Farmington, NY, 1994

Farmington, NY, 1994.

Your kitchen leaks. It has room for two to stand back to back when either are routing around for the dollar cans of ravioli, but when you’re shrouded by the drowsy, cobweb arch separating it from the yawning brown carpet of your living room, you’re suddenly claustrophobic. The rest of the one floor cottage spirals out of proportion - how can it be so large and just right here be so small? The kitchen runs parallel to the living room - half the length of an east coast, small-town home - and splutters the wandering out through its pipe-work into the backyard disguised in dying clumps of yellowed grass.

Just out of sight of those tiny mesh squares gleaming over dead blades of filler is a paradise of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, apples, pears and cherries; of roses, orchids and daisies; of forget-me-nots and love-mes, so your daddy calls them. Those little burning flower hearts hung by their pointing tails are magic, you know it. Through that wire screen you see him happier than you will ever remember him again, knee deep in the iron-soil of your childhood, mucking through compost heap behind your family’s aging shed. The truth is it’s for the apple tree - it’s but a withered stump, one lone arm saluting the sunny sky but still there’s apples. You know it must be because of the love-mes.

You press your nose against the mesh and see the throbbing hearts of love-mes beating by his dirty nails. They are magic, you know it. The love-mes, with their dark red passion, have a plot all of their own, with white stones and special sprinklers. You will pick one when you’re ten and he’ll, with red nose and stumbling words, wither you, brown the tips of your ears with rage - they are some of the most difficult flowers to bloom, and hidden underneath those silly cherry trees, how else could one expect hard work to flourish? You’ll act sheepish and proud but water your dying house-plants - the green thumb is y-chromosome only - with your shame.

The yellow-curtained, claustrophobic kitchen has two slits for eyes that lazily watch your father muck through his compost to help satisfy his future broken heart. The frilly things are useless - always pulled back, they age relentless against the burning sun, doing nothing to shield a bowl of cherries from those shadowy trees against the afternoon’s hazy blaze.

Two lilac bushes coat the sides of your home, sneak into the vision of your ever-squinting house. You think they look like the perms on your mother’s elderly lady friends, the ones who work for county - you gossip with them, and pick them for your ear, and think they look quite divine. Your hair clips dissipate in a barely dusted vase, dripping though they were set to brighten the sea-foam linoleum card table, where you, Italian, must always finish your adult-sized portions. Even when you’re not hungry. Even when it’s brussel sprouts.

The table is what stunts the archway. The right eye can do nothing but peer over the over-wide linoleum, and the over-wide linoleum is shoved so close to the tobacco yellowed walls that only four of six brown leather chairs can actually occupy humans. The other two, squeezed between wall and pseudo-dining room, serve as hidden rests for cat or the freed cockatiel. (He’ll die when you are ten, shortly after you break one of your father’s hearts, and just before your family’s ready to leave New York for that mystery named Colorado. It could have been Australia, you’ll remember when the teens turn troubled.

(Dear Gods, you’ll lament, it could have been Australia.)

A lilac petal falls upon the envelopes, stacked one by one, rooted out from underneath the kitchen sink earlier by your father. You don’t bother to read them, just totter through to the dingy sink and play with tomato stains that ought to be cleaned.

It could have been here, Australia, or the elderly ladies at the county, you’ll think, barefoot, plump stomach, stick fingers picking at tomato stains. But for now you’ll pick the lilacs, tack them behind your unwashed ears and then into your stuffed animals ears and tell them, “My, aren’t you pretty.” You’ll let them up into the chairs and feed them glorious dinners on the sticky tomato plates and they’ll be allowed to stop when they are full and they won’t eat dollar ravioli, they’ll eat anything and everything in that credit card Eden. You’ll cook for them the fruits of that backyard kitchen.

You’ll cook them your heart in those bushes, those crocus, those scallions, those roses - those strawberries, those blackberries, those raspberries, apples and pears - those lilacs, those cherries, those precious forget-me-nots -

- but this paradise lives on bankruptcy and broken hearts and piles of letters on the kitchen table, and you’ll stand back against the tobacco walls and hear that it is not Australia, the solution is Colorado, and that it is three months and you will think, anywhere,

anywhere for the rest of my life but here.