I ask for hot dogs at the butcher counter and the young man frowns. "I don't believe you've ever gotten hot dogs," he says. "You'd be right," I answer. "I never have before." That's not exactly true. I have bought hot dogs before but it has been years. My usual training doesn't hold space for food like this and if I'm buying junk food, it will probably be snack cakes. Despite my years of physical training, I'm still a sucker for sugar.
I heft the package gingerly. At least I'm now an adult and bougie enough to be buying my hot dogs from the butcher counter. The prepackaged hot dogs sit balefully in the refrigerator section as I walk by. Those are the ones I grew up eating, and not the pricy ones either. My folks didn't hurt for money by the time I came along, late in life, but my mom forever shopped on a self-imposed budget. Brand-name hot dogs were for rich people and we weren't rich, no matter how much money was in the bank.
Kindling fires smell different, all dried branches of elm and box elder. Neither are popular trees, especially box elder, as they scatter spindly branches across the yard at the least provocation. Bad for expensive landscaping and manicured lawns, perfect for kids picking up sticks for a campfire. Out west of the house, the box elder grove. Out west of the house, the little square of wayward bricks with a blackened metal grate next to the picnic table made of redwood and heavy metal frame. Our names — mine, my sisters' — painted on the frame in thick red paint. Somehow, those names, that wood, both seemed permanent, a consequential grounding in time and place, a forever that could not be uprooted.
The sky is blue but pale, the season has changed, summer gone. Box elder leaves are falling, yellow, papery, like flurries of Chinese lanterns, colors forever emblazoned in my memory. Blue, yellow, gold and the sounds, crumpled paper sounds, leaf litter piled, tall and thick and high to me, but that doesn't have to be tall or thick or high when you're so young. Even short dogs are tall when you are two.
The fire, bricked and boxed in, warm, crackling, a testament to my parents' budget courtship. After the wedding, their first meal as a married couple was over such a fire, somewhere in South Dakota, on a windy, sunny May Saturday, and the meal was cheap weenies and a can of pork and beans, and I'm sure my dad drank a can of cheap beer as well. My mom remembered that meal often, especially on afternoons like these. It was a sacred moment, reenacted seasonally. "Be sure to burn the weenies good, Don," she would say and she meant it. Our hot dogs never looked like the ones on the package, plump, juicy, grill-scored. No, ours were blackened, crunchy-edged, and covered with off-brand catsup and mustard.
Was it a day in October, that warm day with the cold chill? A day in November? I was too young to recall the calendar. To me, it is a day out of time, a sacred day, unsullied by time or space. I was blessed with many of those in my young years, so much so that "home," the place in which I grew up, simply was and I could not imagine the house, the barn, the trees, and yes, even the picnic table, as ever not existing or that it could ever be lost to me, or irrevocably changed.
But sacred spaces are difficult. Nothing lasts forever and sometimes not nearly as long as it should. That space, my picnic place, all now in my past, a place to which I cannot return. When that place was lost to me, I became, in my own mind, a sojourner, a stranger even in my own house, even surrounded by remnants of my former home. "Take whatever you want," my dad said after my mom's passing and he meant it. What wasn't loaded up and saved went into a dumpster before the home place was sold off. "Don't come back," my former neighbor warned me, "It's just not the same." I'm sure it is not and I have not returned. To do so would sully the memory, disrespect the space, and I cannot and so remain forever on, unanchored, save for memories.
The sky is blue, but pale. The sun is bright, even in its afternoon slanting. The season has changed and the box elder leaves are falling, yellow, papery, a flurry of crumply, little paper sounds. I smell a kindling fire again. The weenies are nearly done, burnt to a fine and artful crisp. The can of pork and beans is bubbling. A few bucks at the IGA, an off-hand memory shared. We gather, shielded by cheap, warm flannel before flannel was cool, our backs against the outside world, if only for a moment. Family. A sacred space unspoken. Lost. Never forgotten. The picnic.
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