Box fans and rainier cherries

Why Moms are superheroes

Our sweet friend moved in next door to us, renting out a cottage belonging to our neighbor. Her son was born one week before Alinah, so every time he pitter-patters his little feet up the stairs and greets us with a: “Meow!” I feel her spirit sparkle in the room. I give our friend homemade marshmallows and fresh milk, she brings us purple tulips and all sorts of herbs she’s foraged, or maybe some extra stew she put on. It’s a very beautiful and gentle cycle of giving and receiving, a true sense of community that I imagine we all long for deep down.

Coffee in hand, we were chatting this morning in my kitchen as she told me about her day yesterday. Her son was playing and clicked on a little portable fan we had lying around. All of a sudden, I’m transported to my childhood. The soft whir of the fan blades activated a visceral memory in my body, a felt sense of a time and place. A bygone era oozing with nostalgia.

It was our third rental house in the same number of years, each move requiring us to downsize. A tough economy and the few job prospects in our sleepy island town left my parents pinching pennies and getting creative with our finances. I was about to start middle school, and at the time our tiny house felt like a social death sentence. How dramatic and self-conscious a sixth-grade girl can be! Looking around at my peers and their big shiny houses and parents’ new cars left me feeling very much “other.” So intense was my self-consciousness that I made my sweet dad drop me off behind the neighboring building for school. I snuck around the back so no one would see (or hear) his giant, black-painted old U-Haul truck. My brother had a biodiesel company at the time, and said black beauty was run on old McDonald’s grease. It smelled like French fries when it drove by, and it was loud as hell. Hilarious and beautifully unique as I reflect, but decidedly not funny or beautiful at the time.

While I lived my middle school experience, I hated that house. This morning, however, as the fan blades whirred, I was transported to a sense of warmth that made my eyes sting with tears.