Life in the Cheese Drawer

write about some big weather you experienced.
one of my early summers was hot and dry, and the rain held off long throughout the summer months. i remember my elders talking about the crops and how no rain will affect the corn in the fields, their green stalks already taller than i. in the evenings, while i ran around outside through stubbly grass, the sun continued to beat down, low and orange in the sky as i stared out over the field on the north side of the farm. the winds blew across the field from the pig farm, from across our field and again the fields of my aunt and uncle. days and days like this.
then one afternoon the sky turned greenish yellow, and humidity hung in the air so thick i felt like i could stick out my tongue to get it wetter than it was in my mouth. my dad hung around outside on the porch, walking the driveway, hiking out to the edge of the field, even though it was not his corn. my mom turned on the tv and watched the local channel to see if there would be a tornado warning.
eventually the sirens rang, alerting us that a tornado had been spotted. by this time rain had started to dot the dust in our gravel driveway, making large, dark spots out of light tan. soon the spots melted together and the driveway was no longer dust.
my mom hustled me down to the cellar, which was in the back-back room underneath a piece of floorboards that swung up to reveal crumbling cement steps that led to a dark, damp hole in the ground with one small window on the east-facing side. i remember seeing my dad still watching the outside from the doorway in the room as i descended into the hole.  my mom went back up to get liz – a baby – and came back down, now with my dad, and the long, heavy cellar door came down on her head as she was making her way down the steps.
we waited in the cellar, which had a lantern and a weather radio in it as far as i can remember, until the threat of tornado passed.
by this time, my uncle squire had come out to the farm, and he, my dad, and i got in my dad’s orange and white pickup in the rain, drove the short distance to the edge of the cornfield, and watched the rain come down, windshield wipers steady against the rain. afterwards, one of the wallace men claimed to have seen the corn actually grow.

smooth, cool, drippy ice cream. in the dead of summer, those 95-degree days when the humidity is so high that your sweat can’t even ooze out of you pores because it has no where to go, the best place to be during the eveningtime, after supper has settled in your stomach and your tongue is craving something sweet, is dairy queen.
nowadays i get a hot fudge sundae, hfcs-laden as it is, but back when i was small, and trips to the DQ meant driving across austin to the west-side of town (the posh side), usually funded by my aunt colettie, i got a small vanilla ice cream cone dipped in chocolate shell. the DQ was small, and normally so packed that we would take our cones outside and sit on the hard, plasticated metal picnic tables that left diamond shaped red marks on the backs of my legs from sitting on them.
before the ice cream melted, you had to lick it up, starting with the tiny droplets of white ice cream creeping out the pores in the chocolate shells. starting at the top, you bit into the  shell, taking a chunk of the white ice cream with it, and suddenly your mouth was quelled; the coolness slipped down your throat and brought a shiver of delight in the middle of the hot. but you couldn’t dwell too long on the feeling. you had to beat the heat.
licking along the top of the cone often to lap up the ice cream, you slowly ate away all the shell, leaving a small mound of ice cream atop the beige cone, always one step ahead of the heat. sometimes you just licked at it. sometimes you bit a chunk of ice cream off the top, leaving teeth marks in their wake. eventually you were down to the cone, and it was pretty smooth sailing from there (unless, of course, you waited TOO long and the cone started disintegrating).
crunching your way into the cone, you eat your way to the bottom, where the criss cross of cone helped keep disintegration at bay. usually at this point the ice cream was gone – the shivers had subsided and even thought the heat was still heavy, you were a little less hot with the cool ice cream in your belly. at this point you had two choices – throw the nub of remaining cone in the trash or jam it in your mouth, drying out the last remnants of sweetness still hiding in crevices. usually i couldn’t throw it away – it felt like a disservice to the cone.
sticky fingers, sticky mouths, but sated, it was time to peel the backs of bare legs from red plastic and back into the reality of heat. it was a short respite, but it was a respite.

