The windmill had originally been five miles away in the 1790s. Mom was turning sixty-six in a few days and she’d been talking about wanting a kind of oyster the whole trip but the name kept slipping by me. I was twenty-eight, the age where the idea of kids and a house and slow nights were beginning to feel more like a real life. In the windmill, the tour guide—two tape measures strapped to his waist for secretive work—asked if I was rage-baiting with my Yankees cap, I said no, I’m the real deal.
I couldn’t remember the last time I stood in a structure that was built hundreds of years ago and listened to one person speak about it, their eyes turning wet from the ghosts in the room who poured the grain, sweat dripping down their backs, or who rocked a baby in a cradle, boxlike and low to the floor. I inhaled the ancient wood and we stood before the huge granite slab that used to know how to crush grain, all those millions of particles slipping through. I had the sensation that my atoms were fizzing, the unimportant parts of me flitting past my porous borders: the girl who needed a new phone, the 17 or whatever it was, the girl who was waiting to hear back about a rejection from a lit mag, the girl always reading about how publishing was doomed because of idiots thinking they could use AI to write about real things.
I was little the last time I was in a room made to reserve the past, maybe seven. It was a green-doored prairie house in my town, you could walk there in three minutes from the middle school. I could be incorrectly transposing this memory over a place; I know that it happened, but I’m not sure where because all I have from childhood are forty-two memories that stand out, the rest of them big blurs. I remember a darkly lit room and all twenty of us kids gathering around a vat of wax so we could dip naked wicks in, fingers sticking together with warmth as we watched something change.
From the mill’s four small windows, the parking lot and flea market looked smaller, and Mom and I had to duck under a tiny doorframe to leave. I thought about needing to get dog food, the little maltipoo waiting for us at home with CBS on so she could figure out who to vote for in the primaries, and the two new dish towels I’d have to throw in the wash when we got there; I was already cursed with the future. Mom said, I feel like I was on a class trip and it was nice to realize that we’d been thinking about the same thing, like we’d been connected by more than blood again, our bodies existing inside each other once more, like they did almost thirty years ago and like they always would, even after we’d be gone and our home and all our things would be forgotten because we were just forgettable people, like everyone else in time’s indifferent hands.
