City Girl

I grew up in Idaho Falls with a subdivision behind me and sheep in the field across the street. On the other side of the sheep Taylor Mountain sat, soft and majestic, changing color with the seasons. A half hour’s ride would take us into foothills so wild in places I believed I was the first white girl to lay eyes on it. I chose not to think of the ski hill or the dry farms. I used to sit for hours on the cement slab we called the front porch and look at the mountain. If the sheep were nearby, I would talk to them. I could really get them riled up, baaing at them. Probably drove the neighbors crazy, not to mention the farmer.

Three houses down the subdivision ended abruptly in a grassy field bordered by a small irrigation ditch. I hollowed out a little house in the tall grass by the ditch one summer. It was green even in August and smelled of wild things and earth and water. I could hide there and be alone with my ten year old thoughts, letting the sky and the earth seep into places in my soul I hardly knew needed filling until they were full. I wrapped the quiet around me like a familiar blanket, letting it comfort me, letting it quiet me.

A block or so the other way, along St. Clair was the Idaho Canal, which I understood my grandfather had helped to dig. It was deep and ran for miles. Trees loved the banks and the grass and weeds grew tall all along the canal. Water for irrigation ran most of the year, icing over in the winter. I loved the constant patient gurgle of the water. It seemed to answer when I talked to it, to whisper soothing gentle things I heard in the deep places of my soul. I could sit under a weeping willow in the grass and be hidden from the occasional car that drove down St. Clair. I took my troubles there as long as I lived in the red brick house on 17th Street.

My mother used to encourage me to play with the children in the subdivision. A girl close to my age lived in the house behind me for a while. We marveled over the double coincidence of sharing the same uncommon first name and the same birthday, although I was a year older than her, but that was about all we had in common. Around the block was another girl close to my age. Her father had been in a boating accident and drowned, leaving a young widow with four or five young children. I remember her mother, a generous comfortable woman who baked bread and gave thick hot slices slathered with butter to any neighborhood child who happened by. This woman married her poor drowned husband’s brother a little too quickly for the neighbors and promptly began having babies again. She nursed her babies long and tenderly, a practice my own mother talked about in the shocked whispers that guaranteed her children would hear, especially when she didn‘t want them to.

I read too much. I went off by myself and daydreamed. I watched the mountain and the sheep. In the summers as I entered my teenage years I took long walks and bicycle rides in the country, mostly by myself. I shut myself up in my bedroom and listened to the soundtrack from Dr. Zhivago and read more. Mom used to take my books away until I finished my chores. I read practically every book in the Idaho Falls Public Library, a building that filled me with awe. At school I was quiet, speaking mostly in literature classes, after my great intellectual awakening the year I was a sophomore. I nursed heavy crushes on the the smartest boys, but didn’t dare talk to them. Most of my high school friends were from the surrounding farms and went to a different school. They hadn’t figured out I wasn’t cool. They didn’t know about the books I couldn’t hide at school or the awful shyness. They called me a city girl.




Copyright 2006 Rinda Fullmer