Watermelon Summer (5 page)

    "Family reunion" probably wasn't really the right
word for what I'd landed in the middle of.  The schedule that had
been thrust into my hand by an excited eleven-year-old (possibly a
relation, but who knew?) proclaimed that this was the Tenth Annual
Viking Festival and Softball Tournament.  Planned events
included a river flotilla, underground cookery, raiding and
plundering, an official ball game (and unofficial "games we just
made up"), dog shows, and barn dance.  Under "Time Line," the
organizers had explained that "Vikings kinda scoff at schedules,"
but a rough time of day was listed for each event, including "recovery and further
revelry" for Sunday.

 

    Since I was still fighting off jet lag, I'd slept
late, and by the time I woke up, Kat was gone from the car where
she'd spent the night.  This is just the kind of situation
where my usual MO was to pull out a novel and hide in my tent until
someone I knew turned up, but I had to use the bathroom, and after
finding the latrine, the sound of singing drew me deeper into the
crowd.

 

    The source of the sound turned out to be a dozen
people ranging in age from
middle-schoolers to long-bearded adults.  They were sitting in a
circle, intent on the music, but one looked up long enough to motion me
to join them.  The music
didn't stop as the circle made way for another participant, but when
the current song drifted to a close, the woman who had beckoned me in
explained that we were singing rounds, and not to worry—they'd be
sure to start the next one with a teaching round.  So, for my sake,
we sang the ditty several times all together while people drifted in to
join the circle (and a few singers wandered away), and before I knew
it, I was singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in a round...backwards.

 

    The rounds got more complicated, but also more
beautiful, as the day progressed.  I was a bit light-headed from
lack of breakfast, and maybe that's why I suddenly felt embraced by this
crowd of strangers, rather than terrified of them?  No matter why,
when the last song ended, I didn't retreat immediately in search of
Kat, but instead turned and introduced myself to the woman I'd spoken
with earlier.

 

    "I know exactly who you are," she said, her face
curling up into a wrinkled smile.  "You must be Glen's youngest
daughter.  Am I right?"

 

    "How did you know?" I asked, intrigued that this
woman was familiar enough with my father to suss out our
relationship.  After all, I didn't share his last name, so she must
have been going on something physical—the color of my eyes,
maybe, or the way my nose turned up at the end.  I had no clue,
having never even seen a photo of my bio-dad.  "Is he
here?  Or maybe my oldest sisters are?  Kat brought me to the
Viking Festival so I could meet them."

 

    "I'm afraid neither Angela nor Jessica made it this
year," Susan told me.  "But, look, you should come have lunch with
my family and you can pick my brains about anything you want."

 

 

 

    When I woke up that morning, I'd checked my cell
phone and seen that I had plenty of bars (unlike at Greensun), and I
knew I should excuse myself now to call my mother.  She was
probably worried sick about me, even though I'd explained on the drive
down from the airport that I wouldn't be able to call her while I was on
the farm.  We'd resolved to write letters instead, and I knew that her
promised parcel containing empty envelopes and stamps (so I could write
back) was probably in the Greensun mailbox at this very instant. 
Wouldn't it make her day to get a call instead?

 

    And yet....  Here I was at a Viking Festival
(and Softball Tournament), and I was feeling decidedly piratical. 
Not that I was going to raid and pillage, but maybe for once I wouldn't
worry too much about whether my mother was (in turn) worrying about
me.  So I let Susan draw me away to her campsite, which appeared to
be empty, except for a kid (presumably Susan's
grandson) who handed me a
chocolate bar from his nest under the covered top of a pickup-truck
bed.

 

    "I recognized you because you look just like
Angela," Susan explained as she handed me an egg-salad sandwich on
homemade, whole-wheat bread to go with my chocolate bar.  She went on to explain how my father (with Angela and
Jessica's mother in tow) came down to Kentucky from Pennsylvania in the late
1960s as an Appalachian Volunteer.  "Your father is my age, you
know," she explained, clearly aware I was doing the mental math and
realizing my mother was probably in diapers at that time.  I'd
known my bio-dad was twenty years Mom's senior, but didn't quite grok
how
old
that made him until I started peering at Susan's lined face.

 

    In Susan's story, Glen was a combination hippie and
social-reform crusader.  In one breath, she mentioned how he'd gotten into
a car accident while stoned and barefoot, but then in the next breath, she mentioned how hard he'd worked
to help his coal-mining neighbors find support for black lung. 
When Glen bought Greensun with money gifted him by his parents, Susan
(another Appalachian Volunteer) was living just down the road in a tiny
house with no electricity or running water, and her landlord soon kicked
her out when he saw who Susan was hanging out with.  Glen let her
move into the Greensun farmhouse with him and his family, charging no
rent in exchange for Susan's help with his two young daughters.

