The hedges were tall and mostly bare except for a few small green leaves on top. There were gaps between the leafless branches so the backyard next door could be seen in full view. Mary peeked through the branches and saw a garden in its early stages--rows and stakes and green stems and leaves popping up from the ground. And on the far side was a row of tulips just beginning to blossom. There were yellows and purples and pinks, but the one that caught Mary̕s eye was a red one on the end. Its closed petals were like velvet and its strong blue-green stalk and leaves cradled it tenderly. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“MairEEEE!“ her mother yelled from the kitchen window, “DINNER TIME.”

Mary ran into the house obediently with a vision of the flower in her head.

For the next week, immediately after school, Mary went straight to the hedges to behold the beautiful emerging tulip that she had discovered. She watched each tiny increment of change and, when the flower had fully blossomed, she felt an ache in her heart. The next day, in an impulsive explosion of energy and excitement, Mary searched for the largest opening in the hedges. When she found it, she slowly placed one leg through and then the other, biting her lip against the pain in her arms and legs from the scratching hedge branches. The tall deck in the neighbor's backyard blocked their back windows and prevented them from seeing her trespassing. Her heart was beating fast as she nimbly crept through the garden directly to the red tulip.

She hesitated in front of the precious flower for an instant taking in its glory from a close vantage point. Then, in a determined and almost impulsive movement, like a sparrow yanking a worm from the ground while keeping a keen eye on its nest, she snapped the tulip off at the bottom of the stem, her eyes darting around her to be sure no one saw what she was doing. Her hands trembling, she raced carefully through the garden, and plunged back through the hedges, protecting the flower with one gently curved hand. Once back in her own yard, Mary breathed more slowly, put her face into the tulip's opening, and inhaled deeply. The scent was intoxicating.

Going into the back door of her house and up the back stairway, Mary made it to her bedroom without being noticed. She placed the flower gingerly on her bed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water to hold her precious treasure. Mary put her face directly over the flower's opening and inhaled deeply once again to experience the flower's potent and heavenly scent, and placed it in the homemade vase, observing its yellow and black markings inside, more evidence of the flower's wonder and value. She placed it on her desk where she could steal glances at it, and then began working on her fifth grade geography homework, glancing up at the tulip from time to time, smiling ear to ear at her acquisition.

After a while, she heard footsteps outside her bedroom in the hallway.

“MairEEEE!” her mother yelled, and Mary's bedroom door immediately opened.

Mary gasped, not having expected her mother to arrive at home from work this early; she had hoped to find a suitable hiding place for the flower before her mother got home.

“Where did you get THAT?” her mother shrieked.

Looking down at the floor, Mary answered, “from the next door neighbor's yard.”

“You HAVE to give it back!” her mother screamed. "Go over there right now and give it to them! I hope they'll accept it now that you've damaged it. What a terrible thing for you to do! To steal a flower from our neighbors! I'm so disappointed in you!" Mary looked at the floor while her mother talked. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach. When her mother left the room, Mary immediately grabbed the glass with the flower in it, tears falling from her eyes.

Slowly Mary made her way outside into the cool afternoon. She nervously trudged along on the slate sidewalk, noticing the fire hydrant, its red base and yellow top. The bright red color mimicked the color of the tulip, but lacked that smooth, soft, velvet texture of the flower.

Mary arrived at the neighbor's door in a few minutes. Ringing the doorbell, she held the flower-filled glass in her two trembling hands. When the door opened, Mary's heart sank and she said in a shaky voice, “I took this from your yard. I'm sorry.” The neighbor smiled, put her hand to her chest and said, "Oh my goodness!" She then added, "You can keep that tulip, we have so many and we can hardly enjoy them since we can't see them very well out of the back windows. We planned to give your family a few anyway."

Mary could hardly believe what she was hearing. Tears fell down her cheeks in streams. "Thank you Mrs. Gentry," Mary said, her voice cracking. The spring came back into her step as she left the neighbor's house. She brought the flower back home and held it high, smiling widely. This time she did not sneak into her room. She went straight to the kitchen and presented the flower to her mother as a gift, a perfect red tulip.

My grandmother spent her entire life trying to escape her life.

