Summer of '68

The four of us are sitting in the back seat of a shiny, blue Plymouth, taking in that not-entirely-unpleasant new car smell. The road is lined with leafy maples and oaks and they are the greenest trees I've ever seen. My mother is a nervous new driver and we are not allowed to talk. Our silence helps her navigate the bends and turns on the way to town. It is our first summer in the country and my mother is learning to drive. I am learning to swim and neither of us is happy.

Our new house is old, a white Cape Cod with a driveway of grey stones. From the start, it feels ancient and creaky and wrong. When the lilac bush blooms purple in the spring, I will carry blossoms on the school bus to my teachers but I don't know that yet.

I miss our block in the city, the lavender walls of my parent's bedroom, the gold mailbox in the lobby you have to open with a tiny key. I miss our fire escape and the candy store and shopping at the five and ten with my grandmother. I'm used to falling asleep to the sound of sirens in the near distance and here it is dead quiet and black at night.

My mother will wait for some twenty years from now to tell me she never wanted this house. "Your father chose it," she'll someday say, clucking her tongue and shaking her head. "I would have been happier in the city." But I already know this and more. I know what my mother thinks and feels without her saying a word. It's like magic.