Silver Meadows Summer

by Emma Otheguy

  you’ll never pass again.

  Traveler, there is no path,

  only your wake upon the sea.

  Carolina stood, and stepped back.

  Lydia had listened attentively, then stared again into the fireplace, as if the little elves could give her an answer, or as if the hearth really danced with flames. While Carolina waited for a response, Jennifer took her by the elbow and led her toward the door of the cottage.

  “Think about it” was the last thing they said before leaving George and Lydia, alone in the cabin that had once been Old Man Cooke’s.

  The house phone rang in the middle of breakfast Saturday morning. Carolina was eating her cereal while Gabriela helped Daniel pick the best blueberries out of the container. Mami and Papi were deep in conversation with Uncle Porter and Tía Cuca about houses and apartments.

  Tía Cuca got up to answer the phone. After a moment, she cupped her hand over the receiver. “Porter, it’s for you.”

  “I’ll take it in the other room,” Uncle Porter said, folding his napkin.

  Gabriela stretched, then came over and rested her chin on Carolina’s shoulder. “I’m bored,” she said.

  “You just woke up.”

  “Can you go get your sketchbook and draw me something? I need to be distracted from boredom,” Gabriela said dramatically.

  “I thought you were going to the lake.”

  “That’s not for three hours,” Gabriela whined.

  Daniel scrambled onto the chair next to Carolina. “Yeah!” he piped up. “Draw us something!”

  “Okay,” Carolina said, pushing in her chair. “But just so you know, I’m not some kind of artwork vending machine.”

  “But you are,” Gabriela insisted.

  Carolina grinned and went to grab the sketchbook from her backpack. On her way back to the kitchen table, she faltered. Mami and Papi had joined the kids’ conversation.

  “Have you seen Carolina’s drawings?” Gabriela said.

  “Of course I have,” Mami replied, in an almost-offended tone. “I used to take Caro to her lessons.”

  Carolina hugged the sketchbook tight to her chest, hovering behind Gabriela.

  “She’s been making all these drawings about Puerto Rico.” Gabriela grabbed the last blueberry, tossed it in the air, and caught it in her mouth like a jelly bean. She swallowed. “Yeah, there’s a flamboyán tree and a Cucaracha Martina and everything.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mami murmured.

  Papi turned to Carolina. “Did you finish the flamboyán? Let’s see it, Caro.”

  With one eye still on Mami, Carolina stepped up and laid the sketchbook flat.

  Papi pored over the image. “I remember you sitting on that bench,” Papi said. “You’ve really captured it, Carolinita.”

  Mami stood behind Papi, examining the drawing over his shoulder. “Señora Rivón would be proud,” she determined. “Maybe you could draw something to send to her.”

  “I’d like that,” Carolina said.

  Mami rested her cheek on top of Papi’s head.

  “She used to sit out there all day, my Carolinita,” Mami went on. “She was always drawing.” Mami reached down and rested a polished finger on the red penned-in blossoms of the flamboyán. “I didn’t know you’d been drawing home.” Mami reached out her free arm, and Carolina took the one-armed hug as Dani climbed onto Papi’s lap. “My Carolinita,” Mami said again.

  Uncle Porter came back to the kitchen with his hands in his pockets.

  “Well,” he announced. “That was Lance Rogan. Apparently Lydia has decided to delay the sale of the farm.”

  Mami’s face clouded with concern. “I’m sorry, Porter, I hope—”

  He held up his hands. “I think it’s for the best. She’s still very interested in selling, she just wants to go over the finer points. It turns out she’s had another offer from a young farmer, with some backing from a local conservation group. It might end up being a split sale.” Uncle Porter smiled. “Between us, I’m glad. We all need farmland.”

  As Uncle Porter turned toward the living room, Carolina spoke up.

  “Uncle Porter, wait,” she said. “Do you know who made the offer? What the farmer’s name was?”

  Uncle Porter frowned. “Let me think a minute. Hmmm.”

