I’ve driven by our old farm a few times, slowed down and leaned out the window to review what used to be. But yesterday was different - I pulled in. Waited.

My childhood home is now a truck depot. A heavy petroleum stench has replaced the spicy intoxication of peonies long gone. Uneven grease-stained gravel has snuffed out the acre of lush grass in the front yard where my bare feet linked me to the earth. Our house, the one my dad built, seems to be the office. I didn’t need to go inside; didn’t even want to see what the living room had become or how disrupted Mama’s tidy kitchen was. I turned into the driveway, on this eve of my seventieth birthday, to visit the old porch in the backyard, a 5x5-foot concrete respite where problems were solved just by sitting there. For a little while, I wanted to be a kid again.

Out of the car, I started toward the front door. It seemed like I needed permission to wander to the back yard. I looked for a face in the window to scare me away. No one was there. Still, my courage faded. Childhood memories came forward and it felt as if someone was telling me to sit down and not ask any questions.

Back in the car, I fidgeted. I wasn’t nervous about the faceless occupants. It scared me to think I had been wrong. What if it was just a porch – nothing more?

Men with oily shoes walked in from the truck parking lot, our former corn field. One of them spit on the gravel, glanced my way, and kept walking into the house. He didn’t even try to scrape his boots. Mama would’ve had a fit. I squirmed.

That concrete refuge out back that I yearned to visit warmed the open drafty places in my heart. As a girl, sitting there on a late fall morning, I’d smell the burning leaves from Mr. Palizzi’s vegetable farm down the way. A few weeks later I’d feel excited in anticipation of the first snow. On a sunny afternoon, I’d compete with myself to see how far a flying leap could land my little body on the grass below. I’d mark the spot then try again and again. The sessions ended with parading through the back yard, arms raised in jubilation.

Mama shooed me there to eat a two-stick cherry Popsicle because its melting would stain the rug. I’d create a connect-the-dot picture with the red drips that crept down my forearm onto the porch. At night, searching for Polaris through the traffic jam of stars overhead, dizzied me. I’d squeal with its nightly discovery, as if for the first time. As an early teen, it was my brooding spot where I’d escape the family irritation and noise only to listen to them through the open kitchen window, secure I wasn’t all alone in the world.

It’s the last place I sat before leaving for college. Sat with Mama and told her I was scared to go. Next to me I felt her strength, her hope for me to have a better life than hers. She and I cozied up to each other the evening I revealed my pregnancy with her first grandchild. Now, even with her gone, I sense Mama’s arm around me as I remember the morning we talked about my pending divorce. From somewhere inside, her soft voice is clear, Oh Di, I’d do anything to make it better.

A horn from an 18-wheeler shocked me. In the sideview mirror I saw a guy waving his arm back-and-forth motioning me to get out of his way. I started the engine and heard my tires crunch the oily gravel, saying there’s nothing here for me anymore.

Tonight, cocktail in-hand, I get comfortable in my city condo wrapped in a chair that hugs me. I toast myself with a “happy birthday” and imagine the screen door snapping behind me, see myself sailing off the porch to mark my best-ever distance, gazing upward to find the North Star blinking my way. In my memories, I can visit the old porch exactly as I remember it, let it warm my heart, and feel like a kid, even at seventy.

 -Dianne Blomberg

Dianne Blomberg, PhD, joyfully in her seventies, is a writer and speaker living in Denver, Colorado. Her administrative assistant is a Norwich Terroir, Emmy-the-dog. She, Dianne not Emmy, has been published in Feminine Collective, Across the Margin, Button Eye Review, Alpha Female Society, and the Dove Tales 10th Anniversary Anthology, Abrazos. Her essays have been selected for “Best Of” publications. Dianne has authored two children’s books. Her work is quoted in Good Housekeeping, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Family Life, Newsday New York, The Denver Post, Boston Globe, and more. Currently, Dianne is working on a collection of essays, Walk Away.