the first concrete memory i associate with a bike is when i got my bigwheel for christmas when i was 2 or 3. it was a pink and purple bigwhel that actually lasted quite a while, as myself and my siblings all used it, rotating our little legs  to try to get the hard plastic get a grip on the gravel in our driveway, until it was a faded greyish white plastic remnant no one could fit into anymore.
another early memory of a bike was riding down our long driveway to get the mail with my dad on his bike. his bike had a metal carrier on the back, and he would set me on it, telling me to keep my legs up and clear of the back wheel. i remember it was a hazy day – it may have been sunset, with the low sun shining yellow-orange on our east-west road. then i remember a mess, because i hadn’t upheld my end of the bargain and my foot got caught in the spokes of the back wheel. we went to the ER, where i don’t remember a lot besides bright overhead lights. i didn’t break anything.
the rest of my bike time is relatively fuzzy. i know i got my first two-wheeler for christmas, but i don’t remember it. there were training wheels, then there was one training wheel, then there were none. i know it was pink, and at some point i put those little brightly colored plastic spoke beads on my wheels that made me not only cool, but also added a musical element to tooling around the driveway. i had an old brown secondhand bike for a while after i outgrew my pink bike, and after the barn burned down (for which i was NOT responsible! woo!), one of the first things my dad and i did was go to the bike shop and buy me a new bike. it was the early 90s, right around the time road bikes were on the way out and mountain bikes were on the way in. i remember the bike guy trying to convince me to get the mountain bike he made me read the full guide here in hopes that I would jump on board. unfortunately i was not a pioneer, and i got a nice, sleek, purple road bike to be like all my friends. after about 3-4 years of riding it, i never rode the road bike again (much, i think, to my dad’s chagrin).
a few memorable bike events:
1. the catholic school walkathon/bikeathon was held every year, and my friends and i would bike the 12-mile loop around the eastern edge of austin to raise money for catholic schools.
2. one hot summer day, we were planning on going swimming, and it must have been at marty handsome’s house, because liz and i were biking eastward from our house with plastic garbage bags with a towel and change of clothes dangling from our handlebars. somehow my plastic bag whipped into the spokes (those dang wheels!) and stopped my bike cold. i flipped over the front handlebars and nailed my chin on the asphalt.
3. many trips to southeastern minnesota were had to take a trip on the root river bike trail, seemingly spending all day doing so.

tell me everything you remember about kindergarten.
the kindergarten room at queens was unlike all the other classrooms in the private catholic school. it was by itself on the second-and-a-half floor along with the reading room for grades 1-5. there was a short stairway taken up from the 5th and 6th grade classrooms, and you were in kindergarten domain. it was a green room, i remember, large and cut up into sections by dark-trimmed large archways like you see in older homes. there was the small corner cut off from the rest of the room for reading, another for playtime, and a semicircle of small desks with small chairs for when we learned our ABCs. and can’t forget the statue of the virgin mary, around which every morning we said our prayers.
but the mainstay of the room was sr. brian. i had no particular beef with the teacher of the kindergarten class, other than she seemed to make a lot of people cry more than any other teacher did. one time i was humming while i was putting my ABC blocks in order, and she told me to quit humming. i don’t know why a kindergarten teacher would discourage humming in children, but there you have it.
we hatched a butterfly in kindergarten. i don’t know who it was, but someone found a cocoon, and we put it in a jar to watch its transformation into a monarch.
our kindergarten bags came to us before we started school. they were simple, made out of cloth with a design on the front and our name, just big enough to carry the few sheets of paper needed for kindergarten homework. mine was light pink.
then there was the rivalry between me and nicki bibus. she was at the beginning of the morning kindergarten line, and i was at the end. because we rotated leaders in the line, when she got stuck at the end, she was behind me. and for some reason she started literally picking on me. don’t as me why – maybe she didn’t like my face. anyway, i ratted on her because i was sick of the picking. sr. brian made us shake hands underneath the virgin mary. and guess what? the picking became worse – who knew, right?

