Trans-Atlantic

Lily was at the garden gate, studying the misty shapes of the Prague hills. It was noon and the rest of her family was in the cottage, eating soup together to the sounds of her grandfather snoring on the sofa bed, the shadows of the muted black and white TV playing across his face. Her grandmother made all the racket she possibly could as she went about cleaning up the kitchen, putting pans and pots away, rustling the silverware, banging the windows, all in a dedicated attempt to wake the grandfather up, but everyone else, her mother, her sister, her father, were all completely focused on the approaching storm. The constant hum of their whispering accompanied the noise of the kitchen: would it be big, would the tomatoes drown, would it wash away the bugs? The air in the cottage was thick and hot from the wood stove. How could he possibly fall asleep so close to that thing, they wondered.

The trees behind their cottage shuddered in the summer wind and swept the ground with their branches while the clouds crept in from the south. Lily stood at the gate at the bottom of the hill and watched them. The sky was a golden violet color and in all her summers at the Prague cottage, she had never seen anything like it.

“Lily! Come in! It's going to rain and your soup is getting cold!” her grandmother yelled from the cottage window.

“I'm not hungry yet.”

“What?” she called.

“I'm not hungry yet!” yelled Lily.

“You're always forcing her to eat, let her be!” called her mother from somewhere inside the cottage.

Her grandmother shut the window a little more loudly than necessary, grumbling about the evils of reheating meals and this new generation, her spoiled American grandchildren.

Over the years, the meadow past their gate had been overtaken with weeds. When Lily was younger, she remembered someone coming out every month to cut the grass with a scythe and then the the children would play in it. Now that the weeds grew prickly and tall, they mostly stayed out to avoid the snakes and ticks.

It reminded her that each year could be her last year here, that things were changing. Her grandparents could pass away any day now and all her yearly pilgrimages here, her summers of growing up in this place, summers of memorizing those hills, of smelling these particular carrots, would have no ability to change that the cottage would go to her cousins and that they would become the keepers of her memories. And if she came to visit them and to see the cottage, she would have to ask for those simple things that in this moment were still hers to take: opening the window to let the breeze in, putting the water on for tea, sitting on the couch. Her mother reminded her daily of her grandparents' precarious existence, their fragile grasp on life. (Years later, Lily would realize that her mother had used this as a scare tactic to keep Lily from misbehaving during their visits. She couldn't even remember when exactly her mother started warning her about the impending doom, but she knew it had to be at a fairly young age because she couldn't remember a time in her life when the possibility of her grandparents disappearing suddenly and permanently (at the snap of a finger, the toll of a bell) hadn't hung over her with a shadow-like quality, following her even across the Atlantic to North Carolina where she spent months August through November and January through May. During these musings, Lily would recall scenes of her grandfather chopping wood outside and her grandmother carrying the bathwater out, both strong as oxen, and would wonder why she had ever let her mother create these alternate images of her grandparents as sickly and fleeting.)

Now the clouds were coming down the sides of the hills, their shadows creeping over the pastures and the trees and the train station. The mist seemed to be getting thicker and she heard a distant roaring sound, the sound of a muted waterfall. The window creaked open behind her again and her grandmother poked her head out.

Now Lily was fixated on the mist. It was rapidly advancing.

And maybe it was that she had gotten used to the slower pace of life—it was the 21^st century, and yet here, on the outskirts of Prague: still no phone lines, no running water, just an old black and white TV and the scenery—but it was almost directly on top of her before the instant of recognition hit. (For the mist was not a mist, but waves and waves of rain sweeping across the golden violet sky towards her.)

As though disembodied, Lily watched herself run up the hill towards the cottage, acutely aware of the rain catching her halfway and the suspense caught in her muscles exploding as the first drop touched her arm.

She let it catch her halfway. It slid down her nose and under her glasses and down the back of her neck. Dripping, she turned to watch. Everything was golden in the light of the rain and with the warmth and the roar and the trees bending behind her in the wind, she could feel her grandmother and grandfather watching from the cottage.