Liberty Hill

I swore that when it got dark and cold I would tell this story, and since it's 28 degrees and black as pitch outside, I guess the time has come. This all began long before the terrible winter of my aunt's murder, but it shows that even then, I understood that the land held a profound and dreadful power.

1.

The tale begins many years ago, when I was little girl and my parents' marriage was on the verge of breaking up. Not that I knew this is any official way - my parents didn't talk about such things - but I knew it as a sick feeling in my stomach, a sense of the precariousness of everything I knew as my life.

My sister's wedding that September had brought things to a head. With only me left at home (and too young to have much say in the matter) my mother began a pattern of taking day trips to various places, usually a tourist attraction somewhere within a hundred miles. Possibly she was taking these long drives to think, more likely she was doing it to punish my dad by disappearing to parts unknown. Whatever the case, the effect was that I ended up being dragged from one end of the hill country to the other, visiting a variety of caverns, Presidential homesteads, candle factories and granite batholiths in the bleak and barren landscape.

Now, the thing about the hill country is that in the bright light of summer, you might be able to convince yourself that it's friendly, or at the very least benign. In the autumn and winter, though, all bets are off. When the sun goes in and the clouds loom and the limestone no longer fills the air with reflected light, the land reveals its true nature, a place so desolate it can drain the life right out of you.

It was in this atmosphere  - the greyness, the nausea  - that we visited the international sculpture park at Liberty Hill.

It was one of the rare times my brother was with us, and I suppose it must have been his idea. He was working on his second art degree at that time in San Marcos, and perhaps it had been suggested as a place the students should visit. At any rate, it was a long drive  - more than 80 miles according to the map. I sat in the back of the station wagon, facing rearwards, watching the road unwind endlessly through the bleached horizon.

I wish there was a way to describe how bad it felt, how utterly wrong it all was, but then again, perhaps it's for the best. Suffice it to say there was nothing good about this moment (the lightless cold, the frigid wind) nor in the future (would I have to go with mom to see that man, the one she was having an affair with, which I knew all about even though I wasn't supposed to know?) My helplessness made me feel that I would shatter into a million pieces.

My memory of the town of Liberty Hill itself is vague - I recall an old, ramshackle town, seemingly derelict in a way that that did not seem merely empty, but frightening.  The sculpture park was something else again. Very modern, very abstract. Curving, hulking shapes shining whitely in the gloom.

I left my mother and brother to argue among themselves and lost myself among the artworks. I was very young and did not understand why the sculptures didn't look like what they were named, or what they might mean, or why  they disturbed me so. They were only stone shapes, after all, and yet, the combination of the sculpture and the bitter wind and the nature of the land itself filled me with a horror that was beyond me to express.

Finally I sought refuge behind a statue called Tierra Madre. After studying it for a while, I could begin to see the shape of a woman curling around on herself and felt better for being able to understand. Of course, I know now that Tierra Madre means Earth Mother, but didn't then. I only knew that I felt safe there for the moment.

The last thing I remember about Liberty Hill is my mother's voice, faint in the wind, shouting at me to come on, but I didn't move. They had to come find me.

2.
If the trip to Liberty Hill was the first hint of seasonal depression to come, then the December murder of my aunt cemented it as an incontrovertible fact. Winter was a thing to dread and fear, and aside from a few isolated moments over the years, it was true. Rarely would anything good come in this time and place, and even if it did, despair kept most potential pleasure at bay.

Things were somewhat better when I moved from the hill country to the coast; winters were still cold, yes, but there was not the hostile landscape, there was still an ambient light. Coming back here after nearly 20 years was tough. Being reintroduced to that particular kind of gloom was tougher still. Intolerable, to tell you the truth.

No matter how I tried to cope, the reality of my surroundings intruded. I tried everything, from remembering in small doses (such as writing the above-linked Girl Who Was Witched Away) to trying to block it out entirely. None were especially helpful, and always I'd end up in the back in the abyss.

In the late autumn of 2016, again feeling desperate, I hit upon an new idea. If there was no way to block the bad memories, perhaps replacing them would work. I would pick one of my few good winter memories and focus on it intently, inhabiting it as much as possible. Don't think about the miseries of childhood. Don't think about Liberty Hill.

I chose the memory of meeting my ex-boyfriend, Michael, the man I'd almost married. It had been a bitterly cold and dark December day when he'd swept in and carried me away. Michael, bless him, was crazy about me, and for all his flaws, the memory holds a special place. For a month, I'd put all my mental effort into recreating the feeling of that time, dragging up every half-forgotten scene.

Writing When Dark Comes At Six was part of this effort - I'd even returned to the place where we'd met (on another, suitably frigid day) to take the photo for the post. And then there was the rest of that story, of course, How he'd taken me to meet his family, to their endless stream of parties, how he moved me into his house almost immediately after he'd managed to pry me out of my girlish floral dress.

In the first few weeks, while we inhabited that glorious, secretive bubble that new lovers do, there was a lot of things to learn. Not the least of them was that Michael was a wealthy man from a wealthy family, and like many such people, irresponsible with money. He kept his cash in a gold clip, which he was constantly losing. There was always a kerfuffle at some club door or another because he'd lost a wad of bills, only to have the clip turn up in some odd place, like a camera case or a gumboot. It was funny, but also quite astonishing to me. He managed to casually lose more money than I'd ever possessed.

Lying on my chilly bed in 2016, I marveled at this once again. Michael and his money clip. Michael, the buffoon, who'd bought me a car because he thought it would look nice with my hair. But I'd married for brains, not money, and there would be no beating back winter with luxury items now.  I closed my eyes and resurrected the memory again.

When I woke up an hour or two later, I spied something shiny on the bedside table. With a growing sense of disbelief, I realized it was a gold money clip. Where had it come from? No one in the family had ever owned such a thing. It was disconcerting, how this object had seemed to have jumped from my memory to the waking world. It could hardly be true, and yet, there it was. As if  I'd willed it into existence, a sign that I was finally overcoming the worst of the past.

It was a mystery how it had got there, until I tracked down my teenage son. He'd been messing around in the backyard rockpile, he said, when he'd spied a weathered green box among the rubble. The clip was inside, and he thought I might like it. He brought the box out of his pocket. When I looked inside, I felt a surge of horror as well as disbelief at the name on the lid.

This had gone from disconcerting to not funny awfully fast. First, an object like the one in my memory appears, now the name of something I'd been trying to block out turns up along with it. The Cosmic Joker was at it again. This required a thorough examination, so I pulled out the velvet insert from the bottom of the box and found a little paper slip.

It contained the name of the shop where it had been bought, called Things Remembered.

The Cosmic Joker had hit a home run.

...

I've given up trying to figure out who the clip belonged to, or how it came to be in our rockpile at all. Perhaps, as my great-auntie had once told me in a dream, "things materialize."  Perhaps it meant, as a friend said, that I owned the narrative now.  Maybe it was gift from the landscape itself, as a reward for my sheer persistence, and to remind me that its power isn't always a terrible thing.

I put it in my purse, and it's turned out to be good luck since.

There's only one thing left that continues to mystify me - the signature on that slip of paper. No matter how I try, I can't make the letters form themselves into a name. But that makes sense, really. the ineffable forces of nature would have an enigmatic writing style.