We’re spending three months this winter in a mobile home community in Florida. We’ve left a cold and beautiful place, trading the sights and sounds of home for a single-wide trailer with a Florida room. I’ll miss one of my favorite sounds of winter – how the trees crack during the below-zero days and nights, which is a dramatic reminder that trees have lives of their own.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the need for self-expression. Some think this is the province of writers, artists, performers; that the “ordinary” person need not apply. Most people ascribe to that point of view – that it’s the “job” of artists to express themselves, and they don’t necessarily notice their own self-expression as just that. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is because I’ve been noticing the way that people decorate their houses and front yards using ordinary things like plastic or stone animals, flowers and plants, specific colors, plywood cutouts of people and the like. Things that are produced in mass, for mass consumption. What’s unique, though, is the way these things are combined. Here are three examples: the first, a lovely pink tower made from vases, plates and a teapot; an arrangement of farm animals in a window planter and a house with orange trim which is quite striking and cheerful and fits into this community in a way that it would not in most neighborhoods, developments and gated communities. These things and others like them around this community or arrangements in front yards glimpsed as I drive by are heartening to me. They spark my curiosity about the decorators – how they chose the objects, how they combined the objects, what of themselves they’re trying to express.

I have a picture of a girl in a peach dress.

The girl never felt that the dress fit her at all. It had been made by her mother, the pattern chosen at the fabric store – a place with racks of patterns, wooden stools to sit on, and aisles of bolts of cloth. The girl and her mother sat on the stools to look at patterns for a special dress – her grade school graduation dress – and her mother chose the fabric. A saleswoman shook out the bolt and a length of fabric floated onto the cutting table. She measured it out along a wooden yard stick nailed to the side of the table and, using a pair of scissors, she made a cut, picked up the fabric and ripped it with a delicious sound; folded the length, rang it up and put it into a bag.

At home, the girl’s mother unpacked the fragile tissue paper pattern pieces, laid them out on the cloth, pinned them and cut them carefully. She’d sew them later on a black Singer sewing machine.

There were many, tedious fittings. The girl would stand on the table in the dinette while her mother would pull the partially sewn dress this way and that, re-pinning or adjusting the parts in some way. If it was the last fitting, her mother would take a yard stick with a little bottle of chalk and the girl would have to turn slowly around as her mother squirted a thin line of it along the hemline.

This was how the girl came to wear the peach dress, be photographed in the peach dress, feel as though the peach dress didn’t fit her at all. She didn’t like wearing dresses, she didn’t like the pattern store, she didn’t like the measuring or fitting or hemming. To the end of her days, the idea of sewing anything sat poorly on her shoulders and when she hemmed pants or skirts later, she used mending tape.

She felt invisible to herself in the peach dress. She felt lost. She was 12 or 13 and her childhood felt lost. The days of being outside, feeling the joy of play, having a best friend (who was a boy), being part of the band of kids in their tidy neighborhood of tiny houses, being the best at “Steal the Bacon,” feeling her mind at almost perfect sync with her body, – all of that had been lost.

Later, as an adult, she would remember her childhood as being all summer, all running. Kids calling her name at the back door. Dark, humming summer evenings, alive with fireflies. On one such evening, she and her best friend Johnny, compiled all of the foreign words they knew and surveyed the neighborhood. They started at one end of the other side of the block and finished up on their side. As they passed each house, they’d use a foreign word to label the families inside. The girl had gotten the word “Shetan,” “Devil,” from the Black Stallion book series and as she and Johnny walked from house to house, they’d say “Shetan” outside houses with families they didn’t like, like one where the husband kept any ball that flew over the chain link fence and refused to give it back.

That walk with Johnny, that evening was lost the summer she was eleven. This is by way of just one example.

That was the summer she started to bleed. And bleed. And bleed. Just one thing happened – she bled – and suddenly she was on the other side of childhood. One day, there was something she knew, was a part of; the next, all bets were off. Johnny was irrelevant now. She spent three weeks in bed. And bled. The end of her bed was raised upon advice from the doctor. Still, she bled. Her mother’s friend from church brought over the entire Hardy Boys series in musty brown boxes. She read them in sequence as she bled.

Eventually, it stopped.

Her mother tried. She acted kindly. The girl was on not her own like others had been – like her own mother, for instance – when their flow of blood came down. When she went back to school that fall, her mother took her to see the principal, Sr. Honore. They sat together in Sister’s office on the other side of her big, heavy desk. Her mother explained about the onset of the periods, and Sister and her mother agreed that if ever this should happen, she was to go to Sister and she would help her. Give her pads.

She felt safe. Her mother had helped. She had help at school if she needed.

