April 4th (Grimm)

This year, today, might be the first time I haven’t been with my oldest daughter on her birthday since she was in college. Which makes me sad, although it’s a small sorrow in the face of other larger ones. In an ordinary year I’d be going down there today; or maybe I’d have left yesterday. But say it’s today. I’d be leaving Cleveland around 11, even though I always think I’ll leave earlier, but I never do. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and clear, so the ride down would be nice, the fields showing a little green, maybe the trees too as I go farther south. The long ride down 71: Wooster, Mansfield, the 270 circle around Columbus, then onto 33, the bypass around Lancaster (where once you had to drive through the town, caught up in traffic, and where for years I’d get a pang when I passed the gas station where Val’s car had been fixed when it broke down, and where I left her after driving her there to pick it up because for some reason I couldn’t bear to go any farther, couldn’t bear to see the place where she was living without me, and for which I blamed myself for many years), and then there’s the point between Lancaster and Logan where the formerly Ohio-flat land unflattens and begins to rise into hills, mild undulations first and then higher and sharper, because I’m entering unglaciated Ohio, the southwest corner of the state showing its geologic age, and sometimes I remember the first time I drove through there, when Val was going to school in Nelsonville and lived in a house at the bottom of a steep hill with a cemetery stretching up behind it, or I remember going to visit when she was first married, living on a farm, where a herd of cats lived in the barn -- but no time for all that because I’m coming up on Logan, which has three exits all for itself (664, 93, 328) -- so I take the third and drive past the fields, past the Christmas tree farm, slowing down to 40 (or maybe 45) for the blink-and-you’re-through town of Union Furnace (where my grandson goes to school) and then the two slow-down-to-15 tight turns (where sometimes there are memorials of plastic flowers and teddy bears), and the farm with the lambs, the farm with the tiny waterfall, the house that is black and abandoned, the junkyard, the bed and breakfast on the hill, until you get to 56 where I turn right and then left onto ONeal, with a creek running along the road, and there are the houses of my daughters, Sue on the left and Val on the right, the hill rising up behind Sue’s house, the pond behind Val’s. I pull in to the driveway and there is someone on the porch, one of my grandsons (15 now, taller than me) come out to take my suitcase in and the pile of presents, and maybe Val is coming out of her house with her sister behind her, trying to look as if she isn’t happy to see me because that’s how she is, and it is time to be a family in the same space again, the stretching out of our bonds snapped together, so that it is just the same as it was when we three lived in the same house, when our bedrooms were feet apart instead of miles, when we danced in the dining room to the music of Van Halen, and when they sang “jump!” we jumped until the floor of our old house shivered and bounced.

Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection). Currently, she is working on a novel set in 1930s Cleveland. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.