I Remember Virginia FRom the Womb

I’ve seen 25 years as my parent’s creation. I know my birthdays as anniversaries of their lives. My life is a scrapbook of my parents memories, and by parents, I mean my mother, who shapes endless reminiscences around my childhood milestones.

Remember Maine, she says, where I was born. It’s a rhetorical question; I was only one when we moved away to Ohio, and a bulge in my mother’s stomach when Maine arrived. I was conceived in Virginia, in Lynchburg, Virginia. I remember Virginia from my mother’s voice, her trick of saying ‘ya’ll’ and ‘critters’ sliding the words neatly into her Midwestern Michigan speech without dropping an ‘r’. I remember Virginia from childhood visits overnight, driving, always driving in a school-bus, my parents' station wagon, a rented van. Field-trips, family vacations, summer-camp tours. Air full of midges and ticks in my hair, sweeps of green as deep as my granny’s fur coat, as prickly and with the same dappled depths of light. Nothing in Virginia shines, even wet leaves are too soaked in color to gleam there, even the naked steel tubes of playground swings and slides is reliably matte; talcum covers the state. Dusty-pollen, saline-air and industrial powder fills your lungs, mixing into a humoural mud. It squats down beneath your diaphragm, Virginia, when you breathe and the words in your mouth turn thick as barbecue—it’s a cliché because it’s true. Every vowel is burnt-umber seared earth red. No other air can compete with that; I remember Virginia from the womb.