The 700 club part 1 - Undomestication

The taste of hazelnut - or the sight of cherries and chocolate - always take me back to the day and night I spent with the 700 club. That's right, that 700 club - Pat Robertson's hair smiling at me, Terry the co-host's makeup smiling at me, everyone telling me what a pretty little girl I was - and so well-behaved!
All of this started shortly after we moved out to the semi-country. While I'm not going to accuse my parents of neglect openly and on the internet, I think they became at once so enamored and so overwhelmed by the rehabilitation of the Victorian farmhouse they had spastically and whimsically purchased that they started to think of us more as puppies than children. So we ran wild and started to live outside. We ate the pecans and grapes and figs and blackberries that grew in abundance around us, and we lost ourselves in the woods. We handled snakes and swam in the murky river. We warred with each other over claimed territories and built tepees and forts, and we didn't wear shoes for months at a time. We swung from the vines in our own personal jungle, and upon landing discovered treasures in the form of trash deposited in the woods decades ago.
My father, ever meticulous and systematic, believed firmly in videotaping the progress made in the house with the gargantuan camcorder they had purchased in 1989 (which weighed as much as I did that year). One of the videos from that era shows a slow pan of the new drywall they had put up in what would later become the den, also inadvertently recording the plaster globs, dirt, wood scraps, nails, saw blades, electrical wires and whatever else scattered all over the floor. Many of the rooms still had no light fixtures, so the video gives the feeling of a deserted ruin, or of the beginning repair of a house destroyed by flood and storm. Then the panning stops, and my father's soft narration of each insipid detail pauses, and you see my shadowed face fill the screen. I'm giggling uncontrollably. I don't think my father normally noticed us as we scampered about, but perhaps seeing me through the viewfinder unexpectedly caused him to become unusually observant of just what I had become. "When was the last time you combed your hair?" he asks, in as unrehearsed and incredulous a tone as I've ever heard from him, and I giggle even more and hide my face, eventually squirming my way out the door and out of historical documentation via 85-pound camcorder.
While other kids sat in desks and did long-division worksheets, we chased deer and rabbits, shot each other with BB guns and sneaked by no trespassing signs. We created a universe for ourselves that no one else entered or even noticed, living by our own rules, and we became undomesticated animals.

Dempsey's

Tonight I ate popcorn from a plastic cup in a perhaps too purposefully Irish-style pub. I wiped my greasy fingers on my jeans and watched a mother redirect, and redirect again her toddler who was interested only in changing the sound settings on the band's mixer board. She eventually had to pick the little girl up and carry her away, while three old men and a starkly young one picked and strummed and tapped out their music for us all. The mother was someone I know socially, but not really. There were a lot of people there like that - some I knew, others I had met but didn't really know. It's always like that here. I had absolutely no opinion about any of it as I threaded my way through the crowd's elbows for more popcorn.

2,633 miles in a Hyundai

The faster we drove, the slower the sun set as we chased the spicy sky across Indiana. The day's end came slowly, slowly like a baby who doesn't want to fall asleep. Puffy streaky clouds that you've seen before, purple and blue over orange and pink, were bordered below always by the black lace of naked trees gliding by with grace. Black, spiky flames stuck motionless in space, like burned out buildings before a smooth peach sky, rolling by with the continuous conveyor belt of road. We felt tired and swollen, sweaty and too full of trail mix in this, our 11th hour on the road. As dusk did creep over us with more sincerity, I remembered the needled trees that once wept for me in Kansas, bending over and dripping their tears on the straw around me, knowing they had the same piney soul as my home.