That was when she was eleven. By the time of the peach dress, though, a year or two later, she felt alone; she felt invisible to her mother. She felt unseen, and definitely so in that dress which felt like the color of “horrible.” She should have been able to slide into an easy adolescence because she had help. But she didn’t. She slid, instead, into a kind of blankness, a big box of fuzzy amnesia about who she was and what was going on. Lost to herself in the way that her childhood had been lost.

What happened? Where had she been and where did she go? What did she feel or think was happening?

I offer you a clue.

Since she’d been ten, she’d gone each summer, for two weeks, to a Girl Scout day camp in a big county park overlooking Lake Michigan. She’d walk six blocks and catch a yellow school bus; on the way, she’d sing songs with the other girls. At camp, each day would unfold the same way: they’d raise the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance. She learned about fire safety, cooked the kind of food you cook at camp, like stone soup or tin foil bundles of hamburger and carrots on the wood fire. They’d hiked down to the Lake. There was more singing at lunch or when it rained. Each day ended the same way it began: lowering the flag, folding it into a triangle. Singing “Taps.” The feel of the clips that fastened the flag to the rope, the small snapping noise they made, stayed with her, her whole life.

One night each camp term, there was an over night. After the buses would leave, the campers put up canvas teepee tents. The flag ceremony didn’t take place until the sun was setting.

The tents were canvas teepees that hung on scarred, sturdy center poles. In the morning, they had to be swept clean of grass and twigs, and folded carefully so they didn’t rot over the winter.

After dark, when the troop leaders had gone to their tents, or were sitting around the fire, smoking and talking, the girls would retire, six or eight to a tent.             She’d join them, singing, laughing, whatever it is that girls of 12 and 13 do when night has fallen and they’re away from home and no one is directly supervising them.

Then there were the strip poker that took place in the close quarters of these teepees. She never pushed for them, the other girls did that, but her powers of observation were acutely attuned to what was happening: the flashlights dimly shadowing the action, the whispers and the smothered laughter, the clothes being removed, the dark night outside, the sounds of nature’s creatures in the night. Her mind sat at a distance from her body and noticed her body’s reaction: a kind of buzz. A sort of tingling that was localized in one way, and yet, not. She was on high alert. Even the removal of a sock was exciting, forbidden, frightening.

As an adult, she doesn’t remember how far they went. Did it come down to taking off something that showed something forbidden? What came off: underpants? Pajama tops? She doesn’t remember. What she does remember is that she felt her difference from the others. Her difference – shimmering, gauzy, coaxing her – glimmered behind the play.

Most of all, the secret of the difference. She sensed that her difference must be kept secret, even from herself if that was possible. There was a high price to be paid, if she didn’t keep it. In some way, she felt and knew that it was worth her life to keep it.

My conclusion was that the girl was 12 the last summer of the strip poker games. She was one year past that shocking onset of blood; she was resigned to it by then. For this new thing – her gauzy and scary difference – she had no words, no way to think about it even if she had wanted to. Her mind was like a box that was dark inside. No lid to close it. A year later, a month later, her mother made the peach dress and someone took a picture of her in it.

She looks at the picture now and imagines it as she sits at her desk, writing, and wonders about the invisible girl inside. She searches for words to explain herself, like “shut down” or “alienated.” “Invisible” comes close, but still, she wonders if she’ll ever really know what was in the dark box.

This is why she writes – she thinks of her writing as a meditation she performs in service to herself, in service to that girl, to what she felt, what she thought, what she knew.

She looks something like Joan of Arc must have looked at a moment of mortal change. Was it at her death?

Or was it at that particular moment when, locked in her cell, she’d had to consider which way she should go? Abjure her visions? Deny the messages she’d received? Those messages from the Archangel Michael – he of the seductive voice and the soft, vague wings. His brown eyes. Warm eyes they were but also, she thought for the first time, a little crafty at that moment when he glanced away, looking perhaps for a different girl over her shoulder. Someone less ignorant, less clumsy. A comely girl in a silken gown, perhaps, not she of the nubby homespun dress that was more like a sack she’d donned for modesty’s sake. Donned to cover, not to please.

Abjure him? Abjure those visions of him. Deny those messages? Turn toward that word “heretic?” Turn toward it – was that it?

Or should she turn toward the fire? That, at least, would take her outside her cell.

To turn away from the fire, to recant, meant more of the same. The same dirt floor that muddied whenever it rained, the same wooden slats at night, the same dim days. The same, the same, the same.

Should she choose the fire, then? The ride to the square in a crude wagon drawn by oxen, ropes around her wrists, her waist? She sensed a wispy hope of a warm day, a blue sky. A friendly face. Or two.

There would be a platform under the blue sky, faggots piled high on a mound of straw. A pillar to hold her there. She’d been told about the pillar. It would burn down as she burned down.

Was this the moment of change? In that cell, with those choices?

Toward what would she turn? The visions, the victories in battle? Or the fire and the blue sky?

Yes, she had been changed. In what way, she would know soon.

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