ROOTS

I am inspired.

Blame it on the magnolia trees. For some reason they haunt me. It started in grad school. I moved to a town in central Illinois where I knew not a soul. The windmills felt eerie and conjured a faded memory of a desperate mother. There was a VHS I sloppily recorded over as a child that had just moments of its first life remaining. I remember a red-headed woman- Jodie Foster or Julianna Moore perhaps, or maybe it was Sigourney Weaver; my childhood self was unconcerned and undiscerning. Whoever she was, she was distraught. Her son was missing. She urgently sought him in red canyon-like tunnels, but, in the only moments I saw, he could not be found.

In dusting off this memory, I question whether the windmills were in that movie or the one I taped over it. Upon this scrutiny, I am beginning to think the preferred film of 9 year old Rachelle is the one that actually had the windmills. It was an ET knockoff about a kid and a bike and an alien, Max and Me or something like that, which is comical since I never liked the movie ET and this one had to have been a fraction of the quality. I don’t pretend to understand the preferences of my childhood, nor do I defend them. Though the windmills were likely in the corny kids movie, for some reason I associate them with the red clay and determined mother.

I don’t know that I had ever encountered a windmill in person until Illinois. In my three years there, the daily sight of them became no less unsettling. Not knowing anyone in that small town of Normal, if ever I felt like being out of my house I would just go for a drive. Windows down. Music up. In town I’d pass college kids and frozen yogurt shops. Out of town, windmills and cornfields. Nothing green. No magnolias.

Well, there were soy fields. Those are sometimes green. But not in the same way a magnolia tree is green. And not nearly as inspiring.