There was a creek by the house in Joans River. I remember it from when I was very young. It was shallow and slow moving, banked by steep muddy walls around the clay ribbon of the river. On long summer afternoons, the water was the living color of old blood and at night it was busy with fishes and birds and things that went plop into the currents and were gone.

In those days, during the years before my father died, Joans River was farmland country. Scattered houses speckled the road that ran along its banks before the creek split off and delved into old forest, where it became clogged by pine needles and leaves and the detritus of a greener world. When I was a child, I’d walk down the creek until I drew close to the boarders of the forest, where its narrow boarders were canopied by dogwood and elm. Sitting there, where the air was sweet and humid, I would dig my toes into the soil and pretend I was on a distant bank, another world. Amazon, Nile. To a longing twelve year old girl, they fell from my lips like poetry, and somewhere I was a goddess dressed in vivid colors. But, before the forest, upstream of road, the creek shrugged through corn country, easily identified by the trees and bushes and green that lined it in a landscape define mostly by soy and corn.

When we were children, the cohort of Joans River in the years before my father died, we spent summers in the water, winters on the ice, acting out our dramas and turf wars and pretending we saw fairy dancing in the grass, and believed that Oz was only two skips and a circle of stones away.

We believed. We believed in so much...

*

When my father died, it happened quickly. Or, perhaps it only seemed that way. He’d had the cancer diagnosis for years by then, but the end always comes quickly, at the last.

“When do I need to be there?” I said, looking at winter coming down Tacoma, Washington, and trying to remember why I’d moved away from home.

“Katherine...” my mother said quietly. She didn’t cry, I remember thinking. She was stronger than steel and deeply rooted. He’d been on hospice for a few days by then.

“I’ll book tonight and be there tomorrow,” I said, palming away tears, and reaching into my bag for a shopping list. If nothing else, I could bring food.

So you pack your bags, you leave your life, and you go home, home, home to Joan’s River and that slice of life.

*

The weather was milder when I got off the plane. Jetlagged and puffy from tears and traveling, I rented a car at baggage claim and threw my baggage in the backseat. I’d brought a funeral dress with me, tossed in with toothpaste and shoes and other things I knew I’d need.

Driving, I scanned through radio stations that reminded me of my college years, passed bars and clubs and beaches where I’d been young, irresponsible, heart achingly in love. It was a mild day in later winter, I’d forgotten how early spring could come in this part of the world. I cracked the window and turned up the music, putting on a pair of sunglasses against the glare off the road and the intermittent tears. It was a hard, sometimes. It was hard, suddenly.

I got groceries, I bought a case of wine, and I drove the country roads out to Joans River. When I crested the hill that made one long wall of the valley in which my parents’ home was situated, two steps and a prayer from the creek, I stopped the car, pulling off the tar and gravel road and I watched the sun come down on the farmland valley, where I had left my childhood longing and secrets in the shelter of an imagined world. I dozed as the sun set, just quiet and in need of peace, and so it was that when I pulled onto the road it was twilight that saw me on the last leg of my journey home.

There’s a thing about twilight, I remember someone telling me. As I drove, I crossed a rickety bridge over the creek, watching my headlights sweep across barren, winter fields. Twilight was a doorway and its hinges were well oiled and the door was always swaying, back and forth.

Back and forth. There had been faeries in the tall grass here, once. There had been faeries, or at least I had believed.