My mother has sold the land in Aroostook County, the 2500 acres my father accumulated to exorcise boyhood poverty. What good were they to us, who hadn't been hungry in those fields? She got sick of neighbors calling long distance to tattle: "So-and-so's cutting on your land." You can't blame her, Arroostook's not her heritage. She married the north, and now it's over; if the man is gone, let his baggage go too.

The situation's different for me, a little. You have only to look at me to tell that paternal input dominates my genetic code. Old people near the farm sometimes forget and call me Gyp, seeing my aunt in my face. Murphy resembles my mother's side of the family, excellent people and close with us, but I'm feeling a little isolated now, the only real Tracy in the house. When the pair of them throw out my father's pack-rat clutter, so like my own, I grieve and panic and fly into a defensive rage.

I couldn't quite bear, in the end, to have all that land go. Some atavistic homesteading instinct cried out that I could shelter on land, grow root vegetables, survive. When my mother managed to take in my incomprehensible plea—"Save me some land, save me some land!"—she deeded over a hundred acres of daisies and wild strawberries in the tall grass, and in the center, on top of a little rise, some family headstones. I have under my wing the bones of Auntie Gyp and Uncle Harris, of Lillian who died young, of my grandparents and great grandparents.

Now we are selling the farm itself. Even I see that it should have been sold years ago, after Uncle Harris died. None of us want it. For me the life went out of it with Auntie Gyp; my mother never liked it; Murphy knew it only in decay. But my father couldn't let it go, it was the Home Place, a monument to his mother's energies. For him all those long early years that disproportionately fill our memory banks had been lived there, all the births and deaths, the jokes and dinners and lessons, the familiar views from windows. He tried to keep it lived in by cutting deals with the needy, but one family stole the silver and used the coffee pot for target practice, and the next burned down the tool shed and smeared filth on the parlor walls.

Now we're raiding, salvaging, harvesting, what you will. The house is going, so we're taking out the things we want. It's half a shopping spree, half a melancholy rite. I can't decide whether it feels more wicked to strip the house or to abandon family things to strangers. No matter how much furniture we carry out to the truck, the house seems to settle around what's left and make it look like enough, a trick learned in hard times, perhaps. It's difficult not to love a house that acts like that, but it's too late for love.

We didn't think there was much we'd want here, but objects that can be owned look all at once more desirable. We see how chairs would look with new upholstery. At the backs of dark cupboards we find red glass plates, a funky cup with "Brother" in gold script. Auntie Gyp's high school class ring turns up in a painted box filled with old postcards. We take down grandmother's portrait and find the photo albums.

Murphy and I go a little wild. Our lives are still under-furnished; in fact, Murphy is still in college. I want the parlor stove. He wants to make the organ into a liquor cabinet. Our mother thinks we're nuts. I want the dining-room table. He wants to turn the bookcase into a gun cabinet. She beats us away from faded quilts, hay rakes, the dining-room chairs. I can just remember this process at her own childhood home, when I was six: even then I wanted to take things, managed to drag home a few of her old toys and, by concentrated whining, a pair of china figurines from a box room full of desirable, abandoned stuff. She wouldn't even salvage her earliest rag doll. "You don't want that. That's not worth anything," she kept, and keeps, saying.

