I remember my 5th birthday, a plain white cake with white frosting. My grandma made it for me, the one cake that embodied practical love. My cousin Michael Wayne sat excitedly at the table with me. Because I have to reconstruct the tangents of memories, I know he was only three years and two months old at the time.

My mom never made a cake for me, at least not that I can remember. If I had one on subsequent birthdays, it would have involved my Aunt Ardith. So much of my childhood came from her generosity. She spoiled my cousin Jimmy on his birthdays and those cakes were more than enough to satisfy my cravings for cake. I don’t look back with sepia memory about my birthdays, but I also don’t remember with animosity. Mom had her own issues to contend with. That almost all of them were the result of her choices is irrelevant. The realization of my own hypocrisy prevents me from judging her like I once did. Having said that, if I were to hear her say, “I am what I am” one more time, I’d use her hair spray to light her bee bonnet hairdo on fire. My brother Mike grew to turn his hatred for our mom’s mantra of “I am what I am” into a series of brilliant jokes, often rendered in the voice of Popeye.

When I think about my fifth birthday, I also love to frame it in the context of the fact that an entire secret life was already gestating inside a stranger’s body. My birthday is in March. As my cousin and I sat in a shotgun house’s kitchen devouring cake, my sister still had two months to wait before she’d come into the world.

It wasn’t until a few short years ago that she and I reconstructed why my dad broke his vow to never again leave Monroe County. After being in Indiana and prison, he returned to his stomping grounds, insistent that he’d die in his boots in the dirt of his birthplace. Despite his promise, it wasn’t long after that my family suddenly fled to Northwest Arkansas. It wasn’t until New Year’s Day in 2021 that I met my sister for the first time. We accidentally discovered that my dad fled Monroe County to escape his secrets. My sister was at the fulcrum. Dad died in 1993, 28 years before I’d met my sister.

I love that my obstinacy regarding genealogy and DNA gave me answers I KNEW were there – and that the same stubbornness on my part to accept the family’s malevolent veneer of family honor gave my sister answers. I ripped the truth out of their hands.

When I dream, I often think of zooming down from the sky, rapidly approaching the tin roof of the little house on the hill that bookmarks my childhood. I end up sitting on the porch. Because of technology, I can “see” the overlay of memory. Though it’s been five decades, the two trees in the front are still standing. This amazes me. The house is long gone, the driveway was expanded for a nearby house, and even the ditch banks gave way to gentle slopes. But under the picture is the template of tar paper, storm cellars, creosote railroad ties, mosquitoes, and screen doors that had better not be slammed. These things are the ghosts that are more real to me than what my eyes see on Google Maps.

Time moves ten times slower there. Even when I sit outside here, listening to the cicadas, I’m hearing them from my childhood, out in the fields. The roar of insects in the middle of expansive fields and heat is something that I wish everyone could experience. It’s the background static of the universe if you live in a place to grow things. The night is truly night in those places.

People wax nostalgic about those times, to return to simplicity. It wasn’t simpler. It’s just that we gloss and filter, remembering the terrible valleys and also the green fields and the people who sat with us when we witnessed them.

My other sister’s birthday is Monday. She will be 21,917 days old. That’s 60 years for those of us mundane enough to celebrate the wrong milestones. We don’t live in years. We wake up to the sunrise with the ability to start over. She started over a few short years ago. And because life is a series of lightning bolts, she recently started over again. When my sister talks, the Monroe County inside her oozes through her with a drawling Southern accent. I think she is wise enough now to see that the birthday isn’t the thing she should be happy about. Birthdays require no nod and come to us relentlessly if we are lucky. I hope she celebrates the 21.917 days instead. Monday will be just another day, one she’s waking up to. I ask her to dive into memory and recall what it felt like to sit in the back of a pickup for endless hours over mountains, seeing the house on the hill finally come into view. Knowing that Grandma would be inside.

For me, I’m going to sit and think about white cake and cicadas. And secrets that should have never been secrets. One of them was a person, an entire universe of life that was kept hidden.

Love, X
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