House of the Prairies

I am traveling this summer, to a place I have not been in years — but, you see, this time, it is not so easy. This time, there is a citizenship to sort out, a visa to adhere to, a claim to identity that I must uphold when faced with customs and border patrol. This time, I am no longer a child, and I no longer am accorded the niceties and forgiveness people grant to children who do not know better, and have little reason to. This time, I will be a woman alone in a country I have only seen on western, American news — backwards, they call it, a threat to democracy, led by a psychopath who rewrote the laws to hold onto power, and the people let him do it — and I am scared, I am scared, of going home. 

There is a little house sat across from a golden field, second to last on its unpaved street, protected by a wall of sun-warm black bars and a gate that squeaks and creaks in the prairie wind. We always took the train there, because no one there had the money to build an airport, or even a train station, and so the train would leave us in a golden field, in another one. There are many fields there, more fields than houses. We would carry our luggage through the gold to the nearest paved road, where we would take a cab across town, to the other end of pavement, beyond which cabs refused to go. Smart of them, too; I could not blame them. There are no roads, where we lived. There are trails of dust and dirt, with brown things growing down the middle. Any cabs that dared go down there were unlikely to come back.

The paved road ended with the village, and the village was made of wood. Every house was very pretty and very old. There was only one convenience store, only one store at all, and they sold sukhariki, little crisps, instead of candy. To this day I have a child's fondness for sukhariki. I will buy them if I see them. I do not see them very often, in this place we call America, because here there are chips and pretzels and aisles of snacks in every supermarket, and there is no room for my childhood here.

I am sure the village people did more than care for cows, but the cows are what I remember, the cows and the geese. The cows were kind but terrifying — they were much bigger than me, and probably still are, if there are any cows left. The geese were also terrifying, because they lived in the house on the edge of the village and they chased me when I tried to come in. Now I am afraid of geese. My friend thinks it funny, so I find goose-themed things for her, as a sort of joke. But back then, when we went through the village, we had to pass the geese, and walk through the cow fields, past the giant cows and the head-scarfed women who cared for them, and when we could hear the whipping-trees is when we knew we were home. The river ran there, across the road from the whipping-trees. The river was where the water came from when the pipes ran, when they did not. The river was where we washed our clothes, washed our bodies, washed our food. We had a washing machine one year, but it was stolen, and we did not — perhaps we could not — buy a new one.

We would walk down the river, then turn left, then walk to the second house from the end, the one with the black bars and the creaking, squeaking gate. Across the road stood another house, what people in America would call a trailer house, rusted to the bone. I used to play with the girl who lived there. I don’t remember her name. I gave her a dried seahorse, once, a palm-sized, shriveled relic that I had found on Crimean shores, and she later gave it to someone else.

There were two other kids, a boy and a girl. The boy taught me how to fish, and how to make it look like someone had peed their pants. The girl taught me how to lie, and how to do it convincingly, and how to spin stories like woven glass. We would catch frogs and build houses for them, then feed them to the neighborhood cats. I had a house made of grapevines where we played at being kings. The boy’s nose was an easy bleeder, and the girl and I would tease him about it, and splash him about it. I wonder if they still live there. I wonder where they’ve gone, if they’ve gone anywhere at all. I wonder who they have become. Are they afraid as I am?

I have another friend here, in America, not the goose one, who doesn’t believe me when I talk about the house with the black bars. Part of the roof was stolen one year, so we replaced it ourselves, and the roof has been odd ever since. There are only three windows and only one door. There are two rooms in the house, each a floor, and the bathroom is an outhouse. Wash up in the river, or after 1600 under the hosepipe, unless it’s Monday. Between the house and the outhouse there is a garden. We grew everything there, cabbage leaves and cucumbers and strawberries, tomatoes under plastic and gooseberries under the sun. Raspberries cowered behind the house; green beans clung to their fences; little green grapes grew from my vine-house, inedible, and we used them as bullets. I used to make good slingshots out of twigs and rubber bands. I used to wander the swamp alone and without fear. Now I am afraid of dark alleys, dark corners, parking garages and stairwells. I carry pepper spray. I do not know where to buy pepper spray there — I do not even know if they sell it.

It is funny, now, to think that I had thought the village — which we lived outside of, not within — to be civilization. We are going to the village, was how the narrative ran. The town was far away, hours of walking through birch fields and wild apple orchards and cottonwoods. It was where the yarmarka was, where the lottery ran. I won a six-pack of Pepsi cans, one year, and they were worth heavy gold to me. Another year, I was bought a pink dress with flowers on it, and the lottery lady thought it so cute she let me draw the tickets. There is a spa there, too, somewhere. It is nothing like the American spa. I doubt America would stoop to calling it a spa. I wonder how small the place would feel to me, now, where before it was grand like a Barbie castle.

Perhaps that is the fear, then. I am afraid of coming back a stranger, grown accustomed to American poverty and American dreams, unable to greet the old house with the wonder it has left in me. I am afraid that someone will notice. I am afraid of being an American tourist in a country that, according to the news, loves to target tourists.

I am being childish, in the most grown-up way possible.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? We have made childhood into an insult, yet they do better than the rest of us. Child language acquisition is a powerful tool, one of the most powerful out there. A child can weave miracles of any tongue on this planet, but the adult only of the ones they already know. A child can become who they need to be, but the adult only who they have already become. Why do we frown on childhood? Are we jealous, insecure? We rush towards adulthood, towards the freedom of decision, towards responsibility and the choice to abdicate it, but think — when we were young, the world was as big as it was ever going to be, and yet we were unafraid. More than that, we were curious. We were eager. Those of us that still are, I admire you, I am inspired by you, I am green with envy at you. I wonder what I must learn to see this world like you do, like I used to. I wonder what I have left to lose.

Anyway, I will be going home this summer. I will walk from the lonely railway and through the golden fields; I will gawk through dirty windows at a way of life I haven't seen in years; I will scurry past the cows and the whipping trees and pass new judgement on a life that is no longer my own. It will be a summer of learning, discovering how much of old weathering my skin remembers, testing how well the straight set of my shoulders holds up against the wild world. It will be terrifying, I think. It will scrape me raw. And maybe, just maybe, I will find a little girl among the swamp weeds, with frogs in her pockets and red clover knotted in her hair, a little girl who knows the land she came from; a little girl who will take my hand and walk with me, one last time through the dark, to show me where the flowers bloom.