Sydney Lea: FALLING SHY / NOSTALGIA • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Sydney Lea
FALLING SHY / NOSTALGIA

Falling Shy

My boyhood house is not the home of my heart. That wouldn’t surprise you if you knew some things I know, though I won’t examine any of them and I won’t pity myself. Everywhere I’ve gone, I have come on people who endured much more in childhood than I did from my own petty woes.

Besides, my sadness, if in fact that’s what I should call it, connects obliquely at most to pain or neglect. Instead, the feeling comes more precisely when I remember my bachelor uncle’s farm, which is the store of cherished particulars. I have plenty of those, yet looking back I yearn to thrust them into some higher realm, or deeper.

I pretend this would make me whole, yet memory balks at translation from quiddity: whiff of the barn all year; long shadows of cornstalks at end of summer; spring pastures pocked by woodchucks; airborne crystals– frost at dawn; a daytime owl high in the loft in autumn; the landscape’s inclinations, each as familiar to me as any playmate.

All those, all right, but what do they validate?

I could still point out which pond-side pine in winter refracts the moonrise, and through which mullioned window to behold that show, or the sun’s at-dawn exploding onto days in July that somehow boded adventure, to which I could still be roused by rasping crows.

Even now I’m transported by unpredictable cues. The savor of twisty apples from half-wild trees, for instance: a similar taste today still seems a harbinger of some astonishing revelation.

And then? Head spinning, I tremble, weak in the knees, cliché insulting my search for signification.

Nostalgia

“Did you ever pick beans with a hard-on?” This wasn’t a question I’d ever dreamt of hearing. Just arrived in that north-country hamlet and carless, I’d been hitchhiking to a new job some miles south.

He didn’t introduce himself after he picked me up, but I’d learn that this was Dub, grave-digger, lawn-mower, truck farmer. It was the late 1960s, and he’d hired a crew from a hippie commune to help him reap those beans.

“This one little gal,” he explained, “why, she took her shirt off soon’s we started.” So the pluperfectly offbeat question he’d asked made a sort of sense, however crass.

No old-timers like Dub remain in that town, virtually every farmhouse bought and remodeled by people indifferent to local lore.

The newcomers have frosted the cake and that little village twenty miles south of me. They had started to when I fled it four decades ago. I don’t know a soul there. I fight not to sentimentalize the families–some of them there for literal centuries–who’ve been misplaced. Like any of us, they had their defects of character. And yet, judge Dub and his outrageous question however you will–I dream of beholding his beat-up old boat of a Chrysler veer to the shoulder so I can take a seat up front again. I’d like to smell him: the dung, the dirt, the pipe. I’ll never explain such a longing, maybe not even to myself, a man you could now call archaic too, just one thing left to fear, though not very deeply.

A Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea founded New England Review, was Vermont’s Poet Laureate, and received his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Sydney Lea has published two novels (most recently Now Look), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines). He lives in Vermont.