18 summers

Birthday cakes and treasure hunts. Flies on fresh bread, hot metal railings, green shutters that sing in falsetto. Cool tile and cool sticks and making snail families. That’s childhood, listed out. My birthday always happened when I was there. Slips of paper under rocks and glass Coca Cola bottles. Gifts in paper bags and relatives and the Barbie train I used to own. I was no different than any other kid there. It was innocence before separation.

Growing up, I had the privilege of going to this teeny tiny village at the foot of the Alps nearly every year. It has a torrential history, even at a glance. There are ruins twenty minutes out of what used to be a village by the name of my last name. An annual festival in August to celebrate the bubonic plague not reaching the village seven hundred years ago. I watched my dad fish out a Roman vase out of the river once. And I was convinced I was part of it, once.

Language barriers and fights with my mom. Tomatoes grown in the garden, but eaten quietly. Damp towels and bickering in a squeaky car, limestone river canyons, the smell of wet dog in the trunk. Water shoes and speakers and mud banks and picnic sandwiches. I couldn’t keep up with the French anymore. We got to the age where their slang was moving faster than my textbook. They were nice about it. But I was starting to really feel those six thousand miles.

Before last summer, I hadn’t gone back in eight years. Couldn’t get around COVID and finances. My childhood tucked away, wholly inaccessible. And when I did go back, the fountain in front of my father’s house was turned off for good. Too many wasps. The donkey that lived in a field near the front gates died five years back. The one gift shop of the town hasn’t been open in seven years after the owner fell very sick. More tombstones in the graveyards and trees are missing. The weather is unnaturally hotter. I was convinced I was going to hate it.

White wine and cigarettes. The rowdy bar patio, the summer Olympics on TV. My friends were either finishing up their last year of high school or well into their twenties. No one was interested in treasure hunts anymore. It was pitching tents by the river to party at neighboring villages. It was finishing “cubeys”–wine boxes–as the band did another rendition of a hilarious French-accented Black Eyed Peas song from 2011. It was getting morning phone calls in bed, hungover and dehydrated, asking me when I was going to show up at the bar. I never said no.

And I did not hate it. It’s learning old village gossip I never knew about as a kid. It’s waiting for my friends to explain the joke when I couldn’t catch half the words. I was properly American this time around. A very, very drunk American. But I did not hate it.

I figured it couldn’t be treasure hunts forever. I’ll keep visiting that window that’s covered in snail families. It’ll fog up eventually, but I've been dropping by as often as I wish, even when it’s a bit blurrier every time I come back. The thing I can do is wait to travel those six thousand miles, and wait for the summer to come back.

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