  Carolina crossed her fingers.

  “Alice? Alicia? Something like that.”

  Carolina thought of flowers in black plastic containers, and of people and places that belonged, the way Jennifer’s elves belonged in the cottage. They clicked.

  Across the kitchen table, Gabriela flashed Carolina the tiniest of thumbs-ups.

  * * *

  —

  Mami drove Carolina to register for middle school the following week, and on the way back, she pulled over just past the main intersection in Larksville. She dug her cell phone out of her purse.

  “Could you call Jennifer to see if she’ll have you over for a little while?”

  Carolina was dumbfounded. “Really?” she finally managed to ask.

  Mami held the phone out. “Dani’s at Ben’s house, and Papi and I want to go look at an apartment. It would be a big help.”

  “An apartment?”

  Mami raised an eyebrow. “Did you want to go see Jennifer?”

  Carolina grabbed the phone. “Yes!” she said, punching in the number. “It’s just—”

  “I trust you,” Mami said simply.

  * * *

  —

  At Jennifer’s house, Fiona was out and Gavin was busy in his studio, so they raced through the woods, laughing for no reason. They hiked to the place where the trail ended, and stopped there for a long while.

  “Should we go look?”

  Carolina hesitated. “What if…?”

  Jennifer nodded. “We don’t know what will happen. Even if Alicia and Lizbeth get part of the farm, if Mr. Rogan gets this part—”

  “He wouldn’t really tear it down?”

  “He might.”

  The girls ran back down the hill without visiting the cottage, and tumbled into the kitchen. They didn’t talk about it again that day.

  * * *

  —

  Mami and Papi liked the apartment, on the second floor of a house right in the center of Larksville, next to the sturdy brick post office. As soon as Mami and Papi had signed the lease, Mami set about, once again, preparing for a move. She folded all their clothing into perfect squares and borrowed the key from the landlord to scrub the floors herself, even though he swore they had been professionally cleaned.

  Mami agreed that Carolina had to return Jennifer’s invitation, so Jennifer came to Tía Cuca and Uncle Porter’s later that week, one day when Gabriela had Alyssa and Jamie there too. Suddenly the house didn’t feel big at all; it burst with people. Jennifer had brought her craft supplies, and she and Carolina spread out on the grass in the yard while Gabriela and her friends lounged on the deck.

  As she glued the skirt onto a miniature fairy, Carolina overheard snippets of the older girls’ conversations.

  “I’m going to convince my dad,” Alyssa was saying. “We’re going to that concert.”

  “But—it’s your dad,” Jamie protested. “He always says—”

  “I don’t care.” Alyssa’s voice changed to a loud and conspiratorial whisper. “If Lydia can stand up to him, then so can I.”

  Carolina leaned back, letting her body settle into the curve of the tree. She picked out a shining bead for the fairy’s crown, and thought that there was, after all, one thing that was just right about Rogan Realty’s brand-new houses: the distance between this tree and that deck, between those lounge chairs and this glorious pile of pipe cleaners and wool roving and special beads. They were together, and they were each their own.

  *
* *

  —

  Their last night at Tía Cuca and Uncle Porter’s, Carolina sat at her desk putting the finishing touches on her first drawing of the bench beneath the flamboyán. It was missing something, so she added another figure, another girl sitting beside her, this one with a long braid. She filled in the bright rubber bands of the girl’s braces with different pens: the rubber bands and the blossoms were the only colors the drawing needed.

  “Caro,” Mami said, poking her head in the door, “we have something for you. It just came.”

  Papi, Daniel, and Gabriela were close behind, and Daniel dropped a parcel, wrapped unevenly in bright green construction paper, into Caro’s lap.

  “I wrapped it,” Daniel said proudly.

  “And Gabriela helped us pick it out,” Mami explained. “She said it was something you needed for the school year.”

  Carolina eyed the parcel in her lap. “But why am I getting anything? I don’t understand.”

