by Lisa Thornton
My father and I used to take walks along the side of the road when we lived in Massachusetts. After dinner on warm evenings, we would stroll to the end of the driveway and turn right to head up the hill. The ditches on both sides of the road were filled with cattails, goldenrod, and milkweed.
I was in third grade, and reports were all the rage. My teacher was always asking us to write reports on books we’d read, periods of history we’d studied, famous people we admired. I happily wrote three paragraphs on Marie Antionette, whom I thought was misunderstood. When my teacher assigned a report on a local plant, I chose my favorite–the milkweed.
My father worked for the Soil Conservation Service, which was an arm of the federal government which has since been absorbed by other departments. He knew the land. He told me the names of the trees and weeds and how to best control for soil loss in steep areas as we walked. He stopped patiently every time I asked him if I could rip apart a milkweed. For science.
To start, I’d find a pod that was as big as a dill pickle. I’d insert my fingernail into it and run my nail along the seam to open it like a coin purse. Inside, there was a beautiful swirl of the softest, silkiest material I’d ever felt. It was pure white. I worked it between the pads of my fingers, reveling in its smoothness. Clumps of silk were held together at the tips by tiny brown seeds. I pulled the silk out of the pod and tossed it pinch by pinch into the air. It weighed nothing, so it took flight easily. Over the houses it floated. Above the trees.
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In fourth grade, my father and mother and sister and I left the house on the hill. We drove out of the woods and around dairy farms and through industrial cities with rusting smokestacks and belching refineries. We crossed the Susquehanna, Wabash, and Illinois rivers. My father pointed out farms along the way that were correctly planting trees to conserve soil, and ones that were not. He slowed the car as we veered around muddy embankments, pointing out the window and saying, “Look kids—erosion.” It was January, and our Chevy Celebrity overheated just west of the Indiana-Illinois border. My father stood in the blowing snow and poured antifreeze into the engine. Most of it blew back, blue liquid splashing onto his glasses and jacket.
I knew what to expect because I’d read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. I knew we might face dangers moving out West like when Laura’s dog Jack got lost in an overflowing creek, or when Pa had to spend three nights hunkering down in a snowdrift.
There were no woods or gurgling streams. The land ran flat to the edges at every horizon, like a raw egg in a pan with nothing to stop it. We spent my fifth-grade year in Macomb, Illinois, my sixth in Bourbonnais, my seventh in Champaign. We kept moving in this new flat place. Every time we moved, my father got further along in his career. Every cardboard box I filled with stuffed animals and dolls signaled a promotion. Every moving van, a new position.
I became obsessed with Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh and wore a hooded sweatshirt and carried a notebook in which I kept careful details about the families in my neighborhood whose windows I peeked into every day after school. Town after town, I wrote reports. I wrote reports on Johnny Tremain and the planet Saturn. I wrote a report on the ozone layer. I read Great Expectations.
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Before we lived in that house on the side of the hill with the ditches full of cattails, goldenrod, and milkweed, we lived in a smaller house in a different part of that Massachusetts town. Before that, we lived in a split level in Connecticut close to a chicken farm. Before that, we lived in a grey shingled place on Cape Cod that I only remember through stories, borrowed memories that have taken up lives of their own in my mind through photographs and repeated tellings. The cicadas were so thick the year my mother was pregnant with me that she carried an umbrella to get the mail. The bridge to the mainland was jammed with cars when she went into labor with me on Memorial Day weekend. She squeezed the doctor’s hand so hard during my birth that she broke one of his fingers.
When people ask me where I’m from, I don’t know what to say. Is it the sandy beaches of the Cape? Is it the side of the hill where I discovered silk inside a milkweed pod? Is it along the Housatonic where my mother and father rowed our canoe as my sister and I dragged our fingertips in the water, making long Vs on the surface? Or is it where I had my first kiss, in the backyard in seventh grade next to an impossibly flat cornfield filled with mice that ran inside our house when the farmer harvested? Or the soybean fields south of Champaign where my first boyfriend drove fast on his motorcycle, our helmets off, my arms around his waist, hot wind in our hair, a million pinprick stars tossed like seeds overhead?
There were only so many moves in my family. After the sixth or seventh, my mother said no more. No more packing, no more moving vans, no more being married. Something in her gave out. Maybe she missed the mountains and the streams, but I think it was something more that she missed. I think she missed belonging. Knowing a place like you know your hair, or your lover’s face. Growing along with a place. Being a part of it.
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I left the Midwest when I turned twenty and moved to the Rockies and then northern California. I raised my toddler in the swamps of Louisiana. There are things I miss from every region. I miss boulders, their hardness and indifference. I miss the lap of the ocean, the smell of salt and seaweed, the tangles in my hair after a day at a damp and chilly beach. I miss Spanish moss and snowy egrets.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being from more than one place, I tell myself. Being from lots of places doesn’t make me less worthy. Of love, respect, or stability. I tell myself that people like me who don’t have deep roots are still capable of being whole. But I’m envious of those who have a long relationship with one ecosystem. I’m jealous of people with an uncomplicated identity like New Englander or Midwesterner. Californian. Southerner. And when the question inevitably comes, “Where are you from?” I cringe. It’s meant to be small talk, but it cuts to the heart of who I am, and who I am not.
How much of us is where we live? How much of our identity is the land we walk on, the trees we see every day, the patches of sky we gaze at through our windows? And what happens when we bring ourselves to a new place? When the Illinois River reaches the Mississippi River, it disappears into it. But what happens to the Illinois River? That water is still there, inside the Mississippi. Can we be the same people in different places? Or are our old selves lost forever when we relocate, swirling amongst all that new water?
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A few years ago, I returned to Illinois with my husband and son to live in an area we could afford with well-funded public schools, fewer climate threats, and to be closer to my parents as they age in their separate homes. We found a farmhouse on the edge of some windy fields that is slowly falling down. Since moving back, I’ve come to find comfort in the Midwest’s big, open spaces. The wind turbines in the distance that spin their giant arms and blink red in the night. The metal grain silos that spring up like Italian castles in the countryside. My son is a teenager now. I think he will call the Midwest home. Could I?
I take wrong turns on my way home from work to find privacy in the fields. I park on single lane roads surrounded by ten-foot-tall cornstalks and watch power lines lope into the distance. I turn off the engine and listen to the occasional starling balancing on the tip of a cornstalk, a lone rabbit bolting across the gravel, or a redwing blackbird singing somewhere out of sight.
My father retired from his government job a long time ago. He and his third wife come to see us sometimes, in our crooked farmhouse. On one of his recent visits, he and I took a walk up the road. “That culvert is what keeps these fields from flooding,” he said, pointing to a ditch lined with prairie grasses and cattails that the hawks soar over.
I still look for milkweed. In the ditches on the side of the road and around the base of telephone poles. I would love to peel open a pod and feel that silk on my fingertips. I look for it by the railroad tracks when my husband and I ride bikes after dinner. I look for it when we drive the old truck into the country east of town on Sunday afternoons to keep the battery from dying. People tell me milkweed lives in the Midwest, but I have never seen it. Maybe someday one of those little brown seeds will find me here after floating on their silky wings for forty years and thousands of miles. Maybe I can grow a patch in the backyard, out by the garden.
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Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, and other literary magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net award and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.
Image: Caitlyn Manning
ID: a milkweed plant, open, with seeds.
Psaltery & Lyre 