We each had a horse growing up but it was not a pet, it was transportation. With five kids and a full time business, my folks were not about to transport each of us around. If we wanted to go somewhere, we hopped on our horse and disappeared. Cars in those days were approached the same way. They were something to hop on, but not necessarily in.
I used to wait for my uncle as he turned the corner on his way home from work. He never slowed as I raced his car, leaping at top speed on the running board. We visited and smiled through the open window traveling the last mile together, while I sucked in dust and the smell of tobacco from his cherry wood pipe. On warm summer evenings, we took my parent’s car down country roads with my brothers, sisters and friends lounging across the hood and trunk, hands behind our heads like a pillow, starring into open sky and tree branches. A license didn’t matter, we were in the middle of nowhere. Most of us learned to drive sitting on pillows so we could see over the steering wheel.
When my cousin Rip came home from the Navy, he built himself a car out of old parts. It was his Merry Oldsmobile, held together with bailing wire. It had no roof and no floor at all, so passengers had to hold their feet up when he drove. I used to love watching the road ribbon by underneath us.
Then in boarding school there was the unforgettable Monsieur Le Gurre, our French Instructor straight from Paris. When his Citroen finally arrived in the rolling hills of Vermont, he took our entire class outside to admire it. “Come, come, I will show you,” he said in barely understandable English. “I will drive you all!” Twenty students piled on the hood, the roof and what little trunk there was. The rest stood on the bumper, overflowed the backseat, the front and hung from the windows. It was a sight one does not quickly forget. Unfortunately, the headmaster was watching and quickly dismissed Monsieur Le Gurre from future duties, but not before a spin around town.
As a young mother, I thought nothing of putting my kids in the boot of the car, their feet dangling over the bumper, tree branches propped inside to hold the trunk open. They sat together on a blanket and had a good old time watching the woods go by. I’m sure they sucked down plenty of exhaust, but didn’t seem the worse for it. I remember one couple waving scolding fingers as they passed, but I paid them no mind. What better time could a kid have?
Now, when we near the road to my house and my granddaughter wants to stand on the passenger seat, her upper body shooting up through the sunroof, hair flying in the wind and arms outstretched, I say, go for it! A big smile spreads across her face, and I know in that moment that she feels alive and engaged with life, not strapped in and confined.
Watching her embrace the wind reminds me of a couple I counseled a few years ago, who denied their parents access to their children because the parents took them around the block without seatbelts on. “They were irresponsible and can’t be trusted with our children.” I sigh, knowing that their parents, like myself are products of another era.
Every few years my parents treated us to a cultural week-end in NYC. We drove four hours through vineyards and rolling acres of farmland to the heart of a cosmopolitan environment that was as different from our barefoot childhood as I could imagine. 
Elmer was one of the evening bartenders who worked in my parent’s restaurant. His shift began at five, but he walked through the parking lot door at four thirty dressed in black pants, polished shoes, white shirt and tie. His hair was combed to the left and his cheeks were scrubbed and rosy.
I did show up for classes a few times, but when I walked into my German class, my instructor actually announced that he hated Americans. Well you know what, I hate ya back. You are just the excuse I need to get out of here.
I was in my last year at boarding school before I picked up a book and read it from cover to cover. Before that, words were a collection of tiny line drawings in black ink, placed against a light background and bunched together in clusters of illegible form. Much of my childhood was spent alone in my room with one illness or another. School became a place I rarely went, so my mother hired tutors to keep me in the educational loop. I didn’t fully realize that I couldn’t read, because I’d been taught the mechanics in school, I simply could not gain entry.
Crocuse and snowbells reached for the sun in the shelter of a broken foundation. Red-winged blackbirds made a racket from the branches of an ancient elm, as I surveyed the vacant property where the farm used to be. A stray barn swallow dove and swirled in the distance as if protesting the destruction of his home. I sat among the rocks where the milkhouse once stood and felt, for the first time, the fragility of life.