 

    "You have to take what Kat tells you with a grain of
salt," my informant warned.  "She's understandably bitter that her
father was never a part of her life, but Glen didn't have a harem, as she likes
to describe the women who ended up living at Greensun in those early
years.  He was 100% in love with his wife, and he had a vision that
we could help the Appalachian people, our own little third world right
in the middle of the prosperous United States.  Anyone who was
willing to join in the fight was worthy of his protection, and his
protection generally meant a mattress on the floor in the kids' room.

 

    "But then the Appalachian Volunteers organization fell apart, the
money started to dry up, and we all got sucked back into the real
world," Susan finished, the nostalgia evident in her voice when she
talked about those youthful days.  "Glen's first wife left him and
took the kids, and the rest of us drifted away too.  I don't really
know much about what happened to your family after that, although I see your older
sisters from time to time at events like this.  In fact, I see one
now."

 

    I looked where Susan was pointing and noticed Kat
walking toward us through the crowd.  She was clearly searching for
something, and her face lit up when she saw me.  "Forsythia! 
There you are!  We've got to go," she hollered as soon as our eyes met, and I clambered to
my feet.  My sandwich—and the story—were done, but I
didn't feel quite ready to step out of the 1960s (and Susan's life).

 

    Susan seemed to understand what I was feeling because
she clasped one of my hands between her two, the older woman's papery skin feeling
comforting against my own.  "Don't worry, Forsythia, I'm not going
to disappear.  I'll see you at the Greensun meeting next month, and
if you need me in the meantime, let me program my number into your
phone."

 

    Her words startled a breathless laugh out of
me.  Susan seemed to come from an entirely different era, and I
wasn't prepared for her to be so adept at using cell phones. 
(Maybe more adept than I was—smartphone technology was new to me as
of this trip, and I was still struggling to figure out what all the
menus did.)

 

    "You'll have to walk to Cell Phone Hill to call me,
of course," she added, then quickly gave directions on how to
navigate down the valley at Greensun and up the mountain on the other
side in case I ever wanted phone reception.  Then Kat's adamant
gestures pulled me away, and by the time I looked back over my shoulder,
Susan and her grandson had merged back into the melee of Vikings and
were gone.

 

 

 

    Kat was wound up about the guy she'd met, who'd
invited her to join him at a cob-building workshop starting that
evening (thus the rush leaving the Viking Festival), so I didn't have to do much talking on the ride home.  Her
excitement washed over me while I digested Susan's story, and before I
knew it, I was getting out of Kat's car and waving farewell as she shot
out of the driveway and back into her fast-paced life.  My
half-sister had promised to come back to visit soon, but I could tell
the thrill of a new-found younger sibling had faded into the background behind the brilliant glow of her crush.

 

    For a minute, I felt very alone in
Greensun's parking field.  I couldn't call anyone unless I made the
trek to Cell Phone Hill, and although there were houses across the
road, I knew no one within walking distance.  After the cheerful hubbub of the Viking Festival, Greensun felt very...empty.

 

    Then my eye settled on the mailbox, and I remembered
that I should have a parcel from Mom by now, and maybe a letter, too, in
her illegible (but always heartfelt) scrawl.  Sure enough, a
brown-paper-wrapped package was sitting under a few fliers for local
businesses, but that's not what first caught my eye.  Instead, I
opened the mailbox and was immediately faced with a cluster of
perfectly ripe bananas, and after extracting my mail, I discovered a
bumpy envelope with my name on it (but no stamp or address) slipped
between Mom's package and the junk mail.

 

    The maternal note could wait.  I immediately
unfolded the flap on the strange letter, and out spilled a pen, a blank sheet
of paper, and another page with careful hand-lettering that read:

 

 

 

    Suddenly, the smile on my face was just as big as
Kat's.  I took off my backpack and sat down in the shade of a pear
tree to enjoy a snack and to write a reply on the spot.  One banana
later, I'd let Jacob know that I appreciated his thought, that he was
welcome to come down and check on me anytime, and that I did like
bananas very much.  I also wrote Mom a quick note on the back of
one of the fliers and added it to my outgoing mail, scrawling "PLEASE
LEAVE FOR JACOB" in big letters on the relevant envelope so that I could
raise the flag after all.  Feeling a bit like Scout, who found unexpected
gifts in a tree knothole in
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
I wandered the rest of the way down the hill with a grin on my
face, rereading Mom's and Jacob's letters while juggling the box and
fruit in my other hand.