i remember my aunt colette coming from rochester to austin on the weekends. when i was young, she would stay at my aunt kathleen’s house in the small office area painted a warm peachy red color, its small, high windows letting in little light. there was a pull-out couch, cream with neutral, nubby stripes running down the cushions, that pulled out into a bed little larger than a twin. friday nights i would spend with colettie, cuddled up as little spoon to her big spoon, and fall asleep as she ran her hand over my ear, smoothing my brown hair back from my face.
my mom has a crimson suit, or had, i should say, as it now belongs to my aunt rae, with gold buttons running down the front, high collar, and long sleeves. she called it her power suit, and when she wore it, we all knew that something big was going to happen. because it was the 80s when she donned the bright, richly colored suit, she was going to a meeting that required some presence and obvious power from a female in a male-dominated field. the brilliant suit worked for her on more than one occasion.
thursdays and sundays spent in the cities at the gay 90s always resulted in throbbing music pulsating into my head. if i have early onset hearing loss, i blame the 90s. outside the club, all was quiet, but closer to the doors, the thrumming beat of the bass got louder and louder until we were inside, our bodies throwing themselves onto the dancefloor where techno and electronic music blasted from large, black speakers.
everyone looked forward to the 2nd grade teacher at queen of angels, mrs. royce. word was, in first grade, that she could turn her eyelids inside out, and that was enough to get any 6-year-old excited. she had straight, frizzy brown hair, a long face, and looking back she seemed rather tomboyish. her defining feature, those inside-out eyelids, were what kept her reputation as an easy-going teacher alive.
let me tell you about the best chicken i’ve ever had. last week (yes, it was only last week), i went to chester’s in downtown rochester with my cousins and aunt. it had snowed heavily two days before and downtown was still a slushy mess, and to top it off, it was 5 p.m., rush hour, so finding a parking space was close to nil. after walking through the chilly march weather, we were seated in the “outdoor” space of chester’s (actually in the galleria mall, not in the restaurant). i ordered rotisserie chicken, hoping that it was worth the $17 price tag. and NOMG, it was. five stars – would eat again.
i have always been freaked out by thunderstorms. my mom attributes it to some violent storms leading to having to spend some time in the cellar in the house in austin, not a pretty place. since nate’s started working nights, i’ve grown to hate night storms. the thrum of the rain against the windows wakes me up, and if it’s summertime and the windows are open, i rush through the house slamming windows shut. then i curl up in bed, blankets pulled snugly around me, waiting for the strikes of thunder that shake walls and rattle my brain. if i’m lucky, i have a warm kitty curled up next to my head, but i would rather have someone holding my hand when the lightning streaks and those violent cracks of thunder hit my ears.
smells i remember: cut grass, tree sap, lake, christmas tree, baking chocolate chip cookies, springtime on a farm – melting manure, lilacs, library books, printer toner, cut wood in the black hills.

i remember crisp fall days, walking to my dad’s aunt mary’s house from school in my blue and green plaid uniform with shorts underneath, swishing my tennis shoes through the fallen leaves. i remember chalk lines on the blacktop playground, standing in line to have my turn at foursquare, hoping against hope that i would end up i the #1 spot. i remember drawing the same square with a stick in the gravel dirt driveway, always getting the #1 spot because i played against my siblings, all younger than i. i remember the front yard of the austin house, the cement slab steps leading to a front door no one used, a small roof over it anchored by white pillars. i remember summer evenings my dad sitting on the cement steps, sometimes my mom joining us, and him telling us each where to race to ( all different dependent on age and ability), lining up, waiting for GO, putting every ounce of energy into a short run, slapping a tree, then running back, hoping the length of my older legs would outrun the speed of liz’s legs. i remember going to bed with the sun still up, hearing the yells and shouts of the neighbor kids, wondering why i had to sleep. i remember twilight, watching the fireflies slowly blink into existence, one, then all suddenly and all at once. i remember catching the blinky bugs and watching as my dad smeared the butts over his shirt, giving his shirt a fluorescent glow where the goo stuck. i remember the length of the yard, thinking it was the longest piece of yard ever, the short hill in the driveway a mountain, the trek down to the bus an endeavor likened to mt. everest. i remember coming home from school and tearing up the driveway, especially in springtime with report cards in my bag. i remember trees tall and towering, grass that never seemed to brown, days that never seemed to end.