Blooming

Pale Ghosts. Buried Streams.

Every spring, when the snows melted in the farmy lands around Honeoye Falls, New York, my sister and I would open the heavy bulkhead door and drag our blue bikes up the steep cellar steps to the pale green air above. To us, this day was an extraordinary blooming, as we tugged and pulled the bicycles up and out from the underground darkness into the morning light.

What a wonder it was to ride those bikes again after a winter of trudgy boots and ice-crusted mittens, of dim afternoons, and snowdrifts thick with silence. We were ourselves again: light-hearted and eager, unafraid, free from inside, anxious rooms. Pushing the pedals hard, steering straight, we rode up to the end of York Street and our favorite spring place: the stream.

Run-off from the empty fields, the stream threaded its way through memories of corn and beans and gushed out under York Street into a smooth, sparkling ribbon of cold water with emerald banks, and then it melted into a mucky, marshy field beyond. The water was so clear, the stones beneath looked like polished jewels, and the green underground grass flowed like the tresses of a goddess.

On those banks, we set up house and made cookies out of mud, and pies too, and sometimes we brought our dolls and little flannel blankets, and we made chairs out of fallen walnut branches, and the dolls talked about how lovely it all was, delicious too, especially the cookies pebbled with chocolate chips and the pies sprinkled with snips of grass.

All day long we stayed at the stream until the faltering afternoon light chilled and the cookies were gone and the dolls were cranky, and we knew it was time to go back to the wallpapered rooms stained with cigarette smoke and worry and a number of lost or misplaced dreams. We rode home, quiet now, and put our bikes against the wall of the old, haunted barn with its smell of motor oil and gray dirt and rust and parched wood.

At night, the stream eased our dreams and our wild blue bikes made everything possible and riding hard out to the end of York Street was adventure enough. And we slept in our twin beds in the north-facing room and the dolls slept and the stream flowed and flowed and flowed all the way to the everlasting stars.