Sandra Gail Lambert - A Certain Loneliness: A Memoir

I called them ladies-of-the-valley. In 1960 we lived in Norway, and down the hill from our house was a forest. It seemed so very far away. It probably wasnt, since I was only six. Deep in the woods was a place the sun reached through to the ground, and at the edges of the light, in its shadow, the flowers spread over the forest floor. Id sit among them and smooth the skirt of my dress around me. The bare skin between my panties and the top thigh band of my braces pressed into the wet slickness of the ground. The white pearls of flowers about to open would perch on my fingertips, and they seemed to have no weight. Cars, construction, my mothers voice, and the confusions of where to sit on the school bus or why no one sat with me and the relief of reaching the classroom and the kindness of the teacher also lost any substance. The honey perfume of the disturbed plants rose around me.

It turns out that lily of the valley and all of its partsstems, roots, flowers, leavesare poisonous. It slows the heart.

Three years later the woods, which by then I thought of as nothing but an empty lot (and now know were a remnant of massive virgin forest), were cleared. But there was still the hill behind my house too steep to build on. Id walk up it as far as possible and then drop my crutches and scramble with my hands to the top where Id sit among pine needles and low-bush blueberries. Id reach and reach until I ate a circumference of berries. From there, through trees, was a view of mountains in a blue mist. The muscles around my eyes rearranged themselves, and I could focus into a far distance. When I was young I thought that seeing far away, like through a telescope pointed at the stars, would let me see into the future. Now I know that telescopes show us the past. They show us the light of stars long after the star itself has exploded and gone dark.

When I was thirteen I could name a lot of what I needed relief from. Not being allowed to stay up and watch television programs the rest of my classmates watched, the pain of the contraption put on my legs at night that was supposed to untwist my bones, a tattletaling little sister: I could describe these affronts at great length and with the unrelenting harshness of a teenager, but only in my head. I was considered almost too old for a spanking, but not quite. A door slammed in reaction to parental intransigence, or a poorly timed and so overheard screaming argument with my sister could still lead to the quick rattle of a buckle, the slick sound of a belt pulled through loops, a humiliation. I had learned to be careful. And I had learned the comfort of stolen alcohol. But also, sometimes, in our front yard, a deep winter sun would slant through the grove of silver birch. The ice coating the limbs exploded in light. The white of the trunks became translucent, and Id put my hand out and imagine it sinking through the bark.