Searching

I finished the last bite of sandwich and began picking things up from the small square card table pressed against the window of my mother’s independent living apartment. She put her hand on the table, looked up and said, “I would like to ask you a question.” I set the plates back on the table and sat down. “Am I adopted?”

There are moments in life when something so unexpected happens that you can actually feel the earth shift under you: time stops and you are in the middle of some vortex.

I looked at her, kind of expecting her to laugh, to show me that she was in on this joke. She didn’t. Her eyes peered into mine with expectation not only for an answer but a solution. I inhaled and told her that of course she was not adopted. I slowly began to recite her mother’s and father’s names and then went on to my sister and her kid’s names. She nodded seriously, silently mouthing names along with me: or not. She spoke of her lifelong relationships, not as if she knew them, but struggling to put a puzzle together.

It wasn’t the first time there was struggle to remember things but suddenly I was watching sand silently slipping through her fingers.

In the parking lot I sat in my truck for a long while. I felt like she did: attempting to piece together what I knew for sure about my life and then, in my mind’s eye, watching it all break apart. She had also confused my father, her husband, for her own father which made me feel as if my dad had maybe not existed and that our history lay over reality like a scrim. I tried to squeeze memories to the front of my brain to make it all become real.

I also realized that, while it had previously seemed to be swinging, a door had solidly shut. I kept seeing her eyes asking me if she was adopted, a child searching my face. Needing something from me that I couldn’t possibly give. Flames of anger at having to become the adult, at losing my parent, made worse by a long, unsatisfactory relationship. My place in line had changed

Such a strange thing to be four children’s mother and still need one of my own. The moment, the very instant the question fell from her lips, I knew that there would no longer be opportunity to wail at her past injustices and have her understand that the thing I needed would never be heard. I’d always thought my day would come, but as I slowly picked dishes up from her table I knew it never would. Everything now would have to spring from a place of empathy, of compassion and if it wasn’t sitting in a cistern inside of me I would have to dig for it. Impatience, frustration, anger, rebellion..repressed, My teenage gait changed by the weight of responsibility and wobbled by a such a long lack of security.

Time passes even when things feel like they are in slow motion and I find myself searching for solid ground, waiting for the boat to stop rocking.

In Vermont fall is fair season. For us there is only one, and it is as solid as it gets. The one hundred fifty two year old Tunbridge World’s Fair. It gets marked on the calendar beginning in January and I need it this year.

I have attended the fair since I was a child, as have my kids. At the beginning of this, the Tunbridge fair week, our kids call and talk, longingly about having gone to the fair. It lasts a full four days and we attend three, missing the first only because of work. We sit on old wooden bleachers, our laps full of fried food and watch horse pulls, we wander out into the cool darkness and peer up at the half moon rising over the Ferris wheel.

Saturday we return and everything is different in the sunlight. We sit on those same bleachers and watch oxen team pull. Something is always pulling at the fair. We pay way too much for fair food but shrug and pull out crumpled bills. Hand squeezed lemonade, the champagne of the fairgrounds. Children scream from the rides over our heads. We walk through agricultural buildings that we have walked through for years and look at the blue-ribbon-winning-sunflowers as if it is the first time we have ever seen one. We all bet on who can correctly guess the weight of the giant pumpkins and wander through the old barns filled with new cows and watch Mary, our sheep shearer, demonstrate her art.

Sunday Josh and I sit in the grandstand and cheer on the antique tractors doing the pulling. Because our farm is worked by our 1948 Farmall we are always team red. A farmer wearing suspenders over flannel clamps a cigar between his teeth and roars past, his front wheels lifting slightly with effort. He manages a full pull and we stand up and cheer. There is a moment when I look at my bearded youngest son laughing and remember carrying him inside me, watching tractors, perhaps with this same cigared driver, pulling.

On the drive home one of the afternoons Paul looks over and quietly, purposefully, asks me why I love the fair so much. I don’t think on it long because I know.

My roots are nine generations deep in Vermont. I know my many ancestors were in attendance at the fair. When I am there I feel deeply connected: I am walking in the valley where they parked carriages and, like us, took a brief respite from work on the farm. I watch horses and feel the pull.

What I love here is that, in a world that embraces electronic technology and forward motion, the fair stands still. It remains a small fair based in agriculture, the cornerstone of our state.

I understand and relate to this. It is a place where I truly feel what it is to be me living this life in Vermont and that feeling grounds me again.