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  • The Place We First Came From
  • Amy Butcher (bio)

Every Thursday night at seven, I call my brother to hear how the baby is doing. The baby is not yet a baby, just a wet clump of cells, a creature “the size of a lima bean,” my sister-in-law tells me. From my place a thousand miles away, I listen to their report: how they’ve picked out a color for the walls, they say, or are considering the name “Russell.”

“It’s Old French,” Lauren says. “Can’t you envision a tiny beret?”

I try to imagine their child, far too small for a sloping hat. The baby now is mostly concept: an idea of a person. We slip it in and out of situations as if an accessory.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes— chewing a baguette, blowing smoke rings.”

“Exactly,” Lauren says, laughing, and then she tells me about her moods, the cramping, and the nausea. When we’ve exhausted conversation, she excuses herself from our call—there are dinner dishes that need clearing, she says, or there’s a pile of laundry in need of folding. Alone with just my brother, he confides that he is scared.

“What if it’s a girl?” he asks. “What about when she’s dating?”

“There are a lot of years,” I say.

Usually, my brother’s concerns are small; he worries about nicknames, food allergies, securing diapers, slicing hot dogs. “That’s what babies choke on most,” he says. “What if I forget to quarter bites?”

I tell him his fears are manageable and reassure him of what I know.

“You’ll make a good father,” I say.

When our conversation slows, I remind him I’ll call next week. “By then she’ll be a kidney bean,” I joke. “Every week, a new legume.” [End Page 103]

“Yes,” he says, laughing, then: “I wish that you lived closer. I wish you still lived here.”

That was what we always wanted, my brother and I—two country homes in the countryside together—and for many years, we had it. It is all, in fact, I remember of childhood: wielding hockey sticks and whiffle ball bats, whacking back the weeds that grew in abundance in our backyard. Every afternoon is the same in my memory: Wesley and I get off the school bus pack canvas backpacks full of fruit snacks and binoculars, Swiss Army pocketknives, and fraying duct tape, then follow the property line behind the house to the four acres of wild weeds that we’ve made flat. We whack them into floor plans. We whack them into homes. We stack logs, sticks, branches that came down during the worst of summer’s storms, and it is our secret place: a world we’ve whittled from nearly nothing, lining rocks to form a border, digging rows and rows for sweet peas.

Mine is a white farmhouse with a bean-brown door and sloping shutters. The kitchen is slate and white tile, hanging baskets, beans in jars. A bird-feeder hangs outside the bathroom window—two blue jays and a cardinal— and I imagine baking caramel pecan pies in there on Saturdays, the breeze sweet from an open window, the crusts cracking bubbles of amber syrup that later harden in the midday hours. The hardwood creaks when I step across it and yellowed light collects on wicker rockers.

Wesley’s home is white stucco chipped to reveal gray rock and a winding brick veranda. We each own a farm, and a barn, and a rolling landscape that stretches into mountains.

We share the wide lake.

We’ve imagined docks on either end, the planks mealy and rotten where the wood dips to meet the water. Some afternoons, Wesley pretends he’s caught a fish, slipping a hook from a leaf’s frayed corner, but on others, we’re content just to lie beside it, imagining ducks and geese and frogs, an entire symphony of muddled croaking and rippled water where the birds take off. But what’s most important about these imagined spaces is how we’ve imagined them here, together.

I am 9, and Wesley is 11, but already we...

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