We are originals—Calla and I. We were born in Pastoral.
Our parents came in the autumn of 1972, when all mad, wild, enraged hippies were fleeing the war and the draft. They retreated across borders and into remote lands where they couldn’t be tracked down.
Our mom had been an out-of-work elementary school teacher and our father repaired refrigerators. Both skills, as it turned out, served them well in Pastoral. Mom taught all levels of education to the children of Pastoral, while my father kept things running: well pumps and windmills and wood-burning stoves. When mom was still alive, she told me how they gave up everything they knew—neighbors and family and the local market only two blocks from their home—to come live here in these woods, and they made a life in Pastoral, a good one.
She gave birth to me within these forest walls, without doctors or drugs.
People say you can’t remember your birth, but I do. I was born in this farmhouse, on the second floor, with the windows open to let in the breeze—curtains brushing against the wood floor. I can recall the feel of the sunset glimmering across my newborn body, the smell of the air so sweet for the first time, the magnolia trees in bloom. The midwife, who had long, braided gray hair, held me against her heart, and I can still recall the beating of it against my tiny shell-shaped ear. I never cried as a baby. I looked around the world with curiosity, as if I knew it wouldn’t last, that someday it would all be taken from me.
Now I navigate the farmhouse halls easily, knowing the divots in the wood floor, the slanted walls and the angles of each doorway by heart. I smelled the rain in the air as we ran from the orchard, I felt the dampness against my skin before a single drop fell from the sky. I absorb the world like a bird navigates, a memory imprinted in hollow bones, flying south season after season. The scent of poppies beside the back porch have colors that brand into my memory, the lemon trees that line the pond smell like bright, sunlight-yellow, much richer and sharper than the actual color of a lemon I recall from my childhood. The world comes to me in ravenous hues and disjointed shapes. A thing that is hard to describe.
After my sister and I retreat to our rooms, rain sheds over the house like a great weeping, slow and doldrum. Sometimes, on evenings like this, it reminds me of when Calla and I were younger—after our parents died—and it was just her and me in the old farmhouse.
But Calla doesn’t like to talk about before—the memories hurt too much. Remember how Mom would hide our stuffed animals under our blankets at the foot of our beds, so when we climbed beneath the sheets at night, we’d find them by wiggling our toes?
No, Calla would answer, shrugging off the memory. I don’t remember things like you do. As if we had a different childhood, as if she’s blotted out the years we shared with our parents before they passed. I think she’s angry at them for dying too young and leaving us alone. Instead she’d rather forget them completely than carry the hurt around inside her like a rotting piece of wood. Maybe she feels betrayed by me, too, because I’ve refused to let them go, and sometimes the divide between us feels so big I worry it will break us both.
After an hour, I leave my bedroom and walk out into the hall, unable to sleep.
My footsteps are the only sound; even the wind outside has softened, the rain reduced to only a few scattered drops. The room my sister shares with Theo is two doors down on the right, past the white-tiled bathroom with the cracked clawfoot tub we rarely use. In summer, we bathe in the pond or in the metal basin beside the back door, and after, we let the sun bake dry our skin.
I walk to the stairs and down into the living room. A hallway stretches back from the kitchen to the mudroom, where a crooked, unwieldy door opens up into overgrown grasses, mangy shrubs, and several honey locust trees that press their thorny barbs against the siding of the house, scratching away the old paint.
We rarely use this back end of the house; it feels dark and closed off, from another time.
But a small room juts off the hall, down a series of low steps.
It was once a sunroom, where tall windows let in the southern light, and herbs and root vegetables were grown late into the season. But half the windows have been boarded up, the others draped with heavy linen curtains.
I touch the cold door handle, feeling the stale draft coming out from beneath the door. When I was little, the converted sunroom was used for outsiders, a place where new arrivals who had found their way through the woods to Pastoral would stay, awaiting the ceremony to initiate them into the community. I remember the wearied faces of strangers when they shuffled up our front porch steps, tired and hungry, their eyes wide with a different kind of thirst.
Sometimes they stayed in the sunroom for only a couple days, sometimes weeks, while it was decided whether they could remain—if they were a good fit for Pastoral. But rarely was anyone ever turned away.
It’s hard to imagine now: strangers in the house. It’s been over ten years since anyone new has wandered up the road to Pastoral. And just as long since anyone left.