sepiastars | perfection (Reply)

Isn't it amazing how places from your childhood just seem so... perfect? I don't know what it was, but I was just sitting here, reading a book, and I had a flash--a sudden memory--of my grandparents' house in North Carolina. Instead of saying, "we're going to Grandma's house," we always referred to it as "going to the mountains," so that in my universe The Mountains is a very specific place. A place with specific smells and feelings. My memory wasn't of anything in particular, just of how it looked to be lying on the grass in front of Kim's cabin and looking up at the way the sun filters through the leaves, how the grass and earth and wildflowers smell. I miss it. I can see us, me and my cousins, like it's a movie-- little girls running through the woods, climbing the trees and walking the trails that were, and are still, so familiar that we could do it backwards and in our sleep. There are the rocks up above Pat's house where we pretended we were riding horses, the trees by my Grandma's that have our names carved into them (and the stump I landed on when I fell out of my tree, still there), Kim's cabin that no one but us girls ever used, the narrow, steep and winding trail that led to the dam and the lake up the mountain - a hidden fairyland. I miss when we used to walk down to Miss Jackie's house and play in the stream in her back yard (it was so cold!), and afterward, we would always knock on her door and ask for a glass of water. And she was always happy to give it to us. Miss Jackie died years ago. I miss how on the drive up it was easy to pretend that no one was able to follow through the mountain passes, and once we reached the gap, I was surrounded by a safe wall of earth that no one else would be able to negotiate. I miss the way the house used to smell - yeah, it was a little damp, so it had an earthy smell, and then there was the smell of oatmeal, because that's what Grandma always cooked for breakfast. And coffee. And the smell that I still associate with my Grandpa but still can't identify. And Dial soap, because that's what he washes his hands with. And Noxzema. And the green, leafy smell from the open windows. Maybe I just miss being a little girl. Or maybe I just miss my grandparents. Or my cousins, whom I haven't seen in a long time. I want my little girls to spend their summers there with their cousins, playing in the dirt and catching salamanders. I'm tired, and I want to go to the mountains, and I want it to be like it was then.