I am small. Sun streams through the bathroom window onto my torso, naked and pink like the tile. I plant my feet and press my ribs against the cool porcelain of the bathtub, like I do when my mom is soaking. My mom is not in the bathtub, no one is, but the things she uses in the bathtub rest on its ledge, the soap, the pretty pink plastic she runs across her legs. I reach for the plastic and turn it over in my hands. Now there is red on the plastic, on the tub, on my fingers. Red is my favorite color. I press my fingers together and open them over and over to make more red. Hands reach down and grab me, lifting me, squeezing me. Something is wrong. Everyone is upset.

I am small. Cold air lifts me from a deep sleep. I open my eyes and see gray swirls curling against the night sky, lit up by the massive flood lamp above the garage. Angry screaming billows from the house. Big arms cradle me. My uncle was babysitting. I hear later he put a pizza in the oven and passed out. Not fell asleep. Passing out is not the same as falling asleep.

I am small. I unfold the step stool and climb to the countertop, where I open a cupboard and use both hands to pull out a plastic bottle of Canadian Windsor. I set it on the counter and open another cupboard, take out a glass. I climb down and move the step stool to the refrigerator where I retrieve ice cubes from the freezer. I return to the counter and drop three cubes in the glass. I open the bottle and lift it very carefully to pour the correct amount, then return to the refrigerator for a can of Pepsi, with which I fill the remaining space. I spill some on the counter. The Pepsi fills the stained orange and yellow textured vinyl before making its way under the corner where crumbs gather, seeping into the body of the house.

I am small. Music blasts from a pair of four-foot-high speakers on the other side of my bedroom wall. It is a school night. I take school very seriously. I climb out of bed and walk the few steps from my bedroom through the kitchen to the living room. “Can you turn it down?” I yell to make my small voice heard. Men look up from their beers and joints. Some laugh. Some look at me and some look at my mother’s boyfriend. I understand that I have seriously overstepped my place. “It’s a school night,” I say, more quietly. The men all laugh. No one turns the music down. I go back to my room and close the door.   

I am small. I sit cross-legged on my living room floor surrounded by loose pictures and photo albums scattered like confetti. I check for date stamps, try to match up hair styles, anything to find the timeline. It doesn’t work. The more I search, the less sure I am about those blast zone years of the early 1990s. I feel myself losing my hold on the ground, sliding slowly like a pile of spaghetti on an uneven plate toward the edge of confident reality. I am alone. There is no one to break the spell, to tap me on the shoulder and pull me back into the level present. So I keep sliding, watching the distance between me and my self-image grow, the click of detachment as any confidence in my status as a sane person floats away. These images aren’t helping. I need an anchor, a map to help me find the way back to myself.

My breathing grows rapid, as if I am running, and I pull the reins to tame my spiraling psyche.  

Earlier in the afternoon, my therapist asked what I felt like before I had These Symptoms: nightmares, hypervigilance, tinnitus, jaw clenching, extreme aversion to certain places and people. My heels started bouncing and I crossed my arms. I couldn’t remember a Before. It dawned on me that the therapist was trying to find a baseline and that maybe I didn’t have one, so maybe I shouldn’t tell her because maybe that was a much more serious Symptom than I knew. My husband was out of town so there was no one to get me if I landed in a psych ward. Our time ended and I went home to begin my ill-advised expedition into memory.

I stand, careful not to step on any photos, and go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I hatch a plan. Step 1: find a memory from when I was small that is safe to exist within. Good or neutral. Step 2: [figure out later]. 

 

I am small. The air is so hot and thick during the Minnesota summer that even in the shade, the adults sit with feet splayed out, arms propped on chairs. My cousins and I beg to be taken to The Access, the public access, the only place a boat or a person can be launched on the lake. The Access was built after my grandpa made a deal with the county, an easement in exchange for a road into the landlocked forty acres he had purchased from his brother-in-law. Grandpa grew up here, in the north woods of Minnesota, but moved to the cities to raise a family and design tools for manufacturing facilities. He built this house on the lake, this four-season cabin. He and his sons—the three eldest, not so much the younger two. He built his house in the cities too, and the one next door, also on a lake. I live across the street from those homes. My dad grew up there, but I won’t make the connection for many years because I live with my mother and Grandpa is my dad’s dad and my mother hates my dad. She says horrible mean things about him and never mentions the fact that we live on the street where he grew up, looking out our front window onto his childhood home. I know my dad once lived in the house where I live because I know my parents were married. I even have a fragment of a memory of him in the house. My dad likes the park at the end of our block and I attach his affection for it to the brief time he lived in my house and to the park’s proximity to his best friend’s house down the street. I don’t put it together that his best friend has always lived at the end of the block and my dad grew up on this block and that is how they know each other. At this moment, I am not concerned with the house where I live or those across the street because I am up north at Grandma and Grandpa’s, at the new house by the lake.