Her secret weapon for escape, which she kept tucked like a magic key pressed against her breast, was the promise that, if all else failed, one day she would die and pass from this world.

I always thought my grandma resembled one of the heroines in my novels—someone misplaced in the wrong dimension or time, a tragic figure who couldn’t understand why she had been dropped into an unacceptable and confusing situation.

Because my grandmother just did not belong in a world of poverty and sorrow—and that is exactly where she found herself her entire life.

Grandma was born in 1922 to a family in Ironton, Ohio, that was wealthy and educated, consisting of politicians and business owners. But grandma’s father did the time-honored, unthinkable cliché: He married a beautiful young woman who lived on the wrong side of the Ohio River, a Kentucky native from a poor family. He became the proverbial black sheep of the family because of the marriage.

Tragically, grandma’s mother died of pneumonia when she was only thirty-four years old after giving birth to twin daughters. One twin died within hours. One twin was given away to someone who, unlike my great-grandfather, could care for a newborn.

Grandma was only two years old when her mother died. She spent her childhood being passed among her affluent relatives who, she said, treated her like hired help.

“Cousin Drusilla would sit in a chair reading a book while I ironed the family’s clothes—all those tiny pleats on the skirts and dresses. I hated pleats. I wished that I could lounge around all day reading.”

A modern-day Cinderella who, rather than finding her Prince Charming, encountered, instead, an abusive pedophile who married her after she became pregnant at twelve years old.

By the time Grandma was twenty-four, she already had given birth to nine children, losing three in infancy—ghosts who haunted her for the rest of her life.

I don’t know the details of how Grandma met my grandfather, who was ten years older than she was.

Why did her father allow a 22-year-old man to hang around his prepubescent daughter? Was he a friend of the family? Was Grandma raped? Was she just looking, in the theme of her life, for an escape?

Grandma only released certain details about those early years, years shrouded in secrecy and guilt. She refused to speak about things she found sad or uncomfortable, focusing instead on how she had survived.

Much of the story of Grandma’s life was about survival, escaping one mishap to wind up in another. From losing her mother to dropping out of school to being a victim of violent abuse, Grandma survived.

Although Grandma’s formal schooling ended in the eighth grade, she was the smartest person I knew. She loved to read and draw. She could spell anything—even words she had never encountered. She used to enchant my sister and me by reciting poetry and risqué ditties that she remembered from her youth:

"Tattle tale, tattle tale,

Hanging on the bull’s tail.

When the bull begins to pee,

We shall have a cup of tea."

I often wondered if Grandma made up some of those poems she sang to us. I knew she had learned “The Village Blacksmith” by Longfellow in school, but the others had no reference. Poetry and books had always been an escape for her as well.

"Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands."

Grandma’s interest in poetry and reading led me down the same path of books and words even before I started kindergarten. I incorporated early the belief that I, like Grandma, could slip into other worlds using stories.

My favorite book when I was in first grade was a collection of children’s poetry called "All the Silver Pennies". Here I encountered poems about the fairies and gnomes and pixies that I so staunchly believed existed just out of sight. Grandma and I read the poems over and over. I would always return to the phrase written on the first page of the manuscript, the phrase that generated the title of the book:

"You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland."

I wanted desperately to disappear into Fairyland. At only six or seven years old, I had already been indoctrinated into grandma’s philosophy of escaping to enchanted, other places—places that were anywhere but where I currently was.

When Grandma told me she had an actual silver penny, I was ecstatic.

Tucked away in one of her old purses, purses that smelled of cigarettes and faded perfume, among black-and-white photos and letters from Uncle Donnie’s tours of Vietnam, Grandma drew forth a silver penny. Minted in the 1940s to aid the war effort’s use of copper, the “silver” pennies were actually made of nickel. They were, however, shiny metallic silver in color.

When Grandma slipped the penny into my outstretched fingers, I knew Fairyland was only a whisper of longing away.

“Aunt Lulie used to have an entire jar of silver pennies setting on the counter in her grocery store.”

Imagine an entire jar filled with magic escape tickets to Fairyland, I remember thinking. Why hadn’t Grandma used them long ago?

From silver pennies I progressed to other escape hatches from dreary reality to the exciting lives I read about in the books I devoured.

