I loved only the weekly vocabulary list—desultory, recalcitrant, peregrination—syllables strung together like chords out of Schoenberg.
I walked in the deep snow toward the chapel, through the long stand of pines. The park, my sense of the world, was like a sealed white paper envelope.
Back in the apartment my mother made softballs from the used wrapping paper and pinched dead poinsettia leaves. Glen came over in his reindeer sweater and Bonnie Franklin haircut and we took turns posing for my new camera. She apprehended the impossibility of the friendship as rapidly, as silent and confidently, as a shutter opens and closes.
Now the pilgrims forever walk those tracks, