We moved.
Like other people celebrated holidays, we packed our stuff and moved. Leighton Avenue. Bowman Street. East Main Street, upper and lower. All that movement may sound like something, but the places were within blocks of each other and nothing marked the moves as special. In fact, were it not for my mother saying we had a new address, I might not have noticed.
Perhaps they were happy, the moves—our running onto new porches, stretching under sun-filled windows, sitting in front seats of moving vans, fiddling with the loop of keys hanging from the ignition. More likely, though, the moves were nonevents, as moves from one slum apartment to the next tend to be, marked only by a neighbor poking out her head while our olive green sofa was maneuvered through the twists and turns of the entryway, and saying, “Oh, so you all are over here now, hmmm? Well that’s all right, it’s an okay place, at least you’re still close by.”
This was the way things were, our moves tiny and circular, until the end of my fifth year, when we packed our belongings and headed out of the neighborhood entirely.
Another move.
But this one was different. We left the small streets that snaked through the northeast quadrant of Rochester. We left Annmarie VanEpps, her bird of a mother, her well-stocked toy box. We left the one-eyed girl, and the empty desk in my brother’s classroom. We left the teacher with the owl earrings, Carol and her gift purse, and everything we knew.
This time, we headed west.
West, but it was nothing like a gold rush. Nothing so grand as California. We didn’t even make it out of the state, barely left the county. Still, given our history of movement within the same zip code, the move was big.
The reasons for our leaving were unknown to all but my mother. She just packed up the station wagon and pointed it west. About an hour away. Near Albion, where her cousins had a house and where, it turned out, our camping supplies would come in handy. It was not the Adirondacks, but we pitched a tent in their wide yard and slept beside rows of cow corn. It was not Mount Washington either—no blueberries, no stands of tamarack—but at least there were crickets, and she seemed happy there, my mother, walking up and down the gravel road out front, spending her free time lying on her back, running a flashlight back and forth over the canvas of our green tent.