The air was crisp and the trees wore the bold colors of autumn’s tapestry as mother and I drove to St Johnsbury,Vermont. I felt adventuresome, and excited to go to boarding school. It wasn’t until we went to bed that night that the reality of it hit me. I had been delighting in her company without fully realizing that the next day she would get in her car and drive away. I had felt deprived of her before, but now I felt abandoned and panicked.
At boarding school I traded gym class for music and went into town to study with the worldly Madame Schinnerea. She was accomplished, rigid, expensive and formally trained. The woman managed, all by herself, to remove any joy I had ever felt for music. Under her training, music became cold and technical. If, at any time, she felt my work was less than perfect, she would cancel whatever engagements had been scheduled.
I must have been such a pain in the butt, but Elise was an exciting cook and I simply did not want to leave the table.
I am not a nurse. My father thought I should be. He saw my gentle ways and compassionate heart and declared me nurse material, but he was dead wrong.
I loved lying in the tall grass as a child. I loved the way I could hide beneath waving stalks of green blades moving in the wind like a song. I lay near the pond and looked into clear blue sky for hours. I loved that the sky had no boundaries, while I was snug, safe and invisible.
streams of scarlet ribbons against black lace, fastened to hold seamed stockings in place. The lacy push-up bras allowing me to have curves I only dreamed about in my slow development. Men who followed me down the street entranced by my beauty; a beauty the boys back home never seemed to notice. Europe ushered me into an exotic womanhood; a womanhood far removed from my rural roots and the full bodied cotton underwear my mother provided, the multicolored ones with each day of the week embroidered on the side.
My mother, Verse, is 93. She came to Oregon to visit for the last time when she was 88. I remember pushing her to the counter of the airlines ticket desk in a wheel-chair, while she dug in her oversized purse to find her passport. She was always smiling and eager to visit. She loved telling the adventure stories that lived behind each passport stamp gathered from around the world.
As a child, I learned that God was both angry and male. At nine years of age, I decided to test him.
The pond came into view on my left, and finally the buildings themselves. My uncle was standing in his heavy winter coat and cap, his hands in leather gloves, twisting and turning large silver milk cans on the platform for pick up. He was radiating good health and cheer as he caught my eye and waved. I watched him make marks on a clipboard, and hang it on a wooden peg before going back inside. Aunt Ethel was sitting on a three legged stool squirting the faces of six cats with warm milk from a cow’s utter. They licked and pawed it into their mouths with looks of delight and satisfaction, then gathered around an old blue bowl which had been filled to the brim with cream. Ethel unlocked the last cow’s head from the stanchion, and sent her with a pat on the rump to join the rest of the herd. The last cow, Daisy, twitched her tail in response and lumbered down the stair into a fresh bed of straw. Each cow had a distinct personality and names given according to their birth month.
The Rock Creek Tavern is a family place full of tapestry rugs, original art and stained glass windows. It’s five country miles from our house, past tall red barns, flooded wheat fields and acres of horse-fenced hills. Every Tuesday they host bluegrass music in a non-performance environment. Being there is like walking into someone’s living room where a group of friends have gathered. There are no microphones, just kindred spirits coming together to play stand-up bass, mandolins, banjos, guitars, fiddles and dobro. It did not surprise me that most of the musicians were my age, because playing music in that way was such a strong part of our past.
The first thing I ever stole was from the Baptist church. It was Christmas. We were given sugar cookies shaped like stars, steaming hot chocolate and bible lessons. Brightly colored packages circled the tree in the entryway, one stacked on the next. Those were not for us.
It was cold in the winters where I grew up, in upstate New York. Cold and snowy. There was a one room schoolhouse on the corner near my Uncle Glenn’s farm. That’s where my older sister and brother walked to school. I came later. I had an expanded two room school house. When I went to school, you knew what grade you were in by what row you sat in. There were three rows in the ‘little’ room, housing grades 1, 2 and 3. There were three more rows in the ‘big’ room; 4, 5, and 6. After you made it past the 6th row, you were shipped by bus to the village, which was not something to look forward to, because your dog could no longer go to school with you.
Heal Your Life & Free Your Voice with Karen Banfield 