Homecoming
By Kendra Atleework
Each morning I wake up in a yellow bedroom in a sun-bleached town. My bedroom has three windows: one facing north toward the fairgrounds, toward Highway 6 and the dry Chalfant Valley and Nevada beyond; another facing east toward the White Mountains, ancient and almost bare of trees. The third looks south, toward the giant liquidambar that greets the wind and flails its branches in my yard. Not far beyond, just past the roof of the elementary school, is the room where I was born.
I grew up and moved away and came home. I bought this house with its yellow painted bedroom. I live my life here now; I meet my friends at the saloon, I swim at the hot springs. I walk around my hometown and half-visions arrive unbidden. I’m walking to the post office on a random Tuesday and there we are, brother and sister and Mom and Pop, me with long braids and freckles, frolicking on the school lawn, in the shade of the great elms.
When I walk beside canals where I once walked with my mom, the color is water again, the pigments lift and mingle; the pale purple of my childhood bedroom swirls with the yellow of now as she sits with me on the floor in the dust bolts beneath the window, the mountains winging beyond. Never mind that for half my life she’s been gone. Sometimes I wonder if moving home to this little town so far from a university, an airport, a mall, was a failure to launch, a stunting that seized me when she ran out of days. Did I attempt some cowardly resistance to change, to the years as they shoved between us?
Maybe so. Yet I have failed to stop time. Businesses shuffle off of Main Street. The murals peel. A fancy frozen yogurt shop moves onto our wild-west drag. Now that we are neighbors, my father forgets that I know how to use a drill, that I pay bills, that my friends can play more than three chords on guitar when we gather in backyards. Perhaps he’s pursued, on nights spent alone with the mountains, by the image of two girls and a boy in an apple tree, and her, climbing after us, soon hidden by the boughs. She is nowhere now, not east or west. In her place, his grown children have come home.
I think if I can learn the mark of the indelible, can see it on the childhoods unfolding out my window when the recess bell sounds, in the tufts of cottonwood that fill the spring sky and the winter sleep of my lupine, nettle, and thyme—then I can welcome those visions when they surprise me, living my present-tense life in my past-tense town. Only then will years distill to a feeling that has no age, will time regain its cyclical nature, and I’ll stop trying to wrestle it out of line. I’ll catch a glimpse of a kid with braids. I’ll feel not sorrow but a sense of ongoing. The sun lifts above the range and then down. A heron lifts over the canal. Clouds gather in the west, and I’ll wait for the rain; I’ll see it fall on her shoulders, see us dancing in the driveway in the storm. I’ll stand and smell the rain as it strikes sagebrush miles away. It will be upon us any moment now.
Kendra Atleework is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and was selected for The Best American Essays, edited by Ariel Levy. Her book Miracle Country is the winner of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Kendra lives in her hometown of Bishop, California, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Kendra’s book Miracle Country is also a 2021 Nevada Reads selection.
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