I am small. My cousins are small too. They live a few miles from our grandparents in a house that is not on a lake, although it is on a pond. Their dad is my dad’s brother and my godfather. Our great-grandfather built the house where my cousins live and their dad was born in that house and he will die in it, far too young, almost thirty years from now, ten years before his youngest daughter will return to live out the final year of her even shorter life. The pond is excellent in summer for hunting frogs and turtles with a fishing net and excellent in winter for ice skating. Being relatively small and protected from wind, it tends to freeze over more smoothly than the lake. The lake is small too, as lakes go, but it is fed by a spring, so it stays cooler than other lakes its size, even far into summer when our feet have grown calluses, our secret human hooves, built up to protect our soft pads from the stab of rocks and sticks and small thorns on our daily journeys from the house down the gravel driveway through the fir and birch trees, past Grandma’s garden on the right, as we catch the butterflies, walk with the damselflies, avoid the bees, and finally reach the end of the driveway and the road the county built to access the lake so our grandpa could access his land. We sit in the ditch on the side of the road and pick the tiny strawberries that grow there before we walk back up the driveway, and here we are, begging to be taken to The Access so we can cool off in the shallow water of the lake.

The shallow part of the lake, created by a gravel fill to allow boat trailers to get their aluminum fishing boats into the water, only extends a few feet. At the edge, the water is clear and minnows kiss our feet. Cattails crowd both sides of the gravel spill while white and yellow butterflies meander at the edge of dry land. Past the gravel is the lake itself and past the lake all we can see are trees. Out a little ways and to the left, there is a channel that connects the small part of the lake at The Access to the bigger part of the lake, which is still too small for a speed boat. Across the channel, there are a few places where the cattails give way to roots and fallen branches and this is where the largemouth bass like to hang out. We do not care about the largemouth bass yet because we are small and our excitement is still here, in the shallows of the boat launch. At the far edge of the shallows, the bottom of the lake drops suddenly. I do not like the drop off. It scares me so much I will not play in the shallows without a life jacket. In every picture of me near water at this age, I am either wearing a life jacket or holding one in my hand. The drop off is too visible through the clean water of the lake, a hard line between the known and the unknown: gravel and minnows, then nothing, just darkness. I do not know how far down the bottom of the lake is, but even at this age, I know the lake is named Deep Lake and that gives me enough to go on. I know there are big fish with sharp teeth out there. Toes look like bait worms and this will stay at the top of my mind for the rest of my life. When I am brave, I wear my life jacket upside down like a diaper, and turn away from the gravel to float and watch the surface of the lake and the surrounding woods.

The woods are dark too, though not as much as the lake. Pine, fir, and spruce crowd the ash and birch to provide shelter for white tail deer, squirrels, ticks, poison ivy, and black bears. Grandpa shot a bear at the house by the lake once. He waited for it to go away but it stood up on its back legs and tried to break through the window. You can’t shoot a bear outside bear season and it wasn’t bear season, so he left it by the window and called the DNR. The Department of Natural Resources is in charge of hunting and fishing, including the disposal of nuisance bears. To prevent poaching, you can’t keep your own nuisance bear. To prevent waste, the DNR has a list of people who have the facilities and skills to turn a killed bear into meat and hide. I am not afraid of bears because I have been told they are shy and if you are loud, they will avoid you. I am afraid of ticks because everyone else seems to be and all of us kids have to strip down for tick checks when we have been playing outside. Once one hid in my hair and no one found it until it got very big and had to be burned to make it let go of my scalp because if a tick head gets stuck under your skin, that is very bad. I don’t know exactly why but it is. 

When we get back from The Access, the sun is still high though it is getting to be late afternoon. The mosquitos will soon be out. Having eaten all the strawberries from the ditch and most of the Popsicles out of the chest freezer, we venture in search of wild honeysuckle beyond the driveway. Honeysuckle likes shade and shade lives in the woods. The acreage around the house on the lake is almost all woods, except for the pockets of swamps where mosquitoes are born. I have spent a lot of time in the woods, climbing on fallen tree trunks, spotting elusive pink and white lady’s slippers (the protected state flower of Minnesota), avoiding leaves of three, nearly losing shoes in the mud, finding the places where deer have bedded for the night, watching birds, swatting mosquitoes, keeping an eye on the lake in case I need to walk down to the edge to find my way home. The woods are predictable even in all the natural chaos of fallen trees with rotting branches and poisonous mushrooms growing alongside edible ones and wild animals that could kill you because, with rare exceptions, the woods and its inhabitants behave as expected. Trees shade and support, birds sing, deer look startled and run, bears stay away, mosquitoes bite, poison ivy gives a wicked rash. Even the poisonous plants masquerading as benign tell you who they are if you know how to look. I trust the woods. Despite my affection for Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or maybe because of it, the woods are not fearsome, but instead a magickal place where anything is possible. I open the door to the house on the lake and shout, “We’re going to the woods!” Without looking up from his paper, my grandpa responds in his unbothered monotone, “Bring a compass.” 

I am small. I am free. I have a compass.