  “Mi vida, let’s just say it’s something you’ve been waiting for,” Papi said. “Maybe you’ve even earned it. Lydia and that farmer worked out a deal, did you hear?”

  “Really?” Carolina grinned. “That’s—” she faltered. Did Papi know what she and Jennifer had said to Lydia? After all, Lydia was friends with Uncle Porter and Tía Cuca, she might have told them the story, and they would have told Carolina’s parents. Would her parents be mad that she’d gone off into the woods again?

  “Aren’t you happy?” Papi asked.

  “I think it’s great news.” Carolina looked dubiously at Mami.

  Mami didn’t say anything, didn’t offer approval or disapproval, just the slightest shrug. Maybe she was proud of Caro’s meddling, maybe she was furious, but that, Caro decided right then and there, was for Mami and Mami alone to know. She tore the paper off the package with abandon.

  “Do you like it?

  In Carolina’s lap were three small canvases and a box of new paints. “I love it,” she said.

  “Now you can paint some of the things you’ve been sketching,” Mami said. “I would love to see that flamboyán in full color.”

  Carolina grinned, and after everyone left the room she sat for a long time, holding each paint bottle up to the light one by one, and arranging and rearranging the colors in their case. They were not little-kid paints but real ones. They smelled of home: of Señora Rivón’s studio, and of Jennifer’s house.

  * * *

  —

  There was a hint of cool weather in the air the day Jennifer and Carolina opened the back door to Jennifer’s house and noticed a single bedraggled ribbon on the ground.

  Jennifer stopped on the steps. “What’s that?”

  “It’s one of our Hansel and Gretel markers.” Carolina stooped and picked up the wet ribbon. “But what’s it doing here?”

  Jennifer clapped her hand over her mouth. “Caro, look!”

  Carolina dropped the ribbon and followed Jennifer, who had taken off toward the driveway.

  The driveway was piled with things, and Carolina thought at first that the garage had been emptied, but as she drew closer she saw outlines of objects she recognized.

  Metal chairs with crawling vines, painted a new and brilliant white.

  Yellow curtains cut from sheets, cozy and cheerful.

  And a folded note with tidy handwriting:

  Thank you for the loan of these chairs and curtains, which did wonders to brighten my home. Like any good neighbor, I thought I should return these items once they were no longer needed. They are yours, and I hope you will keep them a good, long time.

  With love,

  Silver Meadows Farm

  P.S. You will think that I have kept the little elves, but I’m sorry to say that they disappeared into the forest. I trust they will find their paths.

  “I guess that means the cottage is really gone,” Carolina said, just as a breeze came and whipped the note out of her fingers. It sailed away, and landed somewhere near the base of Cooke’s Hill, lost among the trees.

  Jennifer picked up one of the yellow curtains. “These would look nice in your new room,” she said to Caro, and pressed the curtains into Carolina’s hands.

  They never found the little elves from the cottage hearth. Every time Carolina saw a flash of hunter green beneath an acorn cap, she thought that she had found one, but on closer inspection, it was always only a deeply colored leaf, and a well-positioned acorn cap.

  A note on the poets…

  In seventh grade, I memorized Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” as an assignment for my favorite English class. I loved the rhythm of the words, and the image of the yellow wood enchanted me. At home, my family shared other works with me—poems by Latin American writers, and poems that Latin Americans have adopted over the years. Poetry weaves its way into how we see the world, and whenever I was confronted with a dilemma, my family offered, in response to Frost’s metaphor of two roads diverging, Machado’s metaphor, which tells us that there is no road, and that we make our paths with our feet. Machado’s wisdom suggests that life isn’t programmed in advance, that change, movement, and endless possible directions are the norm.

  Machado and Frost were contemporaries, and though they never met in real life, I have always linked them. When they are carried jointly, their words remind me that as I navigate decisions, I can draw on the insights of two languages and two cultures. This is a book about a yellow wood, and it is about the bravery of imagining many possible paths—and about reading Robert Frost and Antonio Machado together.

