders as we contemplated our next steps. After discovering that we had used the last of the bananas with our previous trial, we moved onto a new test. Adam and I were determined to find an iconic cartoon sequence that was not entirely based in falsehood.

My mother and I maintained a small garden on the back porch, and I had a small green hoe that I used for groundbreaking and gathering leaves. Carefully laying the hoe on the ground with its tines pointed sharply heavenward, I stepped back and nodded at Adam. Adam gingerly placed one foot onto the tines of the hoe, and the gleaming wood handle shot up directly toward his face. He scrambled backward and narrowly avoided a braining; I crowed with elation at our success.

“Do you think if you drop a safe on my head I will end up inside the safe?” I inquired excitedly, caught up in the excitement of our success. My mother had a small fireproof safe in her bedroom closet where she kept candies and other treats. Both of us were in high spirits thanks to our accomplishment, and I thought it was the best time for us to proceed with another experiment while the taste of victory was still fresh.

Luckily for me, Adam had more sense than I did and argued against any trials with the safe. He reasoned that we would likely get into trouble if we popped the screen out of my bedroom window to drop the safe onto my waiting head below. Instead, we retrieved our swimsuits and frolicked with the hose, aquamarine droplets spraying through the air like a wealth of diamonds as we idled away the afternoon.

Life Update

I apologize for the incredible amount of time between posts, but I have been a very busy bee. I am not going to tell you any tales from  my childhood today, but instead you get an actual update on what is going on in my life right now.

I spent the month of November taking archery lessons on Saturdays at a charming little hole-in-the-wall next door to a strip club. I am pretty sure the girl who taught me was half my age. Also, after I begin my fencing lessons in a few weeks, I will consider myself to be an adeptly skilled individual for surviving any potential apocalypses.

Wedding planning has been going very well. You can see our wedding website over here.  The locations are password protected so any potentially unsavory characters can’t find out and burst in à la The Graduate.

I am also working on putting together the expenses and itinerary for our honeymoon. I would love to go on a mini-tour of Turkey…but we don’t have $5,000 to spend on our honeymoon as we’re only spending $7,000 on the wedding total. Instead, we will either end up having a nice little weekend on Mackinac Island (approx. $400) or spending 5 days in Oregon exploring Portland and some nearby attractions we have picked out ($2,191). I really hope that we can do the Portland trip because there are some cool things out there. Our potential itinerary can be seen here.

I will be creating a “Honeymoon Registry” within the next three days so that people can gift us with things such as airfare, room service, a hotel upgrade, and other little gems that will make it possible for us to have a lovely honeymoon together. I was a little worried that creating a Honeymoon Registry would be tacky, but we have everything that we need for our home as we have been living together for over a year now. The joys of spending our paychecks on responsible things instead of hookers and jawbreakers.

Short Story: When I was a senior in high school, I liked to spend my study hall in the library where I would read for 42 minutes in relative silence. One day, a boy named Kyle was talking to another boy about some sort of cartoon trading card. Apparently the card had sold for $3,000.

Kyle’s eyes popped open wide when he heard the sum of money. “Three thousand dollars?! That’s like a lifetime supply of hookers and jawbreakers.”

Because, priorities.

The Reporter

I thought I might regale you with the tale of the first time that Kyle took me to his hometown. But then I realized that it’s a pretty boring story. Instead, I will tell you about the first dream that I ever remembered. It’s much more cohesive than most people’s dreams. Also, it will make you question what kind of child I was if you haven’t already.

One night, my babysitter convinced me to eat all of my mac and cheese by telling me that if I finished my dinner, I would have the most wonderful dreams when I went to sleep. Fork precariously hanging out of my mouth, I peered into her dark brown eyes skeptically before deciding that she was probably telling the truth. I finished my mac and cheese with gusto. That night, my five year old subconscious Dreamed.

Lightning flashed bright white across the ugly purple sky punctuated with a roaring bang of thunder. Startled into alertness, I looked up from the newspaper at the evening storm raging outside the train car. Setting the newspaper aside, I nervously smoothed my high-waist pencil skirt over my thighs and retied the large bow neckline on my blouse. The vivid sky crackled with electricity as I proceeded to fuss with my carefully coiffed finger curls; lightning illuminated the sky once more.

