summers before

I haven’t been to upstate New York since I was ten years old and we drove away from our house there without looking back. I didn’t think to; I thought we’d be back in the fall, back before the new owners moved in, back one last time to say goodbye to the dark wood walls and long hallways and my small room that opened up to the porch. I thought I’d return to the dirt road with the horse farm and the boundless sky and the green, green surrounding everything. I thought that, one last time, we'd pass by the silos and lonely red barn that always served as markers that we were almost home, that I could release the breath I'd been holding for what seemed like an eternity and was really just a car ride. But I never would; before we knew it, the house was someone else’s, as if it had never been ours.

We  used to go there in the summer, every summer; an escape from the clammy wild of the city, and into a new kind of wild. The woods behind the house were rich with fairy dust and my own imagination; I’d conjure up stories there and make my parents feverishly scribble them down on stapled-together paper we still have, tucked away in boxes. My books. I still remember the way the wood planks shifted under my feet as I walked around in that house, the cold of the spiral staircase I’d climb down every morning to enter the playroom, the fresh, woodsy smell greeting us the minute we arrived. The anticipatory first minutes, before the water was even on, when everything felt cold and empty yet bursting, when light finally turned on in the house that had been dark for too many long months. The moments that melted into long afternoons lying in the hammock or running through sprinklers in dew-slick grass, the long stretches of hours between hiking and strawberry-picking and dinner at a restaurant with food that, if I tried it now, would taste like nostalgia.

Sometimes I think I’ll buy that house back, if it ever is for sale again. That I’ll raise my whole family there, in the place of endless trees and the glimmer of lake water, minutes away from a tiny town with nothing but a diner and general store. That my children will go to the summer camps I went to, with the same modern art and organic popsicles and easy friendships. That weekends will be made of trips to the farmers' market and bike rides in the state park, that I'll once again drink Fantas at the depot deli before braving the ore pit, swimming deeper, farther, until finally I reach the dock and sunlight and laughter will penetrate the cold. 

Except other times, I think that place isn’t the idyll I always imagine: that I wouldn’t really want to buy that house, that even the beauty of the town would become covered in a grey film of isolation, that it only seems so perfect to me because each moment I experienced there was laced with my childlike thoughts. If I bought the house, some day, it wouldn't feel the same; there's no way to conjure the past out of the future.

So instead, I wish I could go back to some lost summer, just for a day, to when I was younger and lived in a land where magic felt at my fingertips, where I skipped up the stone path leading to the house every early June like I was entering heaven.