Walking Away
rosalie petrouske
I began walking with my daughter before she was born.
On autumn mornings in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we walked along the shore of Lake Superior. On one of these outings, I felt her move inside me for the first time. The delicate motion made me think of the butterflies I once cupped in my palms when I was a child, and how their wings brushed softly against my skin as I held them gently before letting them go. She felt the same way, a subtle quiver in the small of my belly. I stopped and stood still, anticipating the movement again, my hand touching the rounded curve where she waited to be born.
Senara arrived in January, two months early. At first, she was unable to breathe without oxygen, but she was a fighter and was soon gulping air on her own even though she was confined in an incubator. The following October, when she turned nine months old, I put her in a backpack attached to a metal frame and walked with her through the wooded island up to the black rocks. Her small hands felt like the silky touch of a feather as she parted the long strands of my hair, then pressed her mouth against the skin on my neck, making soft kissing noises.
“Shhhh! Listen,” I said. “If you’re really quiet, you can hear the squirrels scampering in the leaves. They’re getting ready for winter, storing away all their food.”
She stared with big, brown eyes, pointed, and giggled. Her high-pitched voice sent the fat, gray squirrel running for cover.
When summer came, we again spent each day walking by the lake. Senara never liked to take naps or go to sleep early, so I pushed her for hours in her blue stroller until my arms and legs ached. Sometimes I pushed her into early evening. Unlike the city I live in now, at night the sky was spangled with stars and if the conditions were right, the northern lights made their appearance against a landscape of dark lake and even darker sky.
“Moon,” I told her, pointing to its white, round orb.
“Mooo-nnnn,” she’d answer, tipping her head to look up.
Sometimes, I'd sit with her on the front steps of our big blue house and listen to the comforting sounds as night fell—a cricket chirruping under a juniper bush, a tree frog belting out summer's last song. Once a hoot owl in the evergreen tree nearby hooted six times, paused and hooted again.
“Oh, oh,” Senara clapped her hands, and the owl grew silent.
My grandmother and my parents taught me to respect nature. As an eight-year-old, I wanted to live in a log cabin in the forest seeking only deer, raccoon, and wolves for company. I could never imagine needing anything more than a stream of icy spring water to run by my house, and hours to sit on a stump observing the beetles and butterflies conducting the business of their orderly insect lives. I’d often wonder if Senara would find comfort in the natural world as she grew up. For no matter what adversities have come my way, there has always been a moment where I step out into the morning, inhale the scent of lilac, and the sweet smell of moss dampened by a summer rain, to find the subtle beauty surrounding me, quieting my turmoil.
On our frequent outings back then, I presented mini lessons to my daughter. We’d gather fallen leaves in autumn and bring them home, then press each one between sheets of waxed paper. She’d trace her tiny finger over the ridges and veins in each leaf, while I explained photosynthesis using simple words she could understand. I plucked a goldenrod gall for her to look at and showed her the small hole where a gallfly had escaped. We sat on the steps watching sparrows make their nests in the eaves of our house and picked sprigs of prairie fire in early spring. I bought a guidebook so I could show her pictures and name the birds we encountered on our travels. She clapped her hands when she saw the Baltimore oriole claiming the orange halves we left in the composting pile, listened thoughtfully for the song of the black-capped chickadee, or stared intently to catch a brief flash of a blue jay’s bright wing as it flitted from branch to branch. Senara grew as fast as the little ospreys in their nest high above our street. We watched as the osprey mother and father hid nearby while their little ones took their first tentative flights, tumbling out one by one, flapping their appendages awkwardly. They stuttered and bumped into each other like slapstick comedians making me hold a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Like the ospreys, Senara wobbled down the sidewalk going faster as she gained more confidence until I finally had to run to catch up, scooping her into my arms, and planting a kiss in the caramel-colored curls at the nape of her neck.
Just before she turned two, she began speaking in full sentences. I carried on long conversations with her, never at a loss for company. While I was still a child, my grandmother used to tell me I was an “old soul.” With the concept of a soul being vague to me then, I wondered what she meant until she explained that someone who is an “old soul” is wise beyond their years. My daughter was also an “old soul.”
At three, she liked sitting in the grass running the long squeaky strands through her fingers or watching a woolly worm in October scrunch its fuzzy body across the sidewalk. I’d laugh when she’d touch the caterpillar, and it curled into a tight ball. I told her the story my father told me, about how the Native Americans taught the pioneers to predict the severity of the coming winter by reading the bands of color on a woolly worm.
“My father, who would have been your grandfather,” I said, “always told me the thinner the brownish red bands, the harsher the winter will be. However, if the worm is mostly brownish red, it will be a mild winter.”