I was forever trying to discover secret worlds at the back of closets. We didn’t have any Narnia-era wardrobes, but I assumed a closet would suffice. I spent a great deal of my childhood immersed in a jumble of shoes with freshly laundered clothing swaying against the top of my head.

From closets, I proceeded to contests.

I entered lots of contests for Grandma, carefully printing out her name and address on entry forms for all-expenses-paid trips to Ireland.

Oh, Ireland. It was the land where all the fairies and magical creatures from my books resided. It was also Grandma’s ancestral home, a place her father had talked about often, playing sad songs on his violin, invoking memories of washerwomen and emerald fields, memories of a mother country he had never visited.

I imagined that if Grandma won the contest she would, of course, take me along with her. But looking back now, that seems highly implausible.

My grandmother couldn’t drive. She had never in her whole life had a driver’s license.

Grandma had no income or job. She hadn’t worked since her days as a waitress at a small truck stop, where all of her money went to provide necessities for her six living children.

The only savings account with Grandma’s name on it was shared with my aunt. She was dependent on her children for everything: food, clothes, shelter. She lived with one of my aunts or my dad her entire life after refusing to stay with my grandfather after their children were adults.

In return for their support, Grandma watched her children’s children, cleaned their houses, mowed their lawns, and did their laundry—similar to her childhood experiences with her wealthy relatives.

She wistfully wished for a little home of her own.

So how would Grandma have managed, if she had won the contests I entered her in, to take a 10-year-old girl on a tour of Ireland?

Grandma’s utter dependence made me desperately independent. There was such a feeling of freedom when I obtained my driver’s license and was able to take Grandma for rides down the rural roads near our home.

I couldn’t imagine spending my life having to ask someone to take me somewhere, to not even be able to go shopping alone. Always, there was someone with Grandma.

That dependence made Grandma depressed.

Grandma’s favorite phrase, when she was disconsolate or wanted my sister and me to imagine that life could be different, was, “Let’s run away and join the circus.”

Even when I was in college, I would find that phrase circling in my brain and slipping from my mouth when I had exams or had endured an especially rough day.

“Let’s just run away and join the circus,” I would tell my boyfriend and eventual husband. He never understood the allure.

What exactly my sister, Grandma, and I would have done in the circus is beyond me. We had no unique “circusy” skills. No high-wire training or acrobatic talents. Perhaps Grandma could have been the circus cook, my sister and I clowns or ticket takers at the tent flap.

While she was not suited for circus life, juvenile Grandma was an excellent cook. I never tasted her homemade biscuits or pies, however. Her youth was spent cooking for an abusive husband who demanded dinner promptly on the table at a certain time.

Because of those desolate cuisine recollections, Grandma was anxious in the kitchen. She would start shaking if she was required to make anything more complicated than apple butter-topped toast or sandwiches.

For most of my life, Grandma was depressed and sick, seemingly, to me, on the verge of dying.

In her later years Grandma descended into mental illness, losing touch with reality until she was placed on medications that wiped out most of her short-term memory and caused her to remember her past in sweet, rose-tinged hues.

That, too, was a way of escaping her life.

For a time in high school, when Grandma refused to get out of bed following my uncle’s death (her fourth child lost), I was obsessed with suicide, writing stories and watching movies in which the main characters took their own lives.

In literature class we read the poem “Resumé” by Dorothy Parker. I copied it from my English lit book and posted it on our refrigerator.

I think now how freaked out people would be by a teenager hanging a poem about suicide on the door of the family refrigerator. My parents read the poem (I was always placing quotes and sayings on the refrigerator door), but just thought I was being my quirky, moody self. Grandma thought the poem was funny:

"Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live."

Reading over the words as an adult, I realize that I actually was not hoping to escape my life like Grandma. I wanted to live. I wanted the adventure that was my life.

The words that my sister and I chose for Grandma’s headstone came from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child”:

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand."

On the front of the headstone, we glued the silver penny Grandma had given me as a child. Etched above the penny were the words, “You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland.”

Even Grandma’s headstone reflected her search for an escape. Finally, she found what she had been longing to achieve.

