After the terrible fire struck Ellen’s house in Massachusetts, she continued living there with her three kids for weeks. My parents and their friends all wanted to help her. This was the place we had congregated many weekends year round, making the three and a half hour drive from New York City towards freedom and space. Ellen’s property was very private, accessed only by a windy unkempt dirt road. A barn, an old cabin, and farmhouse were nestled between a pond, a huge vegetable garden, and thick woods that seemed to reach out in every direction.

I had never before seen the devastation a fire can bring.

Bright blue sky poked through the busted roof while the trees threatened to reach in the broken windows. It was as if nature wanted to pour right into those burned rooms and reclaim them. The house smelled like barbeque and burnt plastic. Black soot smeared every surface because the rain and eventually the snow fell through the collapsed roof.

I remember walking up the dilapidated stairs, skipping over missing steps, soot dampened into a paste, the army green plastic tarp flapping open in the wind. I was following Ellen’s nine and twelve year old children, Kirven and Ines, into what had been their bedroom, to search for any toys that had escaped the flames’ reach. Mutilated, melted Planet of the Apes figures were all we could recover. We played with them anyway.

By the time the house burned down I was perhaps eight. Kirven was older than me by a year and I had a secret, unspoken crush on him. I was a city kid, mesmerized by his sense of freedom. With golden matted curls and brown skin from summers running naked through the garden, catching frogs and riding his horse, Kirven had a relaxed, goofy laugh and swam in the pond with the leeches, even though they sucked the spaces between his toes. He didn’t seem to care because it was too hot not to swim and he couldn’t wait for our whole group to get organized and drive over to the lake. He swam with the dogs in the algae covered pond and laughed at us chickens. Then Kirven burned off the leeches himself. The boys I knew in Manhattan would never have done something like that. Laughing, he flung those scared leeches into the woods, and jumped fearlessly back into the murky water.

“Have a good trip!” he screamed as each one flew through the air. All I could think of was kissing his smooth red lips.

I never would have though, unless he tried first. And he never did. I don’t think he even noticed that I was a girl, in the kissing way. I was up in the loft of the cabin with him dozens of times where it was so hot that sweat dripped off our faces and onto the old mattress we lay on. Kirven and I lay there close, talking about horses and how our parents weren’t like the parents of our friends. I didn’t know anyone who understood like he did. Except maybe Ines, Kirven’s older sister.

Ines already had breasts and light brown pubic hair, long before I developed any. I knew this because at their mom’s house, nobody wore clothes in summer. Not even the adults. We made flower garlands naked, Ellen and many of the grown ups gardened naked, and when it poured everyone, the grownups also, ran naked, shouting, out into the rain. To the sounds of rain and music flooding out of the open doors and windows, the adults and children would dance and scream. And when the rains were long, we would scoop the thick wet earth and toss it at each other. Running and sliding on the drenched grass, darkened naked bodies became too slick to catch hold of. The grown ups especially looked wild, long hair, beards and strong bodies dripping with dark mud, the whites of their eyes and teeth blazing. We children laughed at the sight of them. We knew that nobody else’s parents acted like that. Not the parents of the kids at school, or the ones at the supermarket. And especially not the ones on t.v.

Afterwards we would all collapse, laughing and exhausted while the rain washed us. In the old claw foot tub that stood without plumbing in the middle of the yard, some of the grown ups took turns soaping their bodies and shampooing their hair while the rain continued to fall. A rain shower. A shower in the rain. Then we would head back into the warmth of Ellen’s home to gather round the pot bellied stove and sip tea.

When the house burned down, the group gathered there to help restore it. There was an old barber chair in the yard. Everyone filed outside for a lunch break, sweaty and covered in soot. Roy was there, Ellen’s ex-husband, and Nick and Gaby, the mother of his child Taj, Ellen and her then husband, David, Liz and Seiji, my Mom and Step-Dad, Al and Laura, Leslie, Mickey, and us kids. Someone suggested that the house burning down symbolized change, and that maybe we should cut our hair to remember it by. Soon all the men were shaving beards, snipping off ponytails, some women cut their hair very short, and naked bodies were once more filling the old claw foot tub.

-end-

Missing Steps

Travels, stays, (mostly stays these days) explorations of the heart and life.