The World
by Sarah Young

I am running through a dim wooden house in red overalls with gold buckles. The buckles clink when I hop in clopping steps with my tiny feet. "I'm two, I'm two," I think, astonished. My time spent walking on the earth has been so little that running seems like an activity for daredevils, one misstep away from bumping into sharp-cornered furniture. To me, my body is solid, but my face is blurry. I am blonde, I know, but I have not yet studied myself in a mirror.

This is in our house in Deland , Florida, a brief and smooth place in my memory. My parents are so proud to live there, not in an apartment or a duplex, but a house with a wide grass yard. With shutters-black ones. With stairs leading to a front stoop. Shaky home movies show my parents' faces, pleased with grocery lists and each other, their two daughters and a son.

One night, on the Fourth of July, I run on our back patio in circles holding a sparkler. Pink streaks, ghosts on fire, follow me as I run in bare feet on the cement. My brother, a year and a half younger than I, follows me in less certain steps. The world is moving so fast. There is a centrifugal force pressing me against the night air, pulling me giggling through the dark. And I feel my mother's presence there, laughing and skinny, loving me.

I do not think much about the world outside of this backyard. The borders of the world are Mrs. Gallagher's house to the right and Mr. Hough's orange grove curving around the rest.

Mrs. Gallagher is a white-haired widow whose white-haired dog would jump onto the front window ledge in a fierce fit of yapping. Her heart and kitchen cabinets were open to us. She always wore an emergency button she could press in case she fell and could not move. Otherwise, no one would find her for days or even weeks. But I am not thinking about this.

Mr. Hough is a weathered man, a bird lover. Once, he held out his hand to me, showing me a grasshopper he had found feeding on his snap peas. I was in awe of the thickness of its body, of the patterns of orange and yellow swirled on it like mother of pearl. Mr. Hough promptly cut its head off with a pocketknife. I screamed. But I am not thinking about this, either.

I am thinking about dizziness and my mother and father. I am breathing in the smoke from the firework in my little hand, not painful or offensive like my dad's cigarettes. I am hearing the sizzle of a lit fuse, the spitting of fireflies. I am feeling the rough grain of concrete under my feet, still soft. Around and around and around. This is the world turning.

Widow's Walk
I am five or six or seven. I dream of a past life, it seems. I am the captain of a creaking wooden ship, and my crew and I must set out to sea tonight. It is an inky night, and the sea is green and black, rising in fast-moving peaks. The hushing sound of the water makes it seem as though the ocean is keeping a secret from me. The boardwalks are lit by streetlamps, the ones with fire burning inside of the glass.

I must say goodbye to my true love, and I feel this true love in my dream, though I am only a sleeping young girl. She is almost in tears, though she is hardened by my many departures. She fears I will die at sea on one of these trips, but she doesn't say this. We both understand, and she looks at me, standing there on the dock with one hand over her mouth, the fear brimming in her eyes. But this is my life. The ocean pulls me, my heart pumps saltwater. My love for her pulls me in the other direction, but it is never stronger than the tide, gripping me in its terribleness and beauty.

I die on this trip. I fall overboard, hitting my head on part of the ship on the way down. Before I drown, I float for a minute, watching my crew scramble in the ship glowing in orange light, calling out words that fade in and out as I bob in the water. I think of my true love, and I am sorry. I will never see her again. All I feel of my body is my love for her. I am absorbed into the dark sea. It is bottomless.

Then, in the dream, I, the young sleeping girl, become the captain's wife. I walk the wooden steps of the widow's walk each night, up to the platform on the roof. Each step I take is measured and slow, so as to hold out hope as long as possible that when I reach the top, I will see my true love's ship out in the moonlit water, coming home to me. But he is never there.

Great Grandmother
My great-grandmother, Grandma Edith, has lived with her daughter, my Grandma Elsie, and my Papa Pyron ever since I have been alive. Ever since my mother was a little girl. Ever since they found her husband lying face down in his rose garden. And even in my cloudiest memories of Grandma Edith I can feel our devotion to one another.

Her love for me is given in train rides, laughter, games of rummy. In laundry and phone calls, games of catch. In watching me swim and color. French toast, macaroni and cheese, sweet cucumbers, yogurt, fruit punch, ice cream. Saving for my future in small change: the ceramic bear that plays "It's a Small World After All" when a coin passes through the slot. Hugs that smell like her powder.

