(FREE STUFF – MEMOIR)

Freezing wintry cold.

I wait.  With the other children, but apart.  As always.

At the bus-stop.

I wait for the heavy doors to swing open, and I step up the black rubbery steps.  Out of the freezing wintry cold and into the only slightly warmer space of the school-bus.  Hurry down the aisle, stepping carefully over the floor’s black ridged surface as I search for an empty seat.  If I turn and look back up the aisle?  I will see little white reverse footprints … the release of packed snow from the treads of my shoes.

My feet are numb.

It is cold where I live.  Very cold.

Western Michigan, but also my house.

Very cold.

I am never dressed warmly enough.

I huddle against the window.  The bus lurches forward.

The window is covered with a thick whorled layer of ice.  Carefully, into this ice, I press my thumb.  Just at eye level.

I hold my thumb there until it hurts with cold, and until the tiny river of melted water that drips from beneath my thumb has refrozen in a miniature icicle profile down the glass.

I remove my hand.

A perfect small oval onto the world.

I watch the world.

I cannot see it all.

Just little brilliant flashing bits of color and movement and energy.

Through this small little window in a window.

It soothes me.

I stare.

School is warm.  It is my favorite place to be.

I have only recently become aware that warm cannot be taken for granted.

School is warm.

I hate recess.

The bus ride home is louder and more chaotic.  There is jostling and yelling and talking.

No one talks to me.

I am small.  Small enough to squeeze through the others and find a seat near the back.  By the window.

In the afternoons, there is no ice on the windows, and I stare at the whole world as it rushes by.

I can see everything.

A big window onto the world.

And the bus hurries through this world, delivering other people to their parts of this world.  I watch as the students leap from the bus and run into their houses.  Into the warm embrace of their houses.

Home.

Not yet.

The bus continues.  I stare out the window.  There is so much world to see.

So much that is not my world … not my part.

And then, through the big school-bus window, I see my street.  My yard.  My house.

My part of the world.

I walk down the black-ridged aisle, step down the black rubber steps, and into my part of the world.

It is cold in my part of the world.

Western Michigan, but also my house.

Freezing cold.

I climb the steps.

I am inside.

My house.

As I stand, my perspective changes.  Shifts.  My view is diminished and tightened and reduced.

Less.

The view of the world from my house is like looking through a tiny thumbprint oval in a larger frosted pane.

But not a thumbprint of my making.

Instead a thumb pressed down upon me.  Against the glass.

The world is out there, but I can only see a tiny never-changing part.

And I am not soothed.

And I am cold.

And I am small.