Rewriting The Past

Oh, pull over here! Perfect. I haven’t been here since I was a little girl. We’re in Genoa, Nevada. The beautiful little town holds a yearly celebration called the Candy Dance. I used to go every year. Sometimes my parents would have a booth selling handmade things. Sometimes we’d go just for fun. There would be face painting and candied apples and one of those booths that sell crystals on leather necklaces and sage for smudging, which I always though was a very funny thing to buy. In Nevada, the whole state is covered in sage. You don’t have to burn it to smell it, just open a window and all corners of your house are flush with the scent.

The town holds an echo of memories, leaping from year to year. It’s a historic little gem pressed up against the base of the mountains, and despite its undoubted beauty and charm and proximity to where I grew up, we only went on special occasions. Candy Dance, class outings and prom dates.

My lifelong friend Tori pulls the car up a dirt path into the town cemetery, and we wander around. Our special occasion is seeing each other.

I once came here with my Girl Scout troupe and we did rubbings of the grave carvings, which I remember loving dearly and the other girls loosing interest very quickly. Girl Scouts was not a place where I felt a kinship with others; it was a magnifying glass showing me how different I was. I loved every tombstone, and yes, to other little girls, that made me weird. I didn’t want to be like them just as much as they didn’t want to be like me.

I didn’t care then and I don’t care now, I adore old grave yards. I cherish reading the stones and imagining the lives of those lain to rest. The lives of the mourners who stood by the markers weeping. I imagine their hair, their clothes. Hands clenching kerchiefs and fresh picked wild flowers, hands lighting candles the snow, and hands comforting others with the touch of a shoulder. There’s no way to really know these things for sure, but the images I dream up come to me in fantastic detail. Somebody stood here and felt loss and love.

I imagine being bereaved myself, feeling at a total loss for words, and yet . . . writing to the nearest mason, with the words I’d chosen to be etched into stone. My dearly departed’s gravestone.

I imagine the stone carver’s skilled hands scrawling out with extra care the brief dates an infant lived, carving lilies and lambs for the devout, carving mere initials to those who could only afford 3 letters.

I imagine the community, so tightly knit grieving together, dawning dark colors in honor of their neighbor’s loss. I imagine love.

Tori and I see deer and the blue bellied lizards we’d caught as children. We see sand and pine, stretching up the mountain. We see, is that, an apple tree? Little green apples dot the tree which is quite well laden for a fruit tree in the desert, in a grave yard with no clear irrigation. Tori climbs up the limbs only to grab the exact apple I was fixated on. She plucks it joyfully and takes a bite, “It’s a bit sour, tastes wild.” Suddenly I’m a child again, finding answers by climbing, touching and tasting. Yet, this time I’m a child with a friend, I feel love.