A curtain of snow suddenly blew across the road in front of me, as if separating me from what had gone before and what was ahead. I was disoriented, crossing no-man's land, blind.
I travel alone on my twice-yearly trips from Philadelphia to southeastern Michigan, where I grew up. I have not lived there for nearly fifty years, but some root stretched very thin still pulls me back. I don't think I could live there, but I need to visit that part of me, the part that is from there.
I need to drive, not fly, take two days to get there in my nowhere bubble. It takes that long to make the transition from an active in-my-life person to the receptive visitor, and from urban life to the small Midwestern town. I slide along through the mountains, stop for the night in an anywhere motel, begin to feel rootless and timeless, learn about many things on NPR or live in the world of an audiobook as I drive again.
The land flattens, and in eastern Ohio the winter lake-effect snow can suddenly squall. This time I saw it ahead, the black sky and a look of fog over the wide fields. Then I was in it, with nothing to do but slow down and hope.
I was not as frightened as I would have been had I not entered a kind of dream state. My cell phone rang; when I finally got safely to a rest area on the turnpike, I saw that it was my sister, Laura, who often has a sixth sense about travel dangers. When I told her about the snow, she said, "I was afraid of that!" and looked up the weather radar on her computer. She said I appeared to be out of the snow except for one little flare near Findlay. Sure enough, that was true, and soon I was at my brother's and beginning the rituals of re-acquaintance with my family and my home place.
It has been ever-more important to do this since my mother's death two years ago. My parents were always the focus of our reunions: in summer, all five of us siblings with our children gathered at their house in the country. Even when they moved to town because of my father's Parkinson's disease, we made the effort to come from other parts of the country. Dad died, Mother aged, we kept coming, supporting her and each other through her decline.
Now we have to face the changes. Weddings have brought us together in Vermont and Texas, but that is not home. And, really, home is not home. The overlay of memory is more real than the physical places.
I am trying to find my way in a kind of suspended state of almost-retirement. My two youngest siblings, who live in Michigan, are still working. My middle sister. in Alabama, has four grandchildren and a job. My sister in Texas is happily retired with an also-retired husband, and they travel all over in their camper. I play violin jobs once in a while now, but my husband is still a very busy musician. I imagine that my family is wondering what has happened to the accomplished oldest sister they have admired, how she can be so aimless.
One day during this visit, my sister-in-law and I explored the Lenawee County Historical Museum. It is housed in the ornate Carnegie library where I spent so much of my childhood. While I chatted with one young volunteer about my memories of the place, an older man with thick glasses came in. I was talking about my fifth grade teacher, a grand-niece of a famous local woman abolitionist, when, to my surprise, the old man turned out to have been a classmate of mine.
He was a deeply informed docent and walked all around with us, explaining the artifacts of the industrial heyday of the county and the history of its part in the Underground Railroad on the route to Canada. He also knew about our former classmates: his buddy who was a go-between for me in third
grade when I wanted to know if Gary Krouse liked me, and the class clown who was now a bitter Vietnam War vet who had lost a leg. And he also remembered that I wrote "wonderful stories" that our fifth-grade teacher had me read to the whole class.
I have only kept in touch with one old friend from those days, my best friend from second grade on, Mary. She has been the constant, along with my family, through all the crises and joys of our lives. We have an innate compatibility that goes beyond mere history. Over a cozy lunch at her house, we picked up our friendship easily. She has embraced her retirement and has a network of volunteering and social activities. It may come more naturally to her than it has for me because she has lived in the same community for most of her life.
In spite of the welcoming from my family and my friend, and all the warm gatherings in sub-zero weather, I was ready to head back home, to my real life, whatever that is. The return trip had no drama; there were no storms. Only my mind is snow blind, caught at the border between two parts of my life.
