Thursday, June 10, 2010

Home Coming

We travel by names. Choose by the pull of them. One summer we follow a map to Peachland just to eat up the sound of it. Twelve hours of driving to arrive at night to an over-packed campground, fire bans, R.Vs parked along the gravel road with unrolled turf and potted plants. I pitch our tent in the crowded dark - the semi dark of patio lights strung like stars between awning poles, electric constellations. Later, we walk the path from site to site to see what we can see, see, see: a lone purple plum drooping over a fence, tiptoe height, beside the sandy volleyball court. All she wants that summer is to pick fruit from a tree to eat, and so I lift her to it. The plum as sweet as a plum should be.

Tonight, we are sleeping in St. Cloud. I found it floating on the map between where we've been and where we will end. Patron saint of weather, or shade, or rain? City of what? In St. Cloud there is a woman who works the desk at the hotel lobby with sharp, pointed brown teeth. When I tell her the washroom is in need of a cleaning, not because I am angry or disappointed or looking for my money’s worth, but because I assume she, or someone, would like to know, she tells me she can’t very well clean the washroom and work front desk and the breakfast table at the same time. “No, I say. You certainly can’t.”

No one seems to know why the name St. Cloud. “But that’s a good question.” I would also like to ask if growing up here makes it easier to believe in God, or, at least, believe in a world where clouds are holy, and if the clouds than the rain that falls from them too, then the ground it blesses, the food it sprouts, the bodies that eat from it, the feet that walk on the soaked and holy mud?

We swim in the pool in the early morning before we leave because this summer all she wants is to swim. The chlorine is so strong our eyes sting from it, and though I shower when I am done I smell St. Cloud on my arms all day long as I drive away from it. Exit north, my directions read. Turn. Merge. I check the map for names to pull us along. Check every twenty minutes that I’m headed right because I am so easily lost, distracted from the point by sweetness. That dot on the map above me with the name I have never asked any questions of.

4 comments:

Janna Barber said...

And this one is so nice too. Unquestionable home, so glad you are there.

deanna said...

Can I just sit in your garden of words for a while? I like it here.

Terog said...

So glad to read you again.

Angela said...

so glad to be read. still.