On the Yahara

"To make the setting truly a poem the full moon rose over the pine clad summits that walled us in, and glowed upon our campfire, revealing the stilled herds upon the hillside and casting fantastic shadows among the rocks that might have been Pan and the Centaurs joined in their nightly dance."  – Richard Halliburton, from The Glorious Adventure: Through the Mediterranean in the Wake of Odysseus




1

Cory looked out the window of her 6th grade classroom up on the very top floor and all she saw was snow flakes the size of cereal shooting down sideways across the frame. Wouldn't have been so bad except it was mid April. Living along the Yahara River at Lake Monona they had already seen beautiful open water, blue as sky, ducks landing and wobbling from the river over to Mr. Towerd's house on Riverside. Plans for the summer had already taken place. In two months her and grandpa would be up on those mountains that he had been talking about for the last few months. Cory moved in with Grandpa temporarily and her life had most certainly changed. For one thing, she looked forward to open water again and for another she looked forward to mountains and saw pictures of what grandpa called the "Alpine Staircase" and thought that maybe it was a magical place full of strange green lands, not like here, in this classroom, surrounded by loud boys talking about loud music and strange games they played in their basement.

Cory walked right of the classroom that morning and she figured, looking back over it some months later, that that was the start of it all, the start of her picking her own 12-year old life right up off the ground and carrying it over to where it needed to be. She left her iPhone in her locker in her bag because she wouldn't need it anymore. Mr. Hanson had been out of the room for a minute. Shana and Sadie were talking over by the radiator and the boys didn't notice a thing. She walked right out into the hall, down the three sets of stairs and out the front door. That was it. The snow hit her directly on the face but it felt much more interesting real and live than it had watching it in the window.  From the very corner of the Koeble-Holder School, she could actually see grandpa's house. What was it she knew right at that very moment? How to explain it? It went something like this, so very hard to describe at 12 years old, but it was there alright, it was there. Grandpas house would be school from here on out. She would be the teacher. That's all there really was to it. She was learning things just walking out the front door. The old riverside oaks were tall and leafless still, covered in a thin white beard of snow at the elbow of the limbs. As she crossed the bridge to the other side of the river, she could hear those big wide flakes hit the river and watched them as they floated for a mere second across the top then fade into the green of the river.