“Then, I think it’s going to be a bad winter, Mom,” she said, touching it gently with her finger, giggling when the little fellow scrunched up, and then slowly scuttled away.
A few months later, Senara’s father decided he no longer wanted to be with me. “We have grown apart,” he said. The excitement of our first meeting, the passion we felt had somehow dulled. “I’ve tried to make this work,” he told me. “But for me, it’s not working.” I realized I was not the person he thought I was, nor could I be who he wanted me to be. Feeling resentful and angry, I moved with Senara out of the big blue house with its views of Lake Superior to a little apartment in a wooded subdivision.
It was January; bitter cold for Northern Michigan and snow fell thickly all winter, piling as high as our window sills. I grew tired of scraping ice from my car’s windows. When the winter thaw came in February, as it usually did before another blizzard hit, I took Senara sledding, pulled her through a stand of evergreens, their branches heavy with dazzling icicles. We scooped up handfuls of snow and tossed them at each other. I showed Senara the magic held in a crystal; intricate patterns too delicate for the eyes to see. We tracked rabbits and raccoons as they darted in and out of the woods, admiring their distinct prints in the snow. Back home, we left seeds in our bird feeder on the porch for the white-breasted nuthatches, who braved the sub-zero winds to visit. Slowly, I began laughing again, and as the first long winter we spent without her father passed, I realized once more nature had softened the rough edges around my heart. I felt hopeful I could begin a new life, and felt worthy of loving, and being loved by someone.
Some lessons were difficult for Senara. She arrived home from preschool and told me proudly, “We’re studying the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.” Every day the children watched as caterpillars formed a chrysalis and then waited for the butterflies to appear. One day, Senara, in her eagerness, reached into the glass case and grabbed at a silken globe. When I came to pick her up, my tearful child stood next to her teacher.
“She crushed the chrysalis in her hand, even though she knew she was not supposed to touch them,” Mrs. Terry said.
“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Senara brushed at her tear-streaked cheeks with chubby fingers.
Even though her teacher felt her actions were willful and careless, needing discipline, I took her out for a chocolate shake and explained to her how fragile life can be.
“Think about the cobwebs when they cling to the lilac bushes in the summer,” I said. “They’re strong because they hold the dewdrops, but if you brush one away, it snaps with just a touch. The same thing happens when you pick a bluebell. If you pull up the roots, the flower will never grow back. Now the caterpillar will never become a butterfly,” I said. “And that’s very sad.”
“Am I fragile?” she asked, wiping clumsily at a tear trickling down her cheek.
“Yes, you are more fragile than anything,” I replied, giving her a hug.
“I promise, Mommy, to be more careful next time, and to never hurt anything again.”
I carry that promise with me, always.
The years slipped by quickly—Senara, once a toddler, was now a third grader, and then a thirteen-year-old in middle school. We lived in different places, far away from the lake we both felt connected to, but during those years, we spent many quiet times walking together along rivers or wooded trails, or across the open fields in a little prairie town in Kansas. Senara went from clinging to my hand to sometimes strolling sullenly ahead of me while I jogged to catch up. No matter where we were though, or at what stage in our lives, we always stopped to pick a flower, or sit on a bench and breathe in the subtle perfume of air scented by lavender and magnolias.
Now a sophomore at my alma mater, Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula, she still has naturally curly hair, and often gets frustrated with its thickness. How the long strands fall sometimes like corkscrews when the weather turns damp. No longer the color of melted caramel, it’s more a burnished shade of brown with a touch of red gold when the sunlight slants across it at certain angles. In the summertime, she cliff dives off the black rocks into Lake Superior. During the winters, she drives through snowstorms, and walks out under the northern lights.
“I want to live up here when I graduate from college,” she tells me.
“Do you ever want to move away?” I ask her, thinking of how at her age I wanted to see the world, and leave the small town I lived in far behind.
“No, I want to stay here,” she says, “get married, raise a family someday, and find a way to make a living.”
Often, I call her just to hear her voice, to know that whatever she is doing, she is safe and warm. When she answers, she sounds faintly surprised because I have called when she is busy with homework, and she has no time to talk.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she says. “I have a big exam, and then I’m going out to dinner with some friends. I’ll call you later, maybe tomorrow.” There is silence on the other end of the line, and I realize she has already hung up.
It seems to me once it was spring and I walked by the pond looking for pussy willows with her, the same way my grandmother used to walk with me; then I looked away, and it was autumn, a blur of red and yellow leaves swirling past my window.
A light snow is beginning to fall, and a winter sunset streaks the western sky. I hook on the dog’s leash and the two of us step off the porch into a white and peaceful landscape. As we head up the sidewalk, making the first footprints along the path, I feel my daughter’s presence at my side and if I look down, I can still imagine I see another set of footprints matching mine with each step taken.
