**This isn’t a ‘new year, new me’ post. Just an essay about being a kid— about kid feelings, and kid fears.
Happy new year, y’all and thank you for being here.
I was 5 or 6. Playing with my brothers in the gully behind our house.
I never really looked at my brother's faces. I was mesmerized watching their little boy hands flip wet, grey stones in the creek. Their fingers, no longer than french fries, plucking black-amber crayfish from the water. Sometimes the crayfish would grab a finger in its lobster-like claw, and whatever brother was on the receiving end would hold up his dripping hand, crayfish dangling, and laugh. Boys, I thought, were so weird.
But also, I was jealous. That’s the truth of it. I was afraid of getting pinched, afraid to feel the pain. I loved to put my hands in the water. Loved picking up the smooth, cold stones, but I kept the part of me that wanted to touch something alive but might hurt me, buried in my chest. The feel of the cold wet stones was enough hardness for me.
One summer, my brother T dove into a lake after a slick black water snake. It shimmered over the surface like a rope of India ink. I kept one eye on the snake, while in my periphery, saw my brothers’ shirtless boy-body leave the shore. For a split second, he arced over the water like a white rainbow in Levi cut-offs. He caught the snake by the tail as his body broke the surface of the water. He came up for air, snake in hand, and the snake wired around, and bit him.
I watched from the shore as the viper opened its jaws and sunk its teeth into the flesh between T’s thumb and forefinger. I was horrified. Some part of me feeling I could not survive even the fear of the fear of it. My brother, still treading water, calmly put the fingers of his other hand on either side of the snake's narrow head, and squeezed until it let go. He flung it unceremoniously out into the middle of the lake like an old shoestring, a look of disappointment on his face. All morning, he’d been hunting for snapping turtles. The snake was a let down. My nervous system has still not recovered.
A few years later, we moved to a different upstate town. Small. Remote. So small and remote, we had our own special short bus that came to take us to school. Our house was at the bottom of a hill, in the middle of a vineyard. In concord season, we would walk down the steep dirt road from the bus stop, our sweaty bodies cutting like pocketknives down the narrow rows of grapes. We would snap clusters of them from their brittle brown stems. They detonated in our mouths like warm purple suns. Every afternoon at 3:30, we’d file in the kitchen door of our little white house with the burgundy shutters— fingers stained plum, spitting leathery skins and seeds into our sticky palms.
Now, when I taste a concord grape, my childhood rushes into my mouth like a gypsy moth. It’s the dusty taste of loneliness, of isolation. We were othered by our seclusion— no neighbors, just grapes. It’s the bitter taste of my mothers drinking, the memory of her passed out on my bed, a bottle of Chivas Regal beside her, half buried in the bedspread.
Do I remember that? Or do I just remember being told that? Does it matter? My inside self knew fear, felt the out of control-ness, knew to hide its emotional needs because they wouldn't be met. The body always remembers imploding.
You kids are the reason she drinks too much, my father would say.
Which is ironic, because living with his unexpressed rage and unhealed trauma made us the collateral damage in the storm of him. Whenever he said it, my sisters would go take care of my mom, and my brothers and I would take off to the vineyard or the creek or the woods.
I would ache to be seen, but always sought out places to hide. Usually in the woods, under tall trees, singing Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend over and over at the top of my lungs. I was little enough to believe the lyrics— that if I called out her name, she’d come running. She never did. No one did.
My brothers would wrestle in the long grass beside the house until one of them bled or cried. Or they’d make homemade cannons from empty Budweiser cans— duct tape them together into a King of Beers bazooka, and pack it with some strangely on-hand explosive. I remember the sound of the Zippo lighter, clicking open and clunking shut in my brothers 9-year-old hand. I can still feel the heft of it in my own hand the times I picked it up like a grenade. I can still smell the trace of lighter fluid it left in my palm.
It’s a miracle my brothers didn’t lose a finger or a limb. They must have been trying to make sense of their own pain and isolation. Express it in some way that reflected the inner violence of being boys with big feelings they didn’t understand and didn’t have permission to feel.
They’d kneel over their tin can weapons, hungry for the adrenaline spike. They’d touch the flame to the black powder and it would blow, echoing across the lake, another explosion sounding back before everything went quiet for a second. My ears would ring for what felt like an eternity.
I wouldn’t look at their faces. I’d just watch their little boy hands, holding fire and making things explode— mesmerized. Jealous. Trying to understand how they were brave enough to touch something that might hurt, when everything inside was already so bruised. Trying to understand how to keep my insides from imploding, while they eagerly reloaded the cannon.
❤️ this and your inspired writing. Thank you. #gypsymoths
God this is stunning. What a beautiful essay. I too have beautiful nostalgic memories of warm concord grapes in the summer and you nailed it perfectly: "detonat[ing] in our mouths like warm purple suns." Damn. Damn. Damn.