"You can't go back home to your family,
back home to your childhood ... back home to ...dreams of glory
and of fame ... back home to the escapes of time and memory.”
--from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again
I try to write myself home. I'm not sure what I want to do if the ink on the page creates some kind of magic portal, allowing me to open a secret door, to lift the lid off of a rabbit hole, to bend time and space.
Would I change how we lived on Clairhaven Street, if I could?
I guess I would mostly like to be seated around our kitchen table on one of the good nights, like those when my father came through the kitchen door carrying a bag of fried shrimp from Young's Tavern, greasy circles dotting the brown paper. On such a night, though it was 10:00 or 11:00 or midnight, we marveled at our good fortune, at the beauty of plump white shrimp inside hot, crisp breading, at the snapshot of a family sitting happily together.
This week, I've been lost in the past, reworking my essay about Clairhaven Street. While I can't find the word spell that will take me home again, I have learned that I can time travel on the whiff of a lilac. Today, peonies took me there.
This morning, I cut white and pink peonies from my side yard. Heavy rain bent their stalks, and the cabbage blooms pooled together into a carpet of blossoms. I cut only those broken stems, the collection of these damaged flowers combining to make something quite lovely.
Today, Rachel told me: "I want these flowers in my wedding bouquet." I smile to think of her finely-boned fingers carrying peonies bound by ribbons at the stems.
She has my mother's hands.
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