Free Growing Girls by Jeanne Marie Laskas Page B

were working single file. I snipped, they stomped. We had never embarked on a project nearly this ambitious. I figured it would take months, a little each week. There was no rush. We didn’t need the path. There were plenty of other avenues up the hill. I loved the woods and wanted a reason to introduce the girls to them.
    I began to think of the woods in the same way I thought of Sasha’s language. A new path. A clearing. A deliberate attempt to get from here to there.
    “What about this one?” Anna asked, pointing to an innocuous branch on the ground.
    “Well, that’s the kind you just step over,” I said. “We don’t have to cut that one.”
    “We’re not going to cut this one?” she said, disappointed.
    “Honey, you can just step over stuff. We don’t have to cut every single thing.”
    “Come on, Sash,” she said. “We have to step over this one.”
    I imagined, one day, when the girls are ten and twelve or sixteen and eighteen, walking with them on this path, reminiscing about this time. I imagined a time when they’re thirty-four and thirty-six and I’m hobbled with arthritic knees, watching squirrels collecting acorns from the corner of my nursing home window. They’ll be out here together, just for old times, saying, “Can you believe Mom made us do this?”
    “Sasha, say ‘sticker bush,’” Anna said. “Sticker bush? Stiiiiicker buuuuush?”
    “Ssss,” Sasha said.
    “No, that’s not right, Sash.”
    “Ssss,” Sasha said more urgently. I looked to see she was pointing at a stick on the ground.
    “That’s right, sweetie, we’re not going to cut that one. That’s the kind you just step over.”
    “Sss! Sss!” Sasha said, her frustration growing.
    “Anna, what is she saying?”
    “I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know!”
    “Sss!” Sasha implored. “Sss!” Her face got red. She began blinking furiously. “Sss!”
    And then she started to cry.
    “What is she saying? What? What is the matter?”
    “I don’t know, Mommy! I don’t know!” Anna kept saying.
    “SSS!”
    Anna started to cry.
    It went on like this, two children crying over nothing, or maybe one crying over something and the other over nothing, the one feeding the other.
    “Okay, okay, it’s okay!” I said.
    I picked up Sasha and I held Anna’s hand. We headed home and I never found out what happened.
    One day I was in the shower shampooing and I heard a horrible sound that might have been a tree falling on our house. But it was quicker than that. It wasn’t a boom or a thump or a pow, but a crack, sharp and angry. Then: nothing.
    I came charging out of the shower, ran down to the kitchen, where Alex and the girls were eating eggs. All three were mid-chew, their eyes bugged out. “What was that?” “Are you okay?” “What was that?” Something big had happened. Outside, the rain was beating on the geraniums.
    “My, what a big noise!” I said cheerfully, but the girls picked up my fear and reached for comfort. Together we tiptoed around the house, looking for the answer to the noise. In the living room we smelled smoke. We saw a hole in the wall, about the size of a quarter, with scorch marks around the edges. “Okay, we were hit by lightning,” Alex said. Overreacting, but maybe not, I took the girls outside and we sat in the car abovethe safety of rubber tires while Alex investigated, making sure our home wasn’t about to blow up. After a few minutes he seemed pretty sure it wasn’t.
    So many things were … off. A clock had fallen off the wall. There were holes in the gutters. There were more holes in the living room walls. Ajar of peanut butter had jumped off the dining room table and landed upside down on a chair. It seemed the work of ghosts. Skippy, our mule, was out there chasing one of our four fat geese. The goose, white and flapping, appeared terrified. Skippy had never shown any interest in the geese before. “Skippy, leave that goose alone!” There had been a pot of petunias on the