Before 10

Who would I be without the places I lived? Without the people in those places?

I carry Texas in my big bones, Scranton in my heart, and Oklahoma’s red dust in every breath.

Who would I be without Rary’s wide lap for my three-year-old head? Her thick fingers combed my hair, traced my ear, and lulled me to sleep.

Who would I be without Grandpa’s Irish toast and soft-boiled eggs for breakfast? His fingertips inky with newsprint, cigarette smoke spiraled into the coffee-scented morning. His permission to explore, climb, and jump while Mom was working.

I feel the imprint of Our Lady of Fatima Montessori on my four and five-year-old self. The long drive into the Poconos to spend each day with teacher-nuns in long black habits, rosaries dangling from waists. Their arms emerged like magic from oversized sleeves to hold and soothe. Their warm, intentional steadiness, and rhythmic heartbeats created a calm quiet. We set the table for snack, cleared afterwards, washed dishes, and swept the classroom. It mattered that we were there, seated in a circle, singing songs, listening to stories. Our work was play, our play was work, and nothing went unnoticed.

Four months in New Jersey might have been lost in the shuffle between Rary’s duplex on West Market Street and the new ranch house in the middle of the prairie. I learned to ride a two-wheeler on the rutted road that passed our rented cottage. Black cinder lodged so deeply into my knees; it might still be there.

A nightmare on repeat woke me each night: I fell into a deep, dark hole with no one to hear my calls for help, and I stopped calling out. We walked to school each day and home for lunch: peanut butter on wonder bread, a brown banana mashed for jam. I can feel it still, stuck to the roof of my mouth.

The stream beside the house in the woods in Oklahoma runs through me like blood. We watched storm clouds gather and threaten from the big wrap-around deck, then rushed to the basement to huddle under a mattress, while our ears popped, and windows rattled with the wind.

Beth and I spent long hours with sandstone boulders, in the shade of cottonwoods, our feet in the stream, toes caked in clay. We carved soft rock into bowls and animal shapes. We gathered dust of different colors to mix into paint on birch bark canvas. Our private art gallery.

My legs hold the memory of running through grass, slipping between strands of barbed wire into the pasture, jumping over cow paddies. We giggled at the huge creatures who sniffed our hands and rolled their tongues through thick lips to taste the grass we offered. We played house in sunken foundations filled with treasures of rusted bed frames, buckles, bottles, and broken pots and pans. We were Laura and Mary Ingalls on the great plains, and we had each other.

This was my life before the lost years, before the move to Indiana where memories are crumpled and squished like forgotten lunch in the bottom of a backpack, where anything, once good, goes sour and rotten.

Before an instinct for survival put me to sleep for decades.

About the Author

Linda Castronovo lives and writes in western Massachusetts, land of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuck People. She makes her home with her husband, a yellow lab, a black cat, and a dozen chickens on a tiny hobby farm with fruit trees, berry bushes, and too many weeds. Nature is still a daily wonder.