we used to spend our summers
running through fields

EMILY STEDGE

“Incoming, incoming,” someone says.

         We thought we were nestled into the tree-line enough to not be found, but I turn around and my cousin is pointing towards the house. Our grandfather is making his way across the backyard, towards the ditch we used to visit when we were kids and still calling it “the junkyard.” Now, we’re gathered here for the nostalgia. And because I needed a place to smoke the joint I brought.

         We start walking towards the house with the same urgency we would when we were kids and caught in the act—trying to outrun our bad deeds. We don’t know it yet, but inside the house my uncle is asking my aunt to take him home. Another holiday, another victim of his off-putting demeanor, only this time it was his sister and she bit back.

         He’s the youngest of my mother’s siblings, the only boy alongside three girls. I’m twenty eight now and still don’t know how he became an alcoholic, but I know this is the only way I remember him. I imagine it’s harder for my aunts and mother, who knew him before, who are reminded of the loss every time they’re with him.

         “Not surprising it’s the three of us right now,” Richard says as we walk through the yard. Zyggy is on the other side of Richard, everyone else has scattered.

         “We eldest children stick together because we carry the largest burden,” I say. 

         Off to our right is a row of five blueberry bushes, barren and twiggy tombs of summers long ago. Blueberry muffins. Blueberry pancakes. Blueberries forever. I came out of the womb loving blueberries. We find ourselves approaching them, staring at them as if this is the Louvre and they are masterpieces seen for the first time.

         “Do you guys remember hauling around those big pots we’d use for the blueberries when we were kids?” I ask.

         “I’d always feel so proud of the hard work,” Zyggy says, absentmindedly playing with the earring dangling from his left ear.

         “Mom-Mom would have us out there earning our keep,” Richard says, and Zyggy and I laugh.

         This is the first time we’ve been back here for Christmas since our last Christmas with our grandmother four years ago.

         Sometimes it still feels like the world might shatter around me at the mention of her name. I feel her absence more when I find myself back in the places she should be—someone once told me we could torture ourselves to death, so many statements filled with shoulds.

         “Do you guys remember when Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop’s bedroom ceiling would be covered in ladybugs?” I ask.

         “Yes!” Zyggy says.

         “It still gets that way,” Richard says, tightening his ponytail. “Down at our house, too.”

         We look down the hill to the house where Richard grew up. Our other cousins are dutifully talking to our grandfather just in the distance. I take the scene in, forcing my brain to grasp it firmly while I can. While I’m here. The blue shed, faded like a favorite pair of worn denim. The lilac bushes where my grandmother would watch me hopping around trying to catch butterflies. The giant evergreen trees on the property line where my cousins and I would hide when playing elaborate make believe games about pirates or Star Wars. The hill we’d take turns sledding down in the winters.

         It seems almost impossible now, how simple it all was when we were young. Yet another thing gone, having slipped through our fingers slowly then all at once.

         I yearn for a time before we all grew up and had to face truths we’d inherited simply by being born into this family. I wish my grandmother was here to tell me something wise. The empty spaces where she should be make me feel like Alice in Wonderland, twisted around in a new landscape and now so much taller in the backyard that was once so vast I would have described it as going on and on for acres. Earlier we’d arrived at the ditch so much faster than I’d expected—I swear it used to be so far away.

         Zyggy reaches out to hold one of the branches and I instinctively do the same. The thin bark is scratchier than it looks, but I grip it like I’m trying to become it. Richard follows, and all three of our fists are wrapped around a different part of a different bush.

         “There’s power here,” Zyggy says, lightly shaking the branch for emphasis.

         I close my eyes.

         I can feel it.

Emily Stedge a writer living and working in Pittsburgh, PA, but she's also called Philadelphia and Youngstown home. Her work can be found in South Dakota Review, Touchstone Literary Magazine, and Litro Magazine.

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