Leaving Home

I ask her for a precipitating factor.

She remembers waking in her bedroom and listening to the dog’s chain rattling outside her window. How the rising sun pulled the shadow of the white picket fence across the lawn. Across the dirt road she could see the starlings like a black necklace on the hydro wires which made a peculiar humming sound. She was smoothing out the sheets on her bed, watching dust motes groping in a shaft of sunlight. As she dressed by the vanity mirror, she could hear the small money sound of the radio playing downstairs in the kitchen where Mom had her ironing board set up. She would be moving her soft, round body in a sweeping motion, her whole self becoming the iron and its movement across Pop’s shirt.

As she descended the stairs with toothpaste still sleeping in the corner of her lips, she was greeted by the smell of toast shifting around her head. On the table, her cracked and stained China cup held a halo of steam in expectance of her. I knew she wanted to tell me about the bacon grease and Pop’s spicy pipe smoke embedded in the eyelet curtains and the way the light kept changing as it filtered through the holes. But instead she mentions that from that same window she could see the fields, half-mown of straw and the dark, sleepy earth stripped of its gold blanket that swept over its face during the eternal summer months. Beyond the wood and glass the world sloped deeply into the sun. The ripe scent of September lay out there, trapped in the cold dew. She could feel the flaming of the leaves in the trees that lined the drive.

And she really believes it happened when Mom opened the window allowing the world to steal into the tightly knit universe of our warm, yellow kitchen. It came searching for her with its impatient fingers. She tried to concentrate on the mantle clock scratching away at the time, the hardness of her chair and the flattened cushion that knew her weight, but it was useless.

The pull was loud in her head, the pull to grow up and out, because the space she was in had shrunk as her knowledge expanded. She imagined the dust settling in her room like an old friend. Her mind began to chart the burning path of the new day’s sun across the angles of the ceiling until it came to rest in the mirror. The room would blush with its touch and the dolls in the closet close their eyes as her ears opened up to the long, low flute note of a mourning dove in the eave of our home.

And I ask her again what it was, but she just takes my hand and tells me there is no answer when you never look back or ahead of the day you live in.