White Rocks

Along the path between my grandparent's house and Aunt Steffie's and Uncle Chet's house were white-painted stones. I knew they weren't naturally this color, because if I looked closely, I could see the thin streaks, like straight fingerprint lines, from where the paintbrush pushed the paint along the face of the rock.

When I asked my Aunt Steffie why they were painted, she told me it was so that my Uncle Chet could see them, so he didn't trip when he made his way down the hill.

"His eyesight ain't that good anymore," she said.

I always seemed to look at these rocks when I walked or ran by. They sat at the far corner of the neighbor's yard, at the base of an old, rustic style fence: posts and cross-members made out of the trunks of young pine trees, debarked but uncut. The fence itself, I thought, save for the cross pieces, looked almost natural enough to blend in.

Sometimes I walked down the hill pretending I was my Uncle Chet, acting out a scenario in which the whiteness of the round rocks stood out enough to save me. Down the hill I stepped carefully, hunched over and cautious. I squinted my eyes to replicate bad vision. I plodded along, head and shoulders swinging back and forth as I exaggerated each haggard step until the bottom of the hill.

"Oh...oh," I pronounced to myself upon spotting the rocks, like parts of the moon, darker in spots, protruding from the dirt. "Better walk around them."

Walking to the side, my decrepit legs stirred clear of the danger. The white rocks worked!

Tree Swing

A peach tree grew in the backyard between the garden and the house. I climbed its rough, scabrous trunk and made my way as high as I could go, sticking my foot in the crotch of the last two branches that could support my weight. Muddy, gelatin-like fungus grew out from it's forking joints and trimmed branch stubs.

Pop Pop told me of a time when the tree was no bigger than a tulip. He put a little fence up around the area to prevent the lawn mower from cutting it with the rest of the grass until it was big enough

One branch extended out toward the concrete sidewalk near the faucet. For as long as I remember, some sort of twine was tied up in two stops along this branch, looping down a foot above the ground. Sometimes I sat in this loop and pushed off the thick ground swinging back and forth. Other times I stood up, with one foot in the loop and my hands gripped tightly on the skinny rope, swinging almost parallel with the ground.

At the back corner of the house, near the rose bushes, sat a tall pine tree, almost as tall as the two story part of the house on that side. The lower branches were trimmed and the bare trunk exposed. Pop Pop built a swing for me there. Two white ropes hung from a sturdy branch holding a painted yellow piece of wood that was better to swing on than the peach tree's rope.

Quarters

One day, as I sifted through the change in the cup holder of my mom's Chevy Lumina, I came across a weird looking quarter. Washington's side profile still resembled all the other quarters I had ever seen, only it was a bit different. Maybe a newer model? It did say 1999. I turned it over and saw, not the eagle, but the outline of the state of Delaware. It was a Delaware state quarter. Unbelievable.

"Grandma!" I cried when we arrived, lifting the quarter under up to her face with my hand. "Look."

She tilted her head back, peering down the lower part of her bifocals. We went to the dinning room table to inspect it under the brighter lights.

"Wow," she said, flipping it from one side to the other. "That's neat."

By the end of the year, we had a bunch: Pennsyvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut. Grandma and Aunt Steffie bought me a booklet to house each state quarter, all the way until the year 2008! The outside of it was green, and opened up to a map of the United States, with little one inch circle cut-outs that the quarters fit perfectly into.

More on Spiders

I hate spiders. I don't mind the wispy ghost spiders or tiny weightless ones. Daddy longlegs, or harvestmens, don't bother me either, but they're not spiders, or 'the most venomous spider in the world, only their fangs aren't big enough to bite through a human's skin,' as the urban legend tells it. Fact is daddy longlegs don't even have venom glands or poisonous fangs of any kind. And while they are Arachnids, they're are not considered a spider.

The spiders that bother me are the ones that sprint out of some dark corner or crevasse running like track runners in a one-hundred meter dash, across the carpet or cement floor for no apparent or guessable reason. They're the juicy ones. The ones that freeze when they see movement, a towering mass looming closer to them or my foot slamming the ground next to them. I hoped to stop them long enough for Grandma or Pop Pop to come over and squish them. As much as I hated them, I didn't enjoy watching their exoskeleton pop under the pressure of a rubber sole, I hated hearing the crunch more. But I had no other choice. I was too afraid to attempt to bring it outside with flimsy paper and a plastic cup. What if it crawled is way out onto my hand, crawled up my arm, in my shirt?

Those spiders, the ones that freeze mid-stride as soon as they're detected, in any position, seemed more intelligent that the other skinny-legged, small bodied spiders. They thought thinks over, stared back up at me as I stayed fixed on their plump, filled out bodies. They were too big.

