Excerpt 1 from "Stirling"
I grew up in the mountains of Pennsylvania. We lived in the more populated area, a sleepy town that nuzzled into the cleavage of two mountains, and cuddled up on three sides to a moody river, about as random in its behavior as a hormonal teenager. All in all, we were twenty-three hundred people at our most—the year I graduated high school—all buzzing about our lives, caught in the in-between. We weren’t quite Country or at least from the inside we never thought so, after all, the “Sticks”(also endearingly called “the Boonies”) were a fifteen minute drive up the hill where our cousins lived, and those weird new kids at school. But we sure as hell weren’t Suburbanites or Cityfolk either—three hours from the City (New York City, of course), an hour or so from Scranton (if you could even call that a city). The town, with its ten side streets tethering themselves to one main road, no traffic light, boasted a whopping two gas stations, old-style 2 pump each, pay the man who handles the gas for you, a General Store, an Oral Surgeon but no doctor, and a Psychic, Madame Annette. Oh, and a bank.
In an effort to drill numbers and letters into the young brilliant minds of its children, all streets were numbered (1st- 10th) and the really-should-be-one lane intersecting avenues gave practice to learning your ABC’s, curving around the mountains and river in order A-S. After all, isn’t the first thing you learn how to write your name, then your address, and then eventually something about a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog? Literacy begins at a young age and we were determined to be smarter than the kids from the Sticks, at least within the pages, but not between the lines. But, don’t let the sheer quantity of numbers and letters fool you, most of the space between stop sign starved intersections was filled with overgrown mini fields, green-thumb gardens sweetening the air and our tongues with corn, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, and the slightly less in number well-manicured yards sewn against the side of houses with rose- and pansy- beds (because there, in that little town in Pennsylvania, pansies are still flowers and not someone who doesn’t fulfill an often dangerous expectation).
We were hugged by farms but didn’t work on them; our hillbilly relatives did. They had the horses, the ATVs, the rifles and shotguns. They built their own houses, probably without licenses, and mended the barns and fences, even the electric ones. Don’t ever pee on the electric ones. They cleaned the pigs and milked the cows, and could skin, gut, filet, cook and preserve just about any animal, fruit and vegetable native to our region. They, those hillbilly cousins, were the can-doers, the able-bodied, the ones that let us drive their rattling Chevy pickup trucks and rusted stick-shift Pontiacs on their windy streetlight-less dirt roads and try our hands at fishing and hunting on their land, in those years long before we could legally have licenses.
Still, as townsfolk, we could hold our own. We learned quickly, spending time in those mountains hanging onto the coattails and horse reins of those strange cousins, playing, learning, observing. We went camping, learned to know the roads, the interactions between them and nature, be it black ice on a 90 degree curve, dense fog clearing the blacktop, gravel or dirt as you traveled along a sheer drop off, or the occasional suicidal buck or doe that preferred to attempt battle with your car’s front end rather than turn tail and save its own life.
I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t all the townsfolk, maybe it was just mine, my family, who’ve always had this odd, inextricable tie to the land, an invisible threading running through our veins and quilting us to nature in a network of patches spread across regions, states, countries, oceans, bonding us to our origin, this unfamiliar yet homey land that now washed its mud over my feet, that clung to my clothes, in my hair, and had already and so easily found its way into me, as if it’d been there all along, and was just seeping back in to settle down for the night.
Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.
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