While Grandma taught me to use words and books as my vehicle for fleeing the heartbreaks of my life, I have never felt like a displaced traveler, a “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Grandma did, however. She finally used her magic powers to push past the fur coats in the back of the wardrobe, and, with the smell of pine in her nose, venture forth past the light post and into another world.

I hope she is where she is supposed to be, happy and no longer searching.

THE END

For as long as anyone can remember, the land has been plagued by an unending storm. This great tempest obliterates everything in its path as it aimlessly traverses the world.

My people call it “God’s Wrath,” for we believe it to be God’s punishment for our sins. The only place where we find shelter is at the core of the disaster, the eye of the storm. And so, we nomads follow in the steps of this giant.

No one knows what is beyond God’s Wrath, only that its footprints leave wastelands behind. Our only hope for survival is to keep moving. This storm can take us at any moment. For us, nothing is permanent.

As soon as we get the safest distance away from the back of the storm, we set up a rudimentary camp. After all, we have to be able to collapse it quickly when the storm catches up.

Everyone in the clan has a job. If you are not setting up camp or taking care of the mounts, then you must be looking for supplies: food, water, wood, or anything else that can assist us in our travels. Of course it is difficult to procure anything since we are lucky to find anything the storm has missed.

Just as I had finished scavenging for any remaining edible plants, I heard my father yelling:

“Eleina! You have to hurry back now!”

“What is it, father? What happened?” My father rarely spoke in such a tone. Panic had already crept into me, flowing down my spine like a trickle of cold water.

“We miscalculated the storm’s direction. It’ll be here soon. We don’t have any time to spare. We have to get going this instant!”

Without any hesitation, we ran back to camp. The other clan members had already begun to dismantle our camp. The path God’s Wrath took was often hard to predict, so we had all gotten used to quickly responding.

“Lissa! Lissa! Where are you!” Ms. Corren’s voice rang out as she scurried throughout camp looking for her daughter. Lissa has always been like my sister, so I, too, began to look for her. Hopefully, she had not gone off to far. Lissa is only a child, and she could get lost easily.

“Do you know where you last saw her?”

“I let her go off to the riverbank earlier to go play,” Ms. Corren said in a shaking voice. The expression she wore was not unlike the one she had when she lost her husband just a few migration periods ago.

If I was not mistaken, the river was back in the same direction as the oncoming storm. Ms. Corren and I hurriedly climbed up the hill behind camp and confirmed our fears.

A kilometer away lay a winding river. Lissa’s unmistakable blond hair poked out from the surrounding grassy field. Ms. Corren immediately ran down the hill, and just as I thought about chasing after her, something pulled on my collar.

“Don’t go after them,” my father said grimly. “Can’t you see the walls of God’s Wrath beyond the river? If we don’t leave now, it’ll devour us.”

“But what about Ms. Corren and Lissa? How can we just leave them?” There was no way I was going to lose them. We already lose so much because of this relentless giant, but now it wants to take our lives, too?

“Lissa is all Ms. Corren has left. You know what happened to her husband two years ago,” my father said sadly. “If she loses Lissa too, she’ll have nothing to live for.”

I argued and argued. We had to get them. We had to save them. We could not just leave them to die. But my protests went unheard.

“Eleina, listen. Ms. Corren knows what it means if she goes after her Lissa, but she chose to anyway. Don’t you think this is what she wants: to be with her daughter until the end?”

I knew he was right, but I could not accept it. I did not want to lose them. I collapsed onto my knees as I cried out.

My father picked me up and put me over his shoulder as he walked toward camp. I kicked, screamed, and cried to no avail. I could see Ms. Corren with her daughter by the riverbank, and I could swear they seemed like they were smiling. I knew they were already long gone.

I secluded myself under the blankets in the carriage as we drove away from the tempest. The roars of the raging storm, the neighs of our trotting horses, and even my toneless cries faded into silence.

For us nomads, nothing is permanent.

I'm an axe in a world of water balloons. The balloons smother me but I don't dare to move. They break so easily. Once they do they're gone and all I'm left with is rust growing on my skin.

I'm an ellipse in a world of squares. I never fit anywhere. I wobble around hoping to find something round. Squares don't wobble. Why do I?

I'm a migrating swan that got lost. I fly with the cranes and the swallows to find my faraway home. I mess up their formations, I know that. It's a long way and spring is ending.