Another myth, that at the time kept me up at night, goes like this: At night, spiders crawl on your bed and sometimes find their way into your dark, cave-like mouth, stupidly make their way inside where they soon die and get swallowed and digested. This happens statistically, based on how many spiders typically inhabit the dark corners of rooms, about eight times a year. Everyone eats about eight spiders a year.

Time

Twenty-three years old. I am now twenty-three years old. Where did the time go? I just graduated. How did it slip past my line of vision? My eyes were open the whole time. Thinking back, when did my twentieth year happen? My twentieth year? I don't even remember it, wasn't I here the whole time? Who did I meet then? I'd have to sit down and really think about it. How can something as elusive as time be rushing by me at breakneck speed? Twenty-three?

I heard it all the time. "Never get old, Jonny," Grandma and Pop Pop would tell me. They were right. I don't feel the effects of age yet, not even slightly, but I know time's knock will come to my door as fast as my high school graduation day came and went--I day I often thought about in my school-age life--but did I ever really believe it would come? By the time it did, the day was over, leaving me to ponder, five years later, the effects and characteristics of time from that point til now.

Every direction is a battlefield. I walk through and it hurts, somewhere deep down in my cells. They are dying, regrowing, aging. I have long since given up on a solution. As I take each step, I receive blow after blow, death after death. The casualties to my body don't stop. It's a battle I understand, but don't really know. Like minions to a master, Time has seconds and minutes and hours. When those are not enough, the days and years and decades will never fail in reminding me of their unending clench. Its hands never stop harassing me. Its fingers never stop ticking at me. Time scratches me with lines that crawl their way around my eyes and forehead. It stains the colors of my hair. It pulls at my skin and weakens the makeup of my bones. There is no place I can go without being found, no place I can hide without being seen.

Though it's my enemy, it caresses me into sleep every night. Like a friend, it wakes me up with the hope of a new day, a fresh slate that is soon stained by life, slowly seeping through the white linen of my conscious memories to remind me its a week day, or my car died, Grandma and Pop Pop are dead.

Spiders

In the dark ceiling corners and on the dusty floor trim behind the couch and television stand roamed tiny spiders, searching for minuscule areas they could name their hunting ground. More inched and clambered around on lanky thread-like legs in the unused parts of the laundry room and lower basement.

Most of the spiders were small, almost invisible, ghosts with long shuffling legs moving through the forgotten spaces of the house. The majority of these spiders, living in nooks never thought about, lived and died without ever being spied by my grandparents or myself, living in a world entirely human. Did they know their bodies were never designed for the right angles and flat planes that humans enjoyed? Of course not. Did their robust two-part bodies and powerful legs yearn for unevenness, the rotting leaves of a forest floor, the skinny stalks of saplings or grass, the bawdy feel of tree bark and branches? Generations lived and died in an environment entirely new to what their ancestors knew millions of years prior. Did spiders know anything?

Some of those spiders, I remember, were tiny, the kind I could only find by laying on the ground, dropping my chin on the floor, and watching patiently for any kind of subtle tiny movement against the carpet or linoleum. These little arachnids were no bigger than grains of sugar, their wispy legs hidden only by their microscopic size. Did they run from their bigger cousins, I wondered? Did they behave in the same way? Did they craft microscopic webs invisible from the giant eyes of elephantine humans?

Calls

Months later, my house got a call from the Southington police. They told my parents that Nancy had to be picked up outside a local bar, or she would be spending the night in jail. She had apparently walked in the bar 'dressed like a whore,' wearing a tight-fitting tube top with a short skirt and suspenders. He was acting out, flirting, and looking for attention. The newly renovated bar, Massimo's, didn't find her actions and advances welcome. Apparently the new owners were trying to change the image of the old place--Nancie, apparently, didn't get that. She was later shown her way out the front door where police held her until my father and I picked her up.

The phone calls started to become more and more common. The following spring, Nancy was caught for speeding by a state cop on Interstate 84 in Plantsville and charged with a DUI after failing a breathalyzer test. She was taken to Troop F State Police Jail in Hartford. A phone call from the police station informed my parents of the situation, and that she needed someone to come pick her up. They went, and took custody of her, preventing her from spending the night in jail. By the time they were leaving, my mom told me, she was still drunk and making advances at one of the young state police officers saying, "Wow, you're hot, you're so hot."

Nancie's husband, my Uncle Ken, called my mother one day and informed her of what was going on, that her parents were feeding Nancie money hand over fist, and had been for a long time, that the five grand was nothing. My mom wasn't surprised with this news, what surprised her was how much she had underestimated what was going on.