Everything Good

In my memories of this place, we were always driving. It seemed we were always far from everything, and that part still holds true. Driving out here as fast as I could made it clear it really is the corner of nowhere and around where Jesus lost his sandals. In my nostalgic mind it’s a view from the jump seat of a pistachio green seventy- something Ford, rough Navajo bench seat chafing my summertime bare legs as my feet dangled halfway to the floorboard. But it was the shifter, watching my grandfather move the car through its gears in a seemingly endless array of movements coordinated between clutch, pedals, and gearshift. Even the alien mechanism itself impressed me, tall and strong right out of the floor, making self important sounds and causing the truck to jump quickly into gear or come to a shuddering stop. It made my grandfather chuckle, but for a child of the automatic car generation, that manual transmission truck was downright magic.

But the memory isn’t even remotely reality now, standing here in absolute solitary silence, watching a mirthless sunset squeeze some reluctant pink from the sky before sighing below the horizon altogether. I think this is about where the house stood. It’s nearly impossible to tell now, the fire was that efficient. A spark from a single cigarette somehow ignited thousands of acres and along with it what remained of my family. It seems that as remote as they were, there was no warning (a cell phone wouldn’t work out here unless it came with its own satellite link), and they were sound asleep right up until the moment it was already too late to run. The fire investigators told me a lot of specifics, but it was hard to comprehend anything over the ringing in my ears. And now I’d been relentlessly driving for leaning on three days, obsessed with the idea of being here for this sunset, on this day. When my gramps and my mom would, should have had a joint birthday. But the sunset didn’t get the memo and the lackluster, impossibly pedestrian twilight faded entirely into country dark.

My memories of this darkness are star gazing, hot chocolate, and fireflies... of watching crackling fires blaze and listening to stories about whenever and whatever, feeling safe and alive just sitting in the sound of the family around me. It seemed they’d always been here so of course we always would be. The land was ours and we belonged to it, simple as that. My grandmother was proud to tell me the stories her mother passed down to her about our ancestors risking their lives building sections of the Underground Railroad, and protecting souls on their journeys for freedom. My grandmother rode and raised horses here her whole life, across almost a hundred acres. And now I couldn’t find a viable pasture within a county of this place, this ruin, this wasteland of what was and should still be.

The cold is creeping in much faster now with the rush of wind beneath the starless night sky, and I start walking a bit quicker to warm myself up. Shoving my shaking hands into the fleece lined pockets of my coat, my left hand closes around a piece of paper and the paper clip attaching a check to the document. I don’t take it out as I push my hand deeper into my pocket, clenching my fists and shaking while seeing the letter as clearly as if I was reading it all over again. The property insurance agent that appeared at my door shortly after the police came to notify me that my world had burned down produced a polite and insufferably litigious letter of condolence with a lengthy explanation of benefits. After a truly awkward, one sided conversation, the agent left me with a $20,000 check for primary pay out and bereavement costs, with plans for site inspection and full compensation to be resolved at a later date. It was too absurd for me to comprehend, both that I was holding a check for $20,000, and that somehow, someone imagined it would ameliorate the bottomless sorrow now consuming me entirely.

The eerie echo of the desolate darkness tells me I’m still walking, somehow, and the meager creek is rushing greedily up the unseen banks through the ghosts of burned up tree giants to meet me. What should be soft and fertile pasture underfoot is hard, crunchy, and smells like ash. Realizing how much nothing truly remains here, I simultaneously decide I never want to come back. I have to leave, right now, before the specters pressing in with the night sky change my memories of this place irreversibly and somehow smother what remains of the good. I shuffle, sniffle, and stumble gracelessly, landing hard and sure on my hip and side. Insult to injury, I now have to convince myself to get up, that laying here waiting for this cursed place to take the last surviving member of my family through her own laziness and the impending cold isn’t possibly going to be how I go.

Willing myself up on to my hands and knees, I feel the earth give a little under my right palm, slide with the stones beneath me a few feet forward, and realize the dirt is covering a drawer. An entire drawer from my mother’s writing desk is inconceivably preserved in near entirety under this pile of debris. Using the torch on my phone, I scrape out the small drawer, and rescue its contents: My mother’s favorite pen, a lock of my hair from childhood, and a single black notebook, not much bigger than my hand. A warmth flushes through me from my soul to my toes as I realize it’s THE book. The one my incredible artist dad drew in, that my mother treasured above all things. The journal dated back to my great grandmother, chronicling her family’s flight from Romania to Virginia to escape Nazi persecution. My father sketched in it most of his life, right up through my parents recent forty fifth wedding anniversary, and the birth of my niece just weeks ago. Indescribable relief courses through my body as I hold its leather cover like a prayer, willing it to be true as I cradle it to my body. Holding this one simple notebook made me sure it was all real, that I was still tethered to the world; that I now had something tangible to hold in the midst of the rubble where my life used to stand. I was shaky, but now I was sure. I would carry this place, its joy, its unspeakable pain, with me everywhere for every remaining moment of my life. But I would also get to carry this notebook, and all those who filled it with my memories. And in that now comfortable absolute darkness, I closed my eyes, and I thought of everything good.