I notice, though, that she still can't drive past her old house without pain, and I begin to understand, a little, what it's about. It seems necessary, though I'm close to thirty, to swing one more time from the ledge over the staircase, smelling the sour, dusty wood; to circle the buildings through the uncut grass; to stare once more into the ravine. For a few years after this I'll have strange dreams of a shining, beatified field somewhere through the woods behind the barn, and I'll wish then that I'd explored farther on this final day before we cut the farm loose to drift through memory and desire, this last day when it was nothing more than its solid, possibly underrated, self.

~~~

Murphy has most satisfactorily grown up, while my mother, who has always gone with the crowd, grows younger to meet us. We're learning to play together, to see how far we can go without getting killed. When I bitch one time too many about the heat, my mother slings a saucepan of cold water over me, right at the kitchen table, and says, "That better?" She spits down the back of Murphy's blue jeans when he bends over. And ever since Murphy and I have somehow discovered that we need only say the phrase "oral sex" to set her gagging, she has no peace. What would my father have made of all this? He was playful and teasing, himself, liking for instance to come up behind us on a city street and pretend to be a stranger bumping into us, but the games we play now are rowdier. We are feeling, for the first time, unsupervised. Not for us boiled shirts in the jungle. We're scrambling for our loincloths.

We go down to the coast to see my mother's cousins for a summer day here and there. My father didn't hold much with cousins, his own or anyone else's, and these cousins, moreover, used to try kissing him hello. He couldn't see any pleasure in visiting, ever, but my mother and Murphy and I quite like it.

Now that we see the cousins more often we are finding our roles in the larger family drama. My mother is envied for her relationship with us, for having children who romp with her. Cousins who would never spit down their children's pants wonder what her secret is. Murphy and I rejoice to look hairier, hippier, than the cousins our own age, whose clothes are printed with whales and ducks.

The cousins have built summer houses in one huge field on the coast, and we'll flit from house to house all day, sucking up the different nectars of personality form the sisters who are my mother's contemporaries—the one who's sentimental and clever, the one who married big money and has lately taken to skinny dipping, the one who flings her legs over the arm of her chair and talks straight. Our great aunt, a vast and ancient woman with an unremitting Scots burr, will whop at Murphy with her cane and cry, "Shave that beard! I canna stand the sight of it!" and he will be gratified.

In the car going down we joke and hoot and squabble.

"Take that cussed headband off, I can't stand headbands," my mother says to Murphy. "Why can't I have any normal children?" This familiar cry is only partly jocular.

"Lay off," Murphy threatens, "or we'll talk about oral sex."

"We" is Murphy and I, who have become firm stylistic allies. It's a good thing for us that the threat always works and we've never had to invent the conversation.

"Urp," gags my mother. "And you," she says, rounding on me, "you could at least curl your ends." For both of us, bending my hair and bending my will sometimes get confused.

"I wouldn't talk about hair," I say, "if I had a hairdo that looked like a white football helmet."

"Does not!" she yelps. Murphy chortles in the back seat: a palpable hit.

"Just needs a number on the side," we assure her.

For the ten good years between my father's death and my mother's, the field of cousins seems permanent as bedrock. In fact their summer compound is fairly recent and will in a few more years break up, the older generation failing and the younger straying. But in the eternal now of living, as of fiction, we're held side by side like petals on an eddy, and stasis has come again.

~~~

Now that she's alone, I lead my mother around Europe every other year or so. This is the ultimate "running the roads" that my father would have seen no point in. Maine veterans of the world wars tend to say, flatly, at suggested jaunts abroad, "I've been to Europe." But we aren't traveling as retroactive rebellion any more, if we ever were. We're never more than a week home before we begin to think with itchy-footed longing of poplar lined French roads, or gulls on our windowsill at windy St. Ives.

Here we are, sitting in a little upstairs restaurant in Athens, not exactly warm but at least out of the January wind that's so much colder than we, or evidently the Greeks, expected. When we get back to our hotel room with its stiff towels smelling of olive oil, we'll try to humidify with an ashtray of water on the radiator, and we'll cough and choke all night, waking each other up and laughing in the darkness at the awfulness of our state. We got colds last week in Turkey, but when we spread out and gloat over the other things we got, as we do fairly often, we don't mind the germs so much. Out of our matching green Eddie Bauer duffel bags, brought from home empty for this purpose, we pour pointed slippers and woven, beaded headdresses for camels, brass and gold and leather and alabaster. Our beds glitter like the bazaar itself; any minute an Ottoman genie could rise up to fetch us a glass of tea with three sugar cubes or, likelier, a coke.

But just for now, in the restaurant, we're not sneezing much and we're almost warm. When we leave there'll be the Acropolis over our left shoulders and the Tower of the Winds straight ahead. We’ve been to see the omphalos, the world's stony bellybutton, at Delphi, which feels considerably holier than the Vatican, and only this afternoon in Corinth an old Greek woman in black split an orange with us. It still had leaves. We are seriously content.

I have been teaching my mother (daughter and widow of teetotalers) to drink a little, and she has surprisingly taken to Restina. It tastes like spruce gum, she explains, knocking it back, and so, I admit, it does. We used to pry those amber balls off spruce trees with a paring knife and chew them, though I had some private reservations about the powdery stage and the way pure resin made my teeth tighten. My mother is always good at domesticating foreign experience. She'll look at a Medici's marble floor tracked by tourists and say, "If I just had a mop!"

Tonight, remembering that she likes licorice as well, I have added Ouzo to the menu. This may have been an error. If my own vision is fuzzing a little, what must hers be doing?

"You're drunk," she snickers.

"I'm drunk?" I say. "At least I don't have crumbs on my chin." This seems to me quite a witty riposte.

"Yes you do!" she says, and she's right. We both do. Dreading the contempt of the waiter, we finish our moussaka and go falling down the stairs to our hotel.

