Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown

Author:Molly McCully Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Persea
Published: 2020-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

POETRY, PATIENCE, AND PRAYER

Recently, when the little liberal arts college in Virginia where they had taught for two decades appeared to be shutting its doors, my parents moved out of my childhood home on the campus to spend an uncertain year teaching at a boarding school in New England. Then, when the college’s alumni rallied and it sputtered back to life, they returned to Virginia to be part of the school’s second act. They did not, however, go back to the little clapboard farmhouse where I was raised. It stood empty during the year they were absent, falling apart without their tender attention. The gutter came loose from the roof, and a number of shingles were damaged. The doors and windows, already old and buckling, warped beyond easy repair. The back porch began to rot, its floor-boards soft. My mother’s beautiful garden went entirely to seed: all deer-munched weeds and groundhog tunnels, grass grown up beyond waist-height. We loved that house like a loyal, old dog. But my parents are edging toward sixty and, by the time they returned, it was beyond their ability or desire to salvage.

Instead, they moved into a newer home near the college’s lake and began the process of unpacking all of their possessions on a new acre of the same landscape, situating their books, lamps, and chairs in whitewashed rooms less than a mile from where they’d stood before. My two siblings and I came back to help with the move at various points over the summer, each of us surprised to find an uncanny shadow version of our childhood waiting. The view of the mountains out the living room window was almost identical, but not quite. All our familiar furniture was in much the same configuration, with just a little more space around it. The ceilings were the same cool plaster but slightly higher, the floors the same oak boards, but without the warble when we walked. Even the light at twilight blued to the same shade, but beginning an instant later—I could swear it.

All of this had the effect of rendering everything we touched simultaneously foreign and familiar. Our childhood knickknacks waited in boxes for us to put them back where they belonged. As I unwrapped framed photographs slowly from dishtowels, I was surprised each time when the face of the child in the frame was mine. The distance between past and present ballooned and collapsed like a lung.

In the photo I paused over longest, I am eight years old and kneeling, eyes closed, in the great tiled hall of some European cathedral. My hands are clasped, and my chin is tilted up towards the ceiling. Beside me, a doll lies abandoned. This photo is misleading for a number of reasons. It suggests a youth full of glamorous international travel when, in fact, aside from this one extraordinary trip to Europe when my father was on sabbatical, I’ve still never been outside the country. More than that, though, looking at the picture, you’d

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