I love her in drawings and letters and poems. In accepting what she offers. In pleases and thank yous. In carving a path in the woods, the sunlit one lined with saplings and golden pine needles, and naming it Edith Trail .

And ever since I learn that dying is inescapable, I fear her death. I am given seventeen years to spend with her.

The Kingfisher
I want to give my mother the song of the kingfisher as a gift. We have moved to Edgewater , Florida , a town directly south of New Smyrna Beach , a town where nature is found in wooded lots for sale. We are driving through New Smyrna along the river when she points out the passenger side window.

"Look! There was a kingfisher," she says.

I see only river, low trees, and the road's shoulder.

"Ohh!" I say, pretending to see the fluttering of wings in the branches. I do not know what a kingfisher looks like.

I decide that the next bird I see is the kingfisher, though I know it is probably not. A jay, maybe. That is not important.

I see the bird hopping through intricate tangles of branches in the woods by my Edgewater yard. I have to capture some part of him for my mother. The kingfisher. Grasping the handle of my brown Fisher Price tape recorder, I step into the woods, following the familiar path that had led to the clearing since before my family moved to this house. Before I discovered it, circled with palm trunk benches, skirted with empty liquor bottles. The trees hover close to me, and the birdsongs are soft and sharp at once, honey voices, a collage of them from camouflaged bodies. Seew seew. Sip sip. Yoop Yoop.

And I, the only one of my kind in this world, do not speak.

I push RECORD and PLAY together on the tape recorder, and it makes a noise like someone covering his mouth to stifle laugher. Oomphh. Then the tape rolls, spinning in the static sound of breathing over a telephone, a mouth open to swallow the voices of birds that it will later spit out to my mother and me in song. I take without stealing, without disturbing their conversations. They are imprinted on black ribbon winding around the white teeth of the tape.

I find my mother in the house and play her the tape. I present it as though it is true kingfisher documentation-his voice is truly there. Hear it? He's the outspoken one-don't you hear him? And of course she hears him.

"Oh! That's a kingfisher, alright," she says.

Where I Am From
New Smyrna Beach is the place where my parents have settled. It is my home, where my block house rests under a squirming oak that rustles in salt air.

And my house is one square in a grid of little old houses built in the 1950s that stretches from the skinny tip Canaveral National Seashore, through the stilt-houses of Bethune, across 27 avenues and reaches up to the Inlet.

And this grid is situated on a peninsula, connected to the mainland on the west by two bridge arteries backbending over the Indian River Lagoon. The Atlantic Ocean crashes and scurries up the shore on the east.

Augusts
The month of my birth is known in Florida for its weather. Augusts are soaked and windblown with tropical storms, hurricanes, tornadoes. They are colored in the bright greens, yellows, oranges, and reds of weather channel radars. The usually cheerful colors become ominous in August, spinning toward our peninsula. This is the year I have turned nineteen, the year Hurricane Charlie is birthed from the tropics.

It is late and the storm is approaching. Fluorescent bulb light creeps over the living room walls and pale tiles. My mother is frantic but excited, rocking in the rocking chair by the open front door. She loves to be close to a storm, to feel the walls vibrate and hear the roof rattle. Across from her, my grandmother's round body sinks into the couch. She is safer here in our block house than in her manufactured home. She has brought as many photo albums and documents as her back would allow her to carry to her car. She laughs nervously, terrified. My brother is all around the house, in the kitchen, down the hall, pacing away his fear in barefoot circuits. My father and grandfather talk like men in the back room with unconvincing calm. I am quiet. I sit and wait.

The rain begins-I'm not sure when. But soon follows the lightning, blinding streaks that shoot straight to the stomach. Then comes the power surge, the darkness, the candles and flashlights. The radio echoing throughout the house with news of damage across the state. Punta Gorda, especially, is being pummeled.

My mother and brother stand outside on our front walkway, backs and arms flat against the house to keep under the narrow eave. They are exposed to the howling wind and the debris it carries, and they laugh and hoot in its face. The storm soon responds by striking down a great oak limb in our front yard. As if by moaning ghosts, the front door slams shut. My mother and brother scream and burst through the door, dripping and laughing. The door remains closed for the rest of the night.

In the narrow hallway, I spread layers of thin blankets on the cool tile. It is safe from windows, and I fall asleep there almost peacefully.

