Indiana Kissed Me Goodbye

Indiana kissed me goodbye when I left. Never had a thing like that happen. Not to this day.

My dysfunctional parents decided to move us back to Southern California, after getting us all worked up about moving to Indiana two years previously. They decided to do that after first figuring out a way to squander all of their money in Indiana first.

Good going, Mom and Dad.

It was late spring. My parents had decided on a trip to the lake for our last weekend in Indiana. Uncharacteristically, Mom went. The lake they chose was the lake right behind our Indiana elementary school, the place where I’d found that salamander at recess under that rock, the only salamander I’d ever caught in my life. There aren’t any salamanders where we came from—where we’re going back to now—so I was showing everyone. They thought I was weird. Mrs. Fay said I should let it go. Of course I was going to let it go. But I was from some other planet to those Indiana kids, because to them it was just a salamander. So what?

This lake was one of scores and scores of small, natural lakes in the region. In California, we’d go to the beach; in Indiana, you go to the lake. So here we were. Our last weekend, and we were finally doing an Indiana thing as a whole family.

It felt a lot like a trip to the beach, too. Me and my brother were in our swimming trunks. Dad was in his cut-off pants for swimming shorts. Mom sat on shore with my baby brother, but also because she hates the water. Whenever she wasn’t saying anything, it was fun.

When you first walk in the water, it starts to go from blue to clear all around you, as you start to step in and go deeper. I got to where the water came up to my ten-year-old waist, and then, about a thousand identical tiny fish swam up to my bare legs and started kissing them. It was a whole school of them, all taking turns kissing my legs. Somehow, even then, I knew this was a thing you could never get to happen in Southern California, not in a million years.

The wildlife in California was always so much more standoffish. Not Indiana animals. From birds flying right in front of your car, to fish kissing you on your legs, to fish always biting your hook, Indiana’s more plentiful animals were so much less wary of humans in general.

I could see these silvery fish swimming all about my legs and I could feel them kissing me. It looked like a thousand little aquarium fish. It felt like little nibbles on my skin, and their nibbles felt like hundreds of tiny butterfly kisses on the skin of my legs.

We were going back to California. We were leaving Indiana for good. And Indiana was saying goodbye. The fish were saying it. They were saying it on behalf of the fireflies and the luna moths and the nightcrawlers that couldn’t make it because they only come out at nighttime; the fish were saying it for the spotted salamanders and the striped salamanders and the mottled salamanders under all the rocks that also come out only at nighttime; the fish were saying it for the birds that got killed on the front of our car and the red foxes that only climbed onto neighbors’ roofs in town, but disappeared out here completely because they knew my Uncle Curt was hunting for them, but there in town, he wasn’t allowed to shoot one. He could get in trouble.