Driftless Heart

It was a cold April day just before my fourth birthday when we stepped from our rusty sedan after the long drive to Wisconsin through Chicago traffic.

Quiet enveloped me. Every noise was enormous: wind billowing through the dark shoulders of the arborvitae that guarded the white house; streams of birdsong disappearing into the forest across the road; mooing from cows at the farm perched on the horizon, surrounded by bare fields.

My parents told me and my older sister Sarah that we’d start a new life here. They were glad to leave our dark basement apartment in Naperville, to escape the pancake-flat Chicago suburbs with their chemical-green lawns, miles of strip malls, and gray-pink nights that smothered the stars. But I loved the nearby park where I caught glimpses of wildness as emerald-headed mallards glided over the pond. I looked forward to watching my older cousins play video games in the dark room full of joysticks and electrical cords at my aunt and uncle’s house. I liked visiting Betty, the old woman who lived upstairs from us. I was eager to see whether she’d give us carrot sticks (gross) or oatmeal-raisin cookies (acceptable), and if she’d catch the single clear drop of liquid that always hung poised on the edge of her nostril before it fell.

My parents said this new house would be better. It would have three bedrooms instead of one. My mother could plant the acre of land into the garden she’d always dreamed of, with vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers humming with bees. My father told us the land we’d live on was special. It was called the Driftless and hadn’t been flattened by glaciers in the last ice age. It was full of caves, rivers, sandstone bluffs, and more wildlife than we’d ever seen in Naperville.

As I stood next to the car, legs stiff from the long drive, I saw myself reflected in the house’s tall windows: a round-faced, pink-cheeked girl with scruffy blonde hair. I wore black Mary Janes with white socks, and my ankles were cold in the spring air. A fresh, earthy scent rose around me, and underneath the tall windows, I saw a miniature forest of blue stars — hundreds of tiny flowers I would later learn were called scillas. They swayed as if in greeting.

After the snug burrow of our apartment, the new house felt big and strange. Over the following weeks, my parents talked about it endlessly, my mother’s voice growing tight as she asked how long it would take my father to remove the fake wood paneling in the dining room and the turquoise and orange shag carpet that covered every floor. But I was fascinated by the grains of sand in the pale blue paint that made tiny red dots in my fingers when I pressed them against the wall. Letters with cartoon animals paraded near the ceiling of the upstairs bedroom, and I hummed the alphabet as I ran my eyes from aardvark to zebra. In the cobwebby basement, we discovered a wooden barrel with carrots packed in sand. Looking at their withered nubs, I felt dizzy with all the lives that had come before me.

As the days unspooled into weeks, the novelty wore off, and I began asking when we were going back to Naperville. I missed our apartment and the comforting routine of our days. There was too much space here; too much silence. At night, the dark was thick as fur and the house groaned like an animal. I refused to sleep alone, go upstairs alone, or use the bathroom without leaving the door ajar.

The days were endless. I didn’t want to watch my father ripping the mouse-infested pink insulation from the attic or listen to the drone of Wisconsin Public Radio as my mother kneaded whole-wheat bread. Sarah read books for hours, leaving me alone with my boredom. I wanted to go home. I flung my body onto the yellow linoleum flowers of the kitchen floor, clenched my eyes shut, and screamed as if I were being torn limb from limb. The only neighbors within earshot came to the door, worried my parents were hurting me. I was hurt, but not in the way they feared. That move was my first heartbreak.

May came, greening the woods and fields, swirling white blossoms on the apple, pear, and plum trees that dotted our acre of land. At the Memorial Day picnic, I ate brats and potato salad from a paper plate, then ran across the grass with the other kids. I made friends with the girl who lived at the farm with the mooing cows. My parents talked with a group of gray-haired professors who invited us to hike on their land, including the miles of forest surrounding our house.

Slowly, the Driftless became my home. I grew strong exploring its woods and prairies. My days took the shape of its rhythm: hunting morel mushrooms in spring, picking blackcap raspberries in summer, watching oaks turn copper in autumn, and going sledding in winter. The natural world was vaster than I could have imagined. I grew to love the quiet that was not quiet, but full of a thousand creatures, living.

Yet as I grew older, the city began to beckon once again. I beat against my parents and the walls of our house like a moth against glass, desperate for something bigger. Climbing to the top of our gnarled apple tree, I strained to see beyond the horizon. I waited for the moment each day when a teenage boy drove by in his red Firebird, one golden arm dangling from the window. My chest clenched with longing as I imagined my future driving with a boy like that, speeding toward a glittering city: somewhere loud, exciting, and a little dangerous.

Eventually, I did move away into that future. I moved to Portland, Oregon, and spent days in a bookstore that occupied an entire city block. I camped in the snow-capped Cascades and swam in the Pacific. I traveled to Europe, where I cried over Van Gogh’s sunflowers in Amsterdam, danced in Barcelona, and ate madeleines in a fourteenth-century monastery in Aix en Provence. I moved to Vermont to study creative writing. I ate maple creemees, saw giant puppets perform among wildflowers, and watched as the hills turned crimson and copper in autumn.

Throughout the twenty years I lived away from the Driftless, its memory grew within me, heavy with longing. It was not just the place where I grew up, but part of my body. The Driftless was buried within me like a sweet, secret tooth, a second heart. Absence grew into a pain worse than heartbreak, the land calling like birdsong in a dream. Until all I could do was pack up the years of my life, drive the thousand miles between us, and answer.

When I arrived in late autumn, the land was brown and the sky was cloaked in gray clouds. The only people I knew were my parents and two old friends, and the pandemic had shuttered everything. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake.

Throughout that lonely winter, I befriended the land. I discovered new spaces and reacquainted myself with old ones. There were no mountains, oceans, or grand vistas. But every oak savannah, effigy mound, sandstone bluff, and meandering river made me tingle with joy. With recognition. Leaving had taught me many lessons, but now I was ready for a new adventure. Letting my roots sink deep into the Driftless earth.

Rebecca Jamieson is the author of the chapbook The Body of All Things (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in Entropy, Mid-American Review, The Offing, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Tupelo Press Prose Prize, a Wisconsin Writers Award, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her two cats.