“We need to go.”  A gruff voice growled at me from the seat across from me. Distracted by the sky’s theatrics, I had forgotten about my companion. The weak light from the exposed bulb swinging above us showed me the tan brim of a fedora obscuring a handsome if stern visage. I heard the rhythmic ticking of the train over the tracks murmur like a heartbeat as I surveyed his poorly lit features with curiosity.

He stood abruptly, leaving the spicy scent of cologne lingering in his wake. The trembling light bulb cast shadows across his khaki trench coat, forming half-remembered patterns that sparked some distant memory within the recesses of my mind. He reached over and pulled me to my feet insistently but not roughly. I stumbled slightly in my patent leather pumps, unsteadied by the urgency behind his movement.

“Follow me.” He commanded brusquely as he shoved the wooden panel open and stepped into the narrow hallway. Entranced, I watched his trench coat disappear around the corner before prodding myself into action.

I gripped the door frame and felt my fingers brush against a knot of wood. I was prepared to trot after him when the already unreliable lighting sputtered and died completely. The train swayed violently on the tracks, and I was flung against the door jamb unceremoniously. I fell to my knees on the cherry wood parquet and crushed cigarette ash into the delicate weave of my nylons before regaining my feet.

The lights flickered in and out as I hurried down the tight corridor toward the end of the car where my companion had been headed. A woman’s soulful song broadcasting from the PA system highlighted my progression.  The record skipped, and I heard rapid footsteps behind me. I turned my head and viewed my pursuer with horror. A balding man with a sagging belly was chasing me, the dangerous gleam of a pistol visible in his left hand.

The murmur of the train’s progress grew to a deafening roar as I pried open the metal door and moved between train cars with alacrity. I hastened to find my companion, tripping into one of the non-passenger cars. I caught my breath for a moment until the sliding side door of the car crashed open, exposing us to the storm’s fury.

A blaze of lightning revealed the scene to me. My companion was standing at the top of a pyramid of blonde hay bales, his trench coat rippling furiously in gusting wind. He stared unflinchingly out the door of the boxcar at the moving countryside, half of his face aglow from the lightning’s brilliance.

My pursuer’s entrance into the car was announced with a boom of thunder. The sudden brightness of yet another flash of lightning silhouetted him against the open door. Alarmed, I looked up into the shadowed face of my hero and began to climb the hay bales, but my heels impeded my progress. I could feel the cold shadow of my tracker mere inches behind me. My companion thrust a hand down to assist me, and a shiver of awareness ran through my body as I grasped his outstretched hand and felt him pull me up.

…

The movement pulled me straight into consciousness, and I reluctantly relinquished the dream.

The Sidewalk Endeavor

When I was about eight years old, I often entertained irrationally idyllic beliefs in humanity’s capacity for cooperation. This manifested itself in a variety of ways, especially when I found myself among my peers. I saw no reason that a group of children couldn’t accomplish incredible feats if we banded together toward a common goal.

One cool April day, I was exploring the neighborhood with my companions when I noticed that a piece of sidewalk had been split in twain. The roughly triangular piece had been marginally elevated from its pattern in the ground, and I pieced together the events that had led to this. As I examined the craggy surface of the cement, I hypothesized aloud how the cleaving had occurred. When the snowplow had shoveled its icy loads onto this sidewalk, the overwhelming weight of the precipitation and truck had cracked the cement asunder. With the plow scraping its way indelicately across the path, it had haphazardly dislodged the broken piece.

I reflected on this awareness and decided to wholly remove the piece of cement. I was seized with an urge to see the black dirt which had been long hidden beneath this unnatural walkway. The weak spring sunlight glazed my face as I turned to my comrades and outlined my plan.

We set to work at once. The holes in our well-worn sneakers absorbed the dew of the earth’s seasonal renewal while we toiled at the extraction of the cement. Our fingertips turned red and white from strain, scrabbling at the concurrently coarse and slippery surface for leverage. Though the sidewalk piece weighed at least twice as much as me, I remained undaunted when we didn’t so much as wiggle the block.

