As children, my younger sister Lisa and I would often play a game in the summer called Pioneer. Working partly from the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and partly from books in the American Girls series, each morning we loaded our toy wagon with provisions, strapped our dolls into their sun bonnets, and slowly made the long journey across the backyard to set up camp in our mother’s rhododendron bushes. The rhododendrons were the ideal place to play in our backyard, because aside from the porch it was the only place with any shade. Having grown there for decades, the bushes reached such proportions that both my sister and I could fit in the space between them and have the branches act as a little roof over our heads. It was a primo spot, especially after our brother and his friends would inevitably encroach upon the civilization of the back porch. After spreading our blankets on the ground and making sure the dolls were sleeping, my sister and I would plant our crops so that we would be prepared for winter time on the prairie. Basketballs served as pumpkins, little piles of cut grass were haystacks to feed to our imaginary horses, and one time Steve got very upset when we took his new football to serve as our Thanksgiving turkey. Peace was only restored when he and the other seven-year-olds were invited to the feast.
They were good times, but of course prairie life, even in a child’s imagination, isn’t immune from hardship- one afternoon saw a plague of ants invade our cracker supply, leaving us stranded without snacks until Mom got home. Another afternoon my sister couldn’t understand why I wanted to try our fortunes farther west at the Big Stump, and she elected to stay in the rhododendrons with her doll family while Rainbow Bear and I moved on. “Sometimes you have to leave to try for something better,” I’d told her.
Years later, shortly after I finished college, my sister helped me load provisions into a different kind of wagon as I got ready to move west for my first full time job. It was a Thursday afternoon, and the landlord of my new apartment had called that morning to say if I could get to Cleveland by six that evening I could have the keys a few days early, so the two of us were shoveling as much of whatever we thought would be most useful into the back of my purple Sundance. Books, sweaters, toilet paper, sleeping bag, a lamp, the box of food staples my mother had fortunately assembled the day before (when I had planned to leave that Saturday) – all were piled more or less haphazardly in the back seat so I could try to beat the clock on a three hour drive. Just before I was ready to pull out, Lisa came out from my room with a scruffy looking teddy bear.
“Here,” she said as she tucked Rainbow into my arm, “you’ll need this tonight. Trust me.”
I didn’t think much about it as I sped towards the setting sun, just barely making it to the landlord’s office before she closed for the evening. I didn’t think of it as I lugged those first few boxes up to the teeny one bedroom apartment that would be my home until the following February, or as I ran to the nearby Walmart for cleaning supplies, or as I spent the next few hours scrubbing the cupboards-MY cupboards, I kept reminding myself. That first night alone in the city, I had no cell reception, no TV, no furniture, only a small desk lamp for light and few of my most basic and prized possessions. I had a first meal of saltine crackers with peanut butter, the significance of which was not lost on me as I thought back to our pioneer games from long before.
When I finally tucked into my sleeping bag I laid awake for hours. Had I made the right choice? How often would I really get to see my family again? What if the job didn’t work out? With Scott my only remaining friend in Cleveland, what if that didn’t work out? Would the drunken guy outside ever stop screaming? (Answer to that one – no, but the cops took him away about 3 in the morning).
What had I done?
In the tiny bit of moonlight that filtered in through the window blinds, I caught a glimpse of Rainbow’s faded plastic eyes, her sun bonnet strings frayed, looking every bit the willing pioneer who had accompanied me on countless treks across the backyard prairie.
Sometimes you have to take the chance and try for something better.
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