Spilling Tears

In college I wrote a paper about the concept of home, the way it pulls at us while simultaneously pushing us away. It’s warmth and it’s coldness. This weekend I felt it’s warmth so acutely that tears spilled all over my family’s shoulders, into swimming pools and over gardens of lavender. I spilled tears on my sister’s cheeks after she put on her wedding dress, twirling and smiling through the tilted afternoon sunlight. Whenever I’m in Wisconsin I’m hit with nostalgia, but the summer heat makes it heavier, leaving me silent and staring straight ahead on a flight to LaGuardia, wondering why the hell I don’t live in the Midwest, where the mosquitoes suck the life out of innocent barbequers, where farmy highway air is thick with the smell of cows, and the Milwaukee air is thick with the sweet smell of yeast. Where I can go over to my aunts’ house and find her popping tomatoes straight from the plant into her mouth, help her dispose of the sad dead bird on her porch, help her set up her internet toolbars. Where I can go to Carrie's house and find her digging up moss in her backyard for her terrarium, the quiet sounds of a shifting, new-smelling home around her, and the cicadas buzzing in the backyard. Where I can sit on the living room floor of my brothers’ calming, plant-surrounded home and squeeze the toes and thighs and cheeks of the most beautiful and perfect nephew I could imagine, kissing his fuzzy head repeatedly, whispering to him how much I love him, over and over and over. Where I can go swimming in my old back yard and float around in the blissful green and watch my friend fall in love. Where I go into the kitchen and see Pat’s fresh cucumbers and eat her delicious pico de gallo, sipping strong coffee and talking about January. Where dad and I curl into chairs in the sunroom lit by one lamp and the fireflies outside late at night, where I talk and he listens, where I show pictures of my life and he smiles.