Mundivagant

Within dry, cracked leather album covers white corners with the scarcest trace of adhesive hold each black and white image feebly in place.   Decades of family photographs fill the tiny trailer that my mother has retired to since my father’s death.   Corner stickers have long fallen out of favor, replaced by two sided tape, adhesive dots and slide-in photo albums.  I wonder how well they will hold photographs in fifty years’ time?  Mother urges us to flip through her albums and take home the ephemera and artifacts of a distant childhood, although our homes already are overflowing with tchotchkes acquired from our own messy lives.  

The few times that we do take the time to browse through her albums, Mother supervises, hoping to impose her interpretation of events on our own recollections.  Most images show a sunny but predictable childhood.  A few are departed elders posing unsmilingly long after old camera technology required unmoving grimness.   Despite my own tattered, fading memories, there is one small image that holds truths that I will never share in discussion -- things that have been both a cipher and a beacon throughout my life. 

A two year old waif walks along the side of a gradually rising rural road.  A small kerchief, tied hobo style to a long stick, rests on her shoulder and holds a few possessions – a special order Mighty Mouse doll, a crushed molasses cookie, a snakeskin found drying in the sun.  A teddy bear held firmly under the other arm is pursued by a cat and dog who smell crumbs.  Both are puzzled by the fact that they are not in the soft comfort of the usual armchair in the living room.  The small girl resolutely (albeit temporarily) is running away from home.  This image crystallized a long held suspicion that my mundivagant nature was forged early in life.   More memories pour out of that single snapshot.

A tall, well-kept red barn rises before me.  Within it my father tends to the dairy cattle or cleans the milking parlor.  When I enter, he will patiently allow me to milk a cow or to wash part of the milking machines.  Such small effort earns a moment of approval – my father’s gruff, unguarded smile.  Throughout my childhood I seek out that rarest of rewards.

My mother’s recollection of the photograph she took long ago would likely be that her toddler has been caught reacting momentarily to the attention transferred to her newborn brother.   My inner child would in part jealously agree.    But in counterpoise to the push of a needy, newborn brother, yet another motive for these early meanderings is the pull of shiny stainless steel machinery, well worn hand tools, and dozens of black and white bovines whose drooling, cud-filled mouths and engorged udders provide wonder and just a hint of danger.  My father, busy at his life’s work, remains nearby for any needed reassurance.  

This equilibrium of unregulated exploration and precious parental affection gave me the ability to fearlessly wander through fields, woods and quicksand filled wetlands, join Grammie's  visits to my unknown ‘Bahston’ relatives, argue politics with my father's ultraconservative friends, beg to become an exchange student, and attend college in far-off Washington, DC.   It also got me into great trouble in late teen and early adult years, expressed by a pronounced inability to remain at one job or relationship until well into my thirties.   And after twenty-five years in the increasingly unsatisfying field of public education, exhausted by familial obligations and lacking attention from a husband who rarely leaves his media-filled life, I have taken a cue from the little girl in that photograph.  

I am running away from home again.  I will leave emotional chaos behind and despite poor eyesight and a thoracic aneurysm that could blow at any moment, I will visit India, teach English and design curriculum for low caste gypsy children.  I will earn a bit of income and barter places to stay from online LinkedIn contacts – editing Nepali papers on aid and democracy and tutoring a bit of online English to the Chinese affluent classes.   Reestablished relationships with Asian college friends from long ago provide a touchstone of approval if I run into trouble.   I walk towards the unknown along a new path of my own making.  

My bohemian adventure requires minimal clinging to material goods.  I cashed in my retirement IRA and used part of it to finish our basement and turn it into a small apartment.  This will both provide a small source of income while I am gone and gently force my husband out of his man cave.  Perhaps we will again become intimate since, now across continents and oceans, I provide him with the distance he so craves.  Without my presence my daughters will find their own paths through rocky choices and challenges.  And I myself will deal with intolerable heat, frequent power outages, chronic bureaucratic paralysis, challenging situations for the independent woman and a hope that I may be of use for often imperceptible small change.  

I carry an old photograph of a small child in my weak but happy heart and, as I walk alone down unpaved roads, I will try not to look back.