The hurricanes of 2004 beat and bruise the New Smyrna Beach shoreline. Boardwalks are now twisted and pulled apart, leading to nowhere. Cement ramps are crumbled. Beach access is greatly reduced for both cars and pedestrians. It takes a certain amount of ingenuity to find places where sea walls can be jumped from or sand embankments can be slid down to get to the beach at all. Beachfront properties are boarded up, motels are condemned.

A year later, little has changed. Damaged structures still outnumber repaired ones. The storms won and Smyrnans are licking their wounds. They do not immediately reinstate their claim over the shore once the hurricane season has turned its back, believing that it is their very right to collect its shells, to leave their tire tracks, to serve drinks in frond-roofed huts. The month of August belongs to the weather, swirling storms, forces stronger than our buildings and bodies.

Words
My mother is visiting my great Grandma Edith, sitting in the cluttered living room. They rock in recliners. Their conversation has been quiet for a minute, the rhythmic groaning of the chairs taking the place of words.

"Gayle," says my great-grandmother, "Sometimes I think that I might die soon." There is fear in her voice and the loneliness of a woman who has outlived her beloved husband by thirty years and is older than anyone she knows.

"No, Gram," my mother says, cheerfully. "You're going to live to be a hundred, and we'll be celebrating your 96 th birthday soon." She is too afraid to comfort her.

Weeks later, my mother quickly hangs up the phone. "Grandma is dying!"

Grandma Elsie has discovered Grandma Edith on the floor in the hallway. She has had a stroke. She is still concious, though not aware.

"Oh God, Oh God," my mother says on the drive to her house. My brother and I are silent.

Grandma Edith has been moved to her bed, and she lies there, eyes rolling around the room, confused and frightened. The paleness of the afternoon slips through the sheer curtains on the window. I sit on her bed red-faced and dripping tears and look her in the face. I call out to her. She grunts with a half-numb mouth. She does not seem to notice I am there. She is like an infant. My mother and grandmother decide they will take her to the hospital so that she will not die in any pain.

Papery blankets. Morphine drip. White. In the emergency room bed, my great grandmother seems barely awake. We encircle it, and I am at the foot. There is nothing left to do, and she has not spoken since she was discovered on the stiff brown carpet.

"Well, I guess we better get on home," my father says to my brother and I.

I glance at my great grandmother's face, the cover pulled up to her chin. "I love you," I say in hope and desperation. We turn to leave.

Loud and clear and to everyone's surprise, she answers. "I love you." These were her last words, and they were said in earnest.

I live my life holding close those three words she spoke, knowing the magic of their being spoken at all.

Something Wild
I stumble upon them by the bay on the opposite side of the yard, thinking at first that there is only one. There are two foxes with sleek bodies on long legs. There is grey flecked into their rusty fur like ashes dashed on brick. Their eyes are eerie orbs of yellow in the light of sunset, and they are set on me. They stand alert like hunting dogs.

The back yard of the Caples estate seems to be a gathering place for animals in a city where manicured lawns reign over wildness. Ospreys, bald eagles, pileated woodpeckers, yellow-bellied parakeets, crows, jays, vultures, raccoons-I have spotted them all in little over a week of savoring the area. And now foxes.

I approach them in cautious steps that rustle the course grass. I stare. They stare. I jump. They continue to stare. We are a curiosity for each other. I curl my body around the knotted champion pine within fifteen feet of them. They do not allow me this proximity for long. They escape in a graceful arch into the tall, dry grass behind them.

I slip off my shoes and squish through the seaweed on the nearby shore. It is like a web of wet, tangled hair that swallows my feet, embracing me, welcoming me. I wade out into the bay, dipping the edge of my skirt in saltwater. I hear only sloshing and maybe the faint hum of the city rimming the water. Snails sleep scattered beneath me. I see the moon through salmon-tinted grey clouds. It is also reflected very near me in the rippling bay the size of a quarter. I prefer this smaller moon, a gift for me to see.

This is my favorite place.

Sarah Young, a student at Fairhaven College, is the author, and the essay was a final project for an Independent Study Project during January, 2006.  The project was titled, "Nature Writing that Matters," and it was led by writer Susan Cerulean. The final project was to write an environmental autobiography and this essay is Sarah's autobiography.

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