I Remember Yellow Snow
Tags: List, New England, Memory, Remember, Snow

I remember my sister saying “No brofer, don’t eat yellow snow.” A fluffy black cat. My sister in a pink snowsuit. That’s the first thing I remember.

I remember my dad dropping his keys and crouching down to find them under the car.

I remember kittens born under the barn. I remember eating dry cat food on the steps.

I remember running down the middle of the yellow lines, a truck driver stopped and brought me home.

I remember suddenly living on the floor of my mom’s friend’s house. My mother slept on the fold out couch.

I remember visiting my dad in a town with the worst smell on earth, paper mill factory. Eating Captain Crunch with a strange woman in a tiny apartment.

I remember my father showing me a tai chi move at the end of the pier jutting out into the ocean. Just that one time.

I remember drip castles.

I remember a storm so strong it sent our cat flying off the roof like a helicopter, she was alright.

I remember biting into a chocolate with alcohol in it and spitting it out. My mother brought me back to the store and to tell the grizzled old man behind the counter that I had stolen it. He grabbed my cheeks and yelled, “Little boys who steal go to hell!”

I remember everyone thought I had wet the bed, but it was a leak in the skylight.

I remember finding ants with wings and it blowing my mind.

I remember breaking vinyl siding.

I remember calling the operator by pressing “0” on a payphone and telling them dirty jokes.

I remember edge places. Behind laundromats. Down a roadside embankment, across the street from a mechanic shop. All the random detritus there: Old beer bottles. Broken toys. Candy wrappers. Cigarette butts.

I remember someone kept stealing our sleds.

I remember finding them across the street on our neighbor’s lawn. They always had their front door open and their dog was named “Six Pack”.

I remember Danny peaking in our windows.

I remember Danny asking me if I liked boobs or butts better. Not having a preference, I picked one. Really upset I can’t remember which.

I remember Danny’s dad, a huge, bearded man, picking Danny up by his ears and shaking him.

I remember Danny’s dad giving us $5 to run away. We found a huge railway trestle covered in trees and snow, over a frozen river. Snow fell in lazy clumps, building up all around us. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Danny began crying because we were lost.

I remember Danny calling me, years later, from his new home way out in the boonies. He was on his roof and told me he didn’t want to live. Later he told me he’d had a gun and that I’d saved his life. I don’t remember what I said.

I remember pigs feet and clam juice we got from the food bank.

I remember eating spoonfuls of Crisco and dipping them in the sugar jar.

I remember wearing multiple sweaters because the oil for the furnace ran out. I remember we got charged extra when that happened.

I remember playing doctor with a girl when I was four years old. She became pregnant at fifteen and I felt somewhat guilty.

I remember the rottweilers that lived on the other side of the makeshift wall made of doors in the basement of our duplex.

I remember my grandfather throwing a snake at me with his pitchfork while laughing.

I remember him waiting for me in his bomber hat and jacket at the entrance to my school.

I remember him sewing his own hand shut after he gashed it open.

I remember him extracting a rusty nail from my foot. He told me to sit still.

I remember trees I could climb just by walking up their huge outstretched limbs, like friendly arms waiting to take me up.

I remember shoveling the snow from our long driveway because I enjoyed it. A man came by and took a photograph. I ended up being on the cover of the York County Costar, surprising everyone.

I remember the emergency room. When they put me under I saw a silhouette of a boy under a huge tree. My mother told me I died and came back. I told her I talked with my ancestors. My grandfather gave me a windup teddy bear in the hospital, it played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I drew a scar in crayon at the same place they had taken out my appendix.

I remember our two kittens could open the doors if one stood on top of the other and turned the knob.

I remember tunnels made in snow, the perfect adventure zone for toy figurines.

I remember trying to smoke a cigarette and nearly puking.

I remember being introduced to my father’s new wife, she was a Russian botanist obsessed with trainyards. He asked me, “Isn’t she beautiful?” I replied, “No, she’s ugly.” He spanked me hard. The only time he ever laid a hand on me in anger.

I remember fearing my father more than anything on earth. His silent rage was the worst.

I remember not being able to tell him what my life was really like. The idea he had of my life drifting farther and farther away from the reality of it.

I remember my father telling me his sister spoke to him in dreams now.

I remember wearing grey sweatpants to school and Voit sneakers with gel heels. I was so proud of those heels. I remember being made fun of by a rich kid because they weren’t Nikes.

I remember the nicest girl in school falling asleep on my shoulder on the bus and how much I loved it.

I remember being in the hospital with an infected lung. The nicest girl at our school was also there. I knew because I asked why Santa Claus had come a week early. At her funeral I saw a hawk through the window of the church circling outside.

I remember my mother drove me to a birthday party. The birthday boy told me I wasn’t wanted. My mother told me to silly string the kid’s front porch and bushes. I did and it was excellent.

I remember the coach leaving with all the other tag-football players to get pizza, leaving me alone on the field.

I remember collapsing boxes in the basement of the dentist’s office so my mother could get a filling.

I remember throwing apples off the roofs of dockside buildings at tourists.

I remember my first make out session in a graveyard, in the back seat of a boxy, satin green Ford she got from her grandmother. How she laughed and smelled like menthol cigarettes and Tom’s of Maine deodorant. How the windows fogged and how I didn’t know what I was doing. Same graveyard where we buried my brother’s guinea pig a few years earlier. I remember thinking about how its corpse was nearby.

I remember packing an Army duffle bag with CDs and posters and taking a one-way Greyhound bus across the country.

I remember making a nest out of shredded newspaper on a rooftop and sleeping in it.

I remember that crack smelled like pistachio in the hallway of the transient hotel. We shared a bathroom with two other apartments. Needles everywhere. They shut the water off to the building for a week, but people kept using the toilets. My room had the original 1940’s decor: peeling, floral wallpaper, tiny ice box for a fridge, a bed that pulled down from the wall. Trash collection meant throwing it out your window onto the growing mound below. In the evening, my friend and I would make burritos, and listen to the sound of the upstairs neighbors peeing onto our windows. I remember the shirtless guy that always wore a hatchet, pounding on our door at 4am with it, wanting to be our friend.

I remember the military assault helicopter at the protest flying so low the noise hurt my brain, and I had PTSD symptoms every time I heard a helicopter for years after.

I remember that pepper spray tasted like hot sauce.

I remember dancing with my grandmother to En Vie La Rose the last time I saw her. She took out her oxygen tubes and closed her eyes and we danced.

I remember riding a freight train in the well car. Wild horses galloping alongside the train in the moonlight in Idaho.

I remember rushing into the waves of a Puerto Rican beach with my girlfriend and discovering that ocean sex is no fun at all.

I remember miscalculating how long we should camp on the beach and that we ran out of money in the first two weeks, forced to eat peanut butter and jelly every meal for twenty days.

I remember the coral reefs there, a psychedelic carnival of colors and life.

I remember seeing her bathe outdoors with a bucket of water under a single bulb in the darkness. Stunned by her beauty.