I called a halt to our efforts so we could reflect on the trial at hand and determine an improved method of approach. The early spring had made the ground damp with melt water, but I realized that the sidewalk piece was likely stuck in place through a combination of gravity and ice as an adherent. I narrowed my eyes and balled my hands into small fists of determination.

“We are going to need a bigger boat.”

My friends and I began to knock on doors, enlisting the assistance of other children in the neighborhood. After we had assembled a team of eleven workers, we detailed the goal and plan of attack before resuming work.

“Come on men! Put your backs into it!” A comrade yelled as we strained at the cement block, sneakers slipping in the muddy melt of spring. A thin line of sweat broke across my forehead while I redoubled my efforts and pulled with all my might.

Two of the children who could not fit into the fray to get a handhold on the block found sticks and dug around the edges, seeking to force the earth to release its icy grip on our goal. A third child directed the actions of those attempting to move the sidewalk piece.

A flash of peach and russet distracted me. I heard the robin’s bright call as I lost my footing in the mud and scrapped my hand roughly across the jagged cement, leaving an unsophisticated smear of skin and blood. Undeterred, I resumed my position and shouted commands at my cohorts. I would not let this piece of rock defeat my ambitions.

Teeth clenched and eyes scrunched tightly closed in effort, we heaved the block out of its place in the pattern and onto the walkway. Cheers of elation traveled on the afternoon breeze as we celebrated our victory.

I pushed through my companions and stood in front of the magnificent hole we had created in the earth. A breeze caressed my hair as I carefully rolled up the sleeve of my coat and pushed my left hand into the rich, damp soil, savoring my conquest.

Two days later, the maintenance men removed all of the broken pieces of sidewalk and repaved the walkway, but in my heart I carried the memories of my triumph.

The Shaving Incident

This story is actually kind of embarrassing, despite how old it is. When I was about 4 or 5 years old, I had a tendency to get into things that I shouldn’t have.

I had solemnly observed my mother removing the fine, blonde hair from her legs with a razor, and I was utterly entranced by the ability of an insignificant object to create such a smooth surface. When I played in the bathtub during my nightly bath time, I would occasionally lay the mauve washcloth flat on the porcelain ledge of the tub and proceed to shave it, inevitably shredding the washcloth. My mother didn’t notice that I had developed this unwise habit of playing with dangerous objects, and she would leave me alone in the bathroom with the door open so she could hear that I wasn’t inexplicably drowning in four inches of soapy water.

One morning I awoke with an awful taste in my mouth, the unpleasant aftereffects of sleep. I felt a nauseating layer of fuzz on the exterior of my tongue, as if I had slept with a stuffed animal in my mouth all night. Stumbling into the bathroom, I stuck my tongue out at my reflection to scrutinize this disagreeable natural phenomenon.

Sure enough, there was a fur-like coating visible on my tongue. I examined the small bumps and creases in my mouth, noting that they indeed felt fuzzy underneath my questing fingertips. Remembering the razor that I had used to cheerfully shear the washcloth in the tub the night before, I decided that I should remove the velvety varnish using the same method.

The pink razor flashed a warning gleam under the bright lights of the bathroom vanity. I gripped it carefully in my small hands. Naïve, I chose not to heed the caution of the sharp blade and applied the device to my tongue, scraping in one smooth motion.

Instantly my mouth filled with pain. A swift burning sensation displaced the moderately unpleasant morning breath. Fire coursed through my nerves, looping from my tongue to my brain and back again repeatedly and insistently.

Too shocked to look away, I whimpered in pain as I stared at my reflection. My tawny eyes brimmed with unshed tears before unleashing a flood of saline. Blood welled up in my mouth, glazing my tongue crimson and vermillion. Now I understood the danger of the razor, and I very gingerly picked it up once more, carefully returning it to its place in the tub.

I spat a small mouthful of blood in the sink, crying out softly at the pain inherent in that simple movement. The cherry red liquid dripped down the drain inelegantly. It seemed almost sacrilegious to watch my blood meet with such an ignoble fate. Wincing with pain, I slumped against the sink and continued to steadily cry for five minutes before seeking out my mother for assistance. Never again did I pick up the razor without understanding its capacity for injury.