  Luis de León was a sixteenth-century Spanish poet, friar, and professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain. In 1572, he was arrested by the Spanish Inquisition because his translations of biblical texts differed significantly from the norms of his time. University lore has it that when he was released in 1576 and returned to teaching, he began his first lecture with the words “As we were saying yesterday,” suggesting that his years in prison were no more than a brief interruption. I like to think that the poetry he wrote helped him maintain his tranquility. His poetry was not published until decades after his death, but today it is widely available in Spanish. I translated the first stanza of his best-known poem, “Vida retirada” (“Peaceful Life”), but if you are interested in reading more of his poetry in English, look for Elias L. Rivers’s Fray Luis de León: The Original Poems (Grant & Cutler, 1983).

  * * *

  —

  Robert Frost was an American poet who lived from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He was born in California but lived most of his adult life in New England. He also spent periods of time in Florida, in Michigan, and even in England, but it’s his poetry about rural New England that he is best known for today. I am particularly fond of Susan Jeffers’s illustrations of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Dutton, 2001) and the collection Versed in Country Things, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, with photographs by B. A. King (Bulfinch Press, 1996).

  * * *

  —

  Antonio Machado was a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spanish poet. He was born in the city of Seville, in southern Spain, and lived for many years in Castile, in central Spain. The Spanish Civil War broke out toward the end of Machado’s life, and he was evacuated first to the eastern coast of Spain and later to France. Like Frost’s, Machado’s poetry is most associated not with his birthplace but with the place where he spent much of his adulthood—Castile. Machado’s poem about a wake upon the sea, “Caminante, no hay camino” (“Traveler, There Is No Path”), is widely known throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and has been set to music. The song Carolina’s father would have played is “Cantares” by Joan Manuel Serrat. I translated the first stanza of Machado’s poem, and my favorite book showcasing Machado and many other Spanish poets in English is An Anthology of Spanis
h Poetry from Garcilaso to García Lorca, edited by Ángel Flores (Anchor, 1961).

  Acknowledgments

  When I was growing up, summers were about cousins, and while the specifics of Carolina’s life are emphatically fictional, the summers I have spent with my family in New York and in Puerto Rico shaped Carolina’s observations of the world around her. I shared with my Schwiep and González cousins Cuban parents, aunts, and uncles who were loud, fiercely tight-knit, and unrepentantly chismosos, while my Otheguy cousins and I shared summer camps, boat trips, countless hours playing in my grandmother’s yard, and sporadic drawing or sewing lessons from older relatives.

  Our trips to my grandmother’s house in Puerto Rico awakened memories within my parents, and it was there amidst the coquís and the metal rocking chairs of her terraza that they told my siblings and me stories about their childhoods in Cuba, and about what it meant to leave. It was there that I felt closest to the Caribbean, this longed-for place at the heart of my family life. I am grateful to my aunts, uncles, and cousins for sharing this world with me, for teaching me everything from the names of the plants in El Yunque to where my grandmother kept her stash of chocolate Kisses. Children of exiles may be always searching for the lost place, but through my cousins I’ve at least known my parents’ sun and salt water, and above all, I’ve known family ties that transcend distance, culture, and language. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge Amaya Labrador for her careful reading of this manuscript. Amaya is one of those rare first-call kind of people, someone who can resolve whatever you throw her way, and I am beyond lucky to be her cousin.

  I wanted to write a novel about a girl with the Caribbean in her blood, discovering her love of the Hudson Valley, as I did during the time I spent at Hawthorne Valley Farm. I deeply appreciate the welcome and community I was shown by everyone there, especially Safina Alessandra and Hilary Corsun. Thank you for the meals, hikes, crash pads, and, most of all, for answering my endless barrage of questions about farming, crafts, and conservation. Silver Meadows is an imaginary place, but I hope I have captured in these pages some of the wonder and love of the outdoors that you have imparted to me.