It snowed hard one night, and in the morning, I had to dig my car out. This was a heavy wet snow, a good five inches, and not expected (by me. I think other people expected it) so, first, I had to figure out where my winter boots were and where had I thrown my hat and gloves? I half slipped down the back steps in pursuit of the snow shovel, which was somewhere in the garage.
We can’t park our cars in the garage. We have a single car driveway that takes a sharp turn, and parking back there would be a constant struggle (for me), but also, it’s where my husband has set up his woodworking shop. Anyway, there was a lot of snow to clear, car-wise and driveway-wise, and forty-five minutes flinging snow around was not how I had envisioned spending my morning.
What I had imagined myself doing was writing. What I’m writing about is the past. In the past it is sunny and warm. I am five years old and living at a campground. I am not a person who romanticizes the past. But spending several days back as my five-year-old self, roaming around the campground where we lived for a summer, has been a nice break from reality.
There’s a pond to splash in and woods to explore. A playground and camp store where you can buy fudgesicles for a quarter a piece. We live in a tent, but it’s a big tent. Enough space for all of our sleeping bags, plus my baby brother’s playpen.
What’s I’m trying to do is unwind time, trace it all backwards to some perfect point before things went wrong. I call my aunt who lived with us at the campground to ask her what she remembers. My aunt is like me. She remembers everything.
I used to think this was a gift, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s a curse. My aunt tells me stories about who she bought the tent from and the time a skunk wandered into the campsite and how she liked to read her book in the afternoons while my baby brother napped and my mother took my other brother and me to the pond to swim.
I have a clear memory of the two of us running down a hill with our towels flapping behind us. Another memory of sitting at the picnic table, coloring in our coloring books while it rained on the blue tarp that stretched over the campsite. I turned six that summer and celebrated my birthday under that tarp. Someone gave me a Barbie camper, and I drove it around and around the picnic table. I don’t know what any of this adds up to.
I was happy at the campground, therefore, happiness is possible. Happiness is possible even though my family had been kicked out of our rental and had nowhere to live for the summer. Five-going-on-six-year-olds only know so much about the world. But in other ways, they know things adults have forgotten. This all made more sense in my head while I was shoveling the walks and scraping off my car.
The driveway went clean, and not really thinking about it, I started shoveling out into the street. A foot on my shovel, a jab of the blade through crust, another clump added to the pile, layer upon layer of snow.
Not entirely dug out. Maybe it will never be entirely dug out. But cleared enough to move past.