It occurs to me that the old impropriety, teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs, might in fact be good fun. Certainly my own grandmother was always ready for sport. I imagine us hiding in the chicken house and playing that we're weasels, laughing behind our sticky hands, inexpert dribbles of yolk down our chins.

"When I think of all the years I might have been doing this!" my grandmother says, licking her lips.

"Never mind," I say, shaking my shell near my ear to see if it's really empty, "you've got a lot of good egg-sucking years left."

"For sure," she says, upbeat as always. She sneaks her hand under a sleepy Plymouth Rock and hands me another egg, with down stuck to it.

But I've saddened myself, or the alcohol has. How many good egg-sucking years can any of us count on? "Nana would have liked this," I say, looking at the classical skyline. We often wish her back for some piece of frivolity or folly—not a bad time to be remembered.

"Especially the Retsina," says my mother.

She's right, we might as well joke. My grandmother's eighty-five years weren't long enough to touch our traveling phase, and there's no way we can fish into history and hook her into our present. We're all scudding along like the cloud shadows over the Acropolis, swift and separate, and any overlap, like this one of my mother's and mine, is a brief and astonishing grace.

~~~

We're selling the vacation cottage, in Maine parlance, ‘camp,’ semi-furnished and we have a buyer, but my mother and Murphy and I are coming through one final time to take away anything we want to keep. This is the farm all over again but a hundred times worse: no avaricious discoveries here, only the dry camp of hindsight. As we let ourselves in the kitchen door our hearts beat "last—last—last.

Camp things, loved for their very shabbiness, seem too frail to carry off. Even without my mother's restraining influence, I probably wouldn't try to take away the ragged dishtowels from the kitchen line, the bent dipper from the water bucket. But I might. The feel and sound of them goes deep. What would we do with the thirty-gallon drums, one painted blue, one green, in which we kept cereals and baked goods safe from the mice? And yet, unthinkable that we won't put our heads again into the sweet, seductive air of the bakery can. Okay, so I have no use for the decorated, child-size canoe paddle Dad bought for me once, I'll leave it on its nails, but dammit, dammit, I want the thing.

I stand in my bedroom, which is stuffy and strewn with dead flies—we're not spending the night—and realize that the Indian blanket is too faded to take and that my current life has no room for plaster gimcracks won at fairs or the gaudy satin pillow cover my father brought me thirty years ago from Niagara Falls. If I carry them home they'll turn from gold to dry leaves, like the treasure in fairy tales. I tuck a selection of Cousin Osgood's 1938 magazines under my arm and square my shoulders for walking away.

Murphy wants, one more time, to walk up the shore to the point by wading through the edge of the lake, as he used to do in his teens. He invites me to go along. It's fun, a last lark, a boundary walk, a crazy tribute to wood and water. Up to our waists, sometimes our shoulders, in sharp, cool lake, we skid on slippery stones, grope our way around the wet side of boulders, peer past shoreline tree roots into the cedar darkness. We’re rolling in the essence of place.

Before we leave we wipe off the oilcloth and we three sit down for a last supper, eating sandwiches off wax paper; we've packed the dishes. Once all these chairs were occupied and the camp was ours forever. I'm remembering a summer in the mid Fifties when a table full of family lingered after dinner every day to talk about dying. Or at any rate my father, Uncle Harris, and my maternal grandparents did. My mother and Osgood, the youngest adults, hated it. "They're at it again," they'd signal one another, and rush to clear and wash the dishes, anything to get away. Often as not I stayed from summer inertia, rubbing my finger over the oilcloth's pattern and watching Murphy play Davy Crockett between the trees while familiar sentences washed over me.

"By then I'll be pushing up the daisies," Uncle Harris always said.

"Well, the young may die but the old must," someone else would remark. I didn't foresee then how these truths would unpeople my world.

Though my mother and Osgood, who fled to the kitchen, are still alive, in the end there's no place to run. One day not long enough from now my mother will have a stroke while reading the Secretary's report to a meeting of the Mission Circle, and never get to New Business. A surprise of the worst sort, but already Murphy and I understand, as we roll up our wax paper, what house we'll have to empty next.

§ § §

Ann Tracy grew up in rural Maine and was educated at Colby College, Brown University, and the University of Toronto. A professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, she has previously published two novels (WINTER HUNGER and WHAT DO COWBOYS LIKE?) and a reference book (THE GOTHIC NOVEL 1790-1830), as well as a book-length piece of non-fiction, HIGHER GROUND. She lives in Plattsburgh, NY.

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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