Stopping by Woods, one of Robert Frost's finest poems, is full of marvels:
'Whose woods these are
I think I know. His house
is in the village though."
So the first stanza runs through my head, as snow drifts and cascades outside my window.
"He will not mind me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow."
Creating a world, in poetry or prose, requires forgetting the present and
drifting back into a time past or time imagined out of all previous experience.
It requires the shock of surprise or demonic terror.
* * *
I am standing at the top of the front steps of the Old Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina,
where my sister and parents and I spent, oh, perhaps, 5 or 7 years before my mother rebelled
and insisted we move over the Cooper River Bridge to a small town of Mount Pleasant.
At the moment, I have walked into the dim Old Citadel hallway, where I
can see all the way to the other end. It's the doorway outside to the cobblestone parking area. Our first-floor apartment looks out onto that area, with its scraggly trees, locusts I think. And where I wait for my father's car to nudge into its slot, and my father, in his Citadel uniform, to trudge on his flat feet toward out kitchen door.
But that is not really my story. Instead, in that dark hallway full of swirling years, I recognize my mother, and her combination of hard work and dreamy fantasy. I could never have entered her head, not with any accuracy, in that hallway darkness. But I remember its features and energy:
She has helped my sister and I mount the tall steps to the train called The Empire Builder. After hours and hours, changing trains several times (especially memoriable, the huge train station in Chicago, with its gleaming curved roof, where glass shapes sparkle, and distant voices call out in ragged
sounds the arrival and departures of trains.
* * *
She knew about snow. A photo of her holding me when I was probably five months old confirms her
undaunted treck home to Hankinson, North Dakota. Her Swedish mother was dying: Mama Max, the
beautiful statuesque grandmother whose death introduced me to snow. And now to darkness, the form of darkness that must be trusted to take us into the unknown, making steps as we go. Steps that will become filled with snow if we try to retrace them.
That is why I write. Not just to find my way back (which is sometimes difficult) but to enter the world of my Swedish grandmother, with the precision and courage of the mother who somehow fell in love with an Italian-American from Pittsburgh, and packed the boxes for their descent from the north to Charleston's Old Citadel, where the marvel of people with brown skin first confronted me.
