The Gill house, which my grandfather and uncles built,
seemed always in exciting turmoil, someone always searching
for something misplaced, and on the stair landing there
was a fabulous window set with panes of colored glass. I gazed
through it to see the world shift to deep red, sickly orange or
an unnatural green.
Before I started school my mother, my twin sisters and I
lived in a small log cabin surrounded by big pines at the back of
my grandfather's property. To this day the smell of white pine
instantly sweeps me back to childhood with a sense of sadness
and inchoate longing. The log cabin period may have been
before the twins were born. I don't trust the tricks of memory.
My mother and her brothers had built this cabin, probably
a dream of her Girl of the Limberlost days. There was an old
wax cylinder player in the cabin. My mother wound up the
crank, the cylinder revolved and the story of The Three Bears
emerged in a tinny voice.
One cabin window faced west framing a hill that had burned
years before. The black tree snags silhouetted against the sky
looked like deformed giraffes and skeletal elephants. They
seemed both sad and frightening. In the deepening twilight
the bony creature shapes seemed to move, the twitch of a leg,
a neck bent. Today, in the summer twilight at Bird Cloud, the
greasewood and rabbitbrush hunch themselves into giant marmots,
crippled elk. The most beautiful object in my mother's
cabin was her cerulean blue silk brocade robe, a present to
her from my father. Burning with fever one winter night she
walked barefoot out into the snow dressed only in this lovely
garment. Later someone said she had pneumonia, a disease she
harbored many times in her life.
At some point we moved out of the cabin and into my grandfather's
ex-gas station, rejuvenated as a house. I remember the
boredom of obligatory nap time and the pattern of cracks in the
ceiling, the nasty yellow marshmallow chickens that sugared
our shoes on Easter morning. I remember waking up once in
darkness and feeling something sticky and hot on my ear, being
conscious of a creature leaping away. It was a rat and it had bitten
me. Only the scar and the memory remain. Although my
grandparents and great-grandparents were close by, and aunts,
uncles and cousins constantly visiting, I had a sense of aloneness,
of not being part of the buzzing hive of relatives. Old
Duke killed my small kitten and I was outraged that he was
allowed to go on living as though nothing had happened. I
would have appreciated a trial, a jury, and a death sentence.
My mother loved to sunbathe and would lie motionless for
hours on a blanket in the hot, weedy sun, her closed eyes covered
with two green leaves. We had a pet crow (called Jimmy
after the Civil War song refrain "Jimmy crack corn and I don't
care"). He was inquisitive and would sidle up to my mother
on her towel and carefully remove each leaf. He was reassured
that she was not dead when she opened one of her green eyes.
When my mother built a stone fireplace in the backyard I was
allowed to press my hand into the wet, gritty concrete that had
not yet set and the crow walked about in it leaving his prints
as well. Years later, as we were moving from 2217 McBride
Avenue in Utica, New York, in a car packed to the roof with
kids and clothes, my father put Jimmy in a hole-punched cardboard
box, and lashed the box to the back bumper. The poor
fellow was dead when we stopped for lunch by the side of the
road, asphyxiated by exhaust. I never forgave my father for this
crime. The misfortunes that befell loved pets were my introduction
to tragic and inconsolable loss.
We moved and moved and moved. Over the years we lived
in dozens of houses. A place in Rhode Island had the outline
of someone's arm in the broken sheetrock at the bottom of the
stairs. A house in Black Mountain, North Carolina, offered a
good view of shade trees where chain gang road crews rested.
A place in Maine had beautiful elms whose roots swelled up
near the surface and made mowing the lawn difficult. Then the
Maine Turnpike went in a quarter of a mile away and almost
immediately there was a ghastly accident that brought police,
rescue vehicles and the too-late ambulance. An official state
cross indicating a death had occurred at this spot went up, a
safety warning policy the state of Maine dropped when the
proliferation of crosses along the highway gave it a ghoulish
appearance.
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