A Twist of the Vine

     by Naomi Ulsted

We seemed to be stopped in the middle of the road for no reason. I leaned over my baby brother Adrian’s chubby legs to peer out the window while he shoved at me.  Outside, just past the dirt road where our wood-paneled station wagon sat motionless, was a wall of forest. The air smelled of recent rain, but late spring sun dried the droplets trying to cling to the dense mass of underbrush leading into the damp darkness of the forest.  Well, Mom said, turning around in the front seat to face me.  What do you think?

Think of what?  I asked.

Mom’s long brown hair was fixed in my favorite style, with two sections pulled into a gold clip at the back of her head.  The remaining strands fell over her shoulders.  Adrian, who had been clambering around the back seat during the thirty-minute drive from my grandmother’s house, reached hands smeared with teething biscuit toward her hair.  She absentmindedly pushed them away.  This! she announced, gesturing her arm out the window toward dense woods.  The property for our new home!

I thought of my grandmother’s tidy lawn with its perfectly rounded shrubs and straight mowed lines in the grass.  I suspected the surprise Mom had been promising me today was not going to be a fun surprise, like a trip to The Farmette for an ice cream cone.  This was going to be one of those grown-up surprises that are kind of boring until they are kind of complicated, like when my brother came along or when I got my new dad.  Even though I thought Mom and I had been doing just fine on our own.

You see? she went on, smiling back at me while Dad leaned over the steering wheel, trying to distance himself from the gooey teething biscuit my brother was waving.  I told you we’d get our new place before you started second grade.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing.  There were only trees and dusty road, but my mom was happy in a way she usually wasn’t.  We had moved from Nebraska a few months after she and my brother came home from the hospital.  After barely surviving Adrian’s birth, Mom may have wanted the extra support from her parents, who lived here on Camano Island, in Washington.

Camano Island is a large island located in the Puget Sound and, at the time we moved there, was populated primarily by people who wanted to live off the beaten track.  People who didn’t want close neighbors, people who lived in log cabins or A-frame houses, surrounded by towering trees and deep moss.  Nearly equidistant between Seattle and the Canadian border, both seemed equally foreign to me, as Camano was pretty much our whole world.  Although we lived on an island, as I grew older I found I often needed to explain we didn’t get there by ferry or some other kind of boat.  Rather, there was one road off the island that crossed a bridge into the town of Stanwood.  Even the bridge wasn’t particularly stunning.  Although Port Susan was to the south of the bridge and Skagit Bay to the right, the bridge itself basically crossed over a large cow ditch of stagnant water.  Although Stanwood was home to a population less than 2000, it was our hub for shopping, school, and supplies.  Nonetheless, Camano was a small and as of yet, undiscovered oasis.  A short drive from anywhere on the island would take us to the edge of the Sound, where we could play in the placid waves, gather driftwood and look for tiny crabs.

Although I’d been born in Seattle and coming back to Washington meant coming home, it didn’t feel like it to me.  Mom and I had moved from Washington to Oregon, then to California where I got my new dad, then back to Oregon, and then to Nebraska where my new brother was born. So for us no state felt like home. For me, only Mom and her yellow Volkswagen Beetle felt like home, and the Beetle had been sold to help pay for Mom’s wedding.

I tried to muster more enthusiasm than I felt.  Great! I offered.  I had to pee, and I hoped we could just appreciate the trees through the car windows and go home.

Out! Adrian demanded, fiddling with the door handle where he’d been riding on my mother’s lap.

Come on, Chuck, Mom said. Let’s explore.

I almost asked to stay in the car, but didn’t think that would go over well, so I got out and we all stood at the side of the road, dwarfed by an imposing wall of ferns, pine and fir trees, nettles, wildflowers, and blackberry bushes. Although it was still warm, as days in June were long, the sun dipped low in the sky.  Follow me, Dad said. Blackberry bushes rose thick and imperious, although the berries were only hard green nubs.  As I stepped onto a trail leading into the woods, a loud buzzing from inside the bushes that towered over all of us, even Dad.

Mom picked huckleberries from bushy clusters of tiny leaves as she held Adrian’s hand and he toddled along until he toddled into a stinging nettle and shrieked in pain.  She picked him up and continued to chatter about the five acres they’d just purchased.  We just have to decide where to build our house, she said.  We thought we would build on the south side of the property, but if we built a little farther from the road, we’d get more sun.  We’ll need to put in a nice long driveway.   Her hair caught in a blackberry bush, and I helped her untangle it as she went on.  Besides, a long driveway will keep us away from the noise of the road.  It will be nice and quiet.

Although the drive from my grandmother’s was only around thirty minutes, for the last fifteen we’d swapped the smooth pavement for a series of dirt roads that became dirtier and bumpier as we went along, passing fewer and fewer cars.  As I would find, the school bus wouldn’t even drive all the way back into those woods.  Instead, I would walk the two miles to the junction where the dirt roads met the paved roads, my sneakers streaked with dust in the early fall, or mud the rest of the school season.  When a truck passed by me, clouds of dirt billowed behind it, swirling like a mini version of the tornadoes we’d seen in Nebraska.

I bent down to pick a stem of wild peppermint.  I crushed its leaves and breathed it in, then popped it into my mouth.  When we lived in Oregon the first time, Mom and I had eaten greens we gathered from wooded areas surrounding whatever apartment we were staying in at the time.  Mom hadn’t had any kind of traditional job since I was born.  She forced me to attend daycare for three weeks once, so she could go to work as an administrative assistant.  However, after paying for rent and day care, where I sobbed at each drop off, there was barely enough left to buy food.  So she quit her job and went back to receiving her monthly welfare check, which gave us lots of time together to search for herbs.  She made tea from the tiny yellow chamomile buds, which I would drink after stirring in large spoonfuls of honey.  I once picked some from my grandmother’s driveway and brought a handful to her to make for tea, but she just asked me why I was dragging weeds into the house.​