perfumed memories

Home can be a place, a person, a feeling. Childhood homes are altogether more complicated. For Elizabeth, childhood meant dirty feet after a day of play. Feeling isolated. Breathing in the smell of rain. Possessing an overwhelming sense of longing. Home meant being a flower trying to grow in the middle of a corn field.

There are times when memories creep up on her like a storm in July. Sitting on a California beach, listening to the waves, she wonders if she will ever go back. There is a deep-seated guilt in leaving home. The Midwest stretches with a sturdy vastness that keeps the rest of the world just out of reach. In that place, she would always be Liz. Always the cop’s daughter. Always a bit odd. Never capable of change in anyone’s eyes but her own.

After ten years, she can still list every classmate by first and last name and taste her mother’s meat and potato meals. She can remember every plant tucked around the corners of her childhood home. Dormant tulips popping up in spring, fresh zinnias planted in summer, rusty mums to accompany autumn pumpkins. Every season different and yet the same.

She recalls the honeysuckle vine creeping across the yard, home to hummingbirds and bumblebees and a scrawny girl with auburn hair. Below its candied blooms she used to sprawl, dust communing with dust, reveling in the feeling of cool earth on skin. Liz had been oblivious to time and what it held for her, only concerned with drawing up her next treasure map and sleuthing around the tree-lined yard. One early summer day, the vines produced a find far greater than gold: a litter of fuzzy kittens tucked beneath the floral jungle.

She searches the beach for such innocence and spots a father and daughter laughing in the surf. The sight is a relief. The City had filled Liz with so much wonder and excitement, she never realized the cold cynicism that can chill through concrete. It had been a hard lesson in perspective; a feast of clichés. The grass was, in fact, not always greener. A cloud passes over the sun as she dips back into perfumed memories.

Outside her childhood room had grown a large lilac bush. Its branches were as gnarled and twisted as a wizard’s staff. Upon the biggest branch Liz would perch, like a nymph among the leaves. It was a secret safe place where she could be anyone and dream anything. The lilac always stood plain and barren before its beautiful transformation. Little Liz wished she could mirror its journey. An ineffable weight came over her heart the day the branch no longer supported her body. She had bitterly compared its awkward limbs to her own.

Stretching her toes into warm sand, Elizabeth smiles to herself. She knows she was not meant to be the lilac. Her journey had been that of the pear tree behind the shed. Her parents had planted the tree not long after her birth. It grew as she grew; it stalled as she stalled. The harder her family tried to coax it into bloom, the more dormant the tree became.

Every one of her beloved flora was eventually claimed by disease or space or time. All but the pear tree. It stood faithfully until the shed was torn down, removing the protective shade. Elizabeth leans back and lets the sun caress her face. The pear tree had found what it needed. The morning she said goodbye, simple white flowers had begun to fill its boughs. Maybe someday, one courageous pear might kickstart all the rest.

She could imagine that first pear, though she would not be there to see it. Elizabeth had left the suffocating flatlands, then left the cement prison. Her life now lay beyond rows of soybeans, over mountains and desert, where her dreams were allowed to grow and take root to a place, a person, a feeling all her own.