She remembers that tiny house in the valley like the back of her hand, even though she hasn’t set foot in the town proper since she left all those years ago. She closes her eyes and against the blackness behind her lids she sees the farms and the brick and mortar buildings of downtown. She sees the old YMCA where she took swimming lessons and the stadium where her family huddled under woven blankets in the winter chill.
She doesn’t consider herself small-town.
She never has.
But at one time, she thought the small confines of that small town was big enough to fit the whole world.
Oklahoma is nearly all small-town, settled directly in the middle of the country, fields of wheat and corn painting the landscape in greens and yellows and browns over the course of the year, rotating crops and livestock with whinnying horses and bellowing cattle scratching at the fenceposts. She drives the highways now and thinks of how vast this land is—how tiny in comparison she feel to the world around her. Now, she think of her childhood with fondness, though not everything was perfect. It never is.
Flashes of memories play out before her, like the trailers to a movie yet written, snippets of conversations and images flashing by her. She wants to reach out—to touch them—to pluck them out of thin air to cherish and question and dissect the moments again and again, and after so many years she sometimes wishes she could hit the rewind button.
She thinks of the laughter in her backyard.
She thinks of the muddy feet and red dirt crusting on her legs.
She thinks of the sweet smell of honeysuckle and the rustling of the leaves from the old oak shading the garden.
She wishes she could go back—if only for a moment.
•••
Maybe it started with cicadas in the summertime, the melody of their calls a backdrop to the playdates she had with the neighborhood boys and a handful of friends from school. Maybe it started with the garden of sunflowers she remember towering over her head at six years old, their bright yellow stark against the blue of the sky, reaching for a Heaven of which she didn’t know the truth. Maybe it began with wishing on dandelions in the sweltering heat of the Oklahoma summer, cracked fingertips sticky with the sap from their stems.
No true beginning existed.
All of her memories blend together in an oil painting, smudged lines and crooked figures playing over the lakes and rivers of her childhood.
She wanted to believe in something outside of herself.
She wanted, desperately, to believe she belonged.
But there was disconnect, always.
She felt alien in her own skin.
•••
She stepped outside onto the porch in the late afternoon, her shoulders aching from carrying her backpack from the street into the house only an hour earlier. The outside air was humid and hot, leftovers of high noon and the weight of the sun’s glare. The dog days of summer spent everyone—the only currency was sweat and lazy afternoons, interchanged on a dime. She played for hours in the backyard exploring the tree line and grasses, searching for and finding every nook and cranny she possibly could so she could declare it hers.
“Mom, I found one!” She squealed with delight, her cheeks a rosy red from the sun and the exhilaration of her new find.
She dashed up to her mother standing in the doorway of the house, hand poised on the screen door, smiling like her child had discovered an entirely new species. In her little hand, she grasped onto the shell of a cicada, which cracked at the edges of the exoskeleton, papery thin and fragile.
“Be careful, Ash,” her mother warned, her lips curving into a wider grin, pearly teeth peeking out from pink lips. “You’ll break it.”
Ash cradled the find between her palms, and she stared into the hands as if they held the answer. What is this thing? Is it alive? Dead?
“It’s a cicada shell,” she heard her explain, and her mother traces the shell where a crack splits it into two, halving it asymmetrically. “See this? Once the cicadas become too big, they grow out of their shells. They look like this before they grow their wings, and then you hear them in the treetops during the summertime.”
“Oh,” Ash breathed out, enraptured. She caressed the same line her mother did, carefully feeling along the crack in the shell. “Doesn’t it hurt them?”
After some deliberation—a thoughtful look, really—her mother answered, “I think so, but growing pains everyone, even just a little bit. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, when the world around us is so small, but we want to grow up and out. And when the time is right, we break out of our own comfort zone. We’re vulnerable. So it’s important for us to take care of one another.”
“Okay.”
•••
She didn’t realize until much later that her mother was right.
They always are.
Ash spent her days playing in the rain, soaked right down to the bone. The next summer—fascinated—she collected the shells leftover from Cicada Season. Armed with a shoebox and nimble fingers, she wandered around the yard with bare feet, with the grass tickling her toes. She walked up to the old oak tree standing in the yard, towering over her head with its branches furling out to provide shade to surrounding foliage. Running her palms against the bark of its trunk, she reached up to pluck a cicada shell right off of its surface. She collected a whole box of them, their empty shells clicking against one another when she ran inside to share her bounty. Her mother nearly laughed her right out of the kitchen.
“How did you find so many?”
“I looked,” Ash told her with the simplicity only afforded to children. “They were all over the trees.”
And they were. She crawled on the ground earlier that July afternoon, her knees turning red with the dust compacted near the oak’s roots. She wrapped her tiny arms around as much of trunk as she could and then climbed it just to reach a few inches further.
She broke a few.
Then nearly broke her neck.
But she wasn’t going to tell her mother this.
“I want to take them to school.”
“Keep them, then,” her mother advises, turning the spaghetti in the pot. “And take them with you in the fall.”
Ash did as she was told—she stuffed the box under her bed and didn’t look at her treasures again until she could share them.
•••
Later—much later—Ash spent her evenings in the summer listening the buzzing of the cicadas’ song, a symphony whose melody rose and fell with the breeze and the rise of the moon. Her own personal picture show, Ash would sit on the porch in the backyard with her mother, staring up at the stars.
She didn’t feel small, she reasoned.
She spent so long thinking about what her mother told her over the summer about the cicadas and their dance and their growth that she wondered when she, too, would grow upward and outward, filling in the spaces she felt she lacked. There was a space there—empty and raw, and she didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know how or what to name that longing, that absence, that abyss, a black hole.
It ached, in a way.
It was not change.
It was not growth.
It was a dull ache, an absence felt but not known.
Her ignorance blinded her, but the warmth of her mother’s hand and the gritty concrete beneath her feet grounded her. At six years old, she knew there was something different about her—with her fascination with the earth and its inhabitants, with the playful conversations with the neighbor’s boy, with her complete disregard for cleanliness and frills. Her hands, covered with the fruit of her labor earlier in evening, bore a resemblance to the clay that her house was built upon.
She was her mother’s daughter, and not.
She was a daughter of the earth, the soil, the trees and sky blending together into the gown she would dress herself with in later years. A blend of the earth and sky, the sweet smell of grass and fresh paper. Imagining a new world, Ash would feel the effects of those growing pains, the cracking of her shell, the creaking of her bones.
No longer did she search for the cicadas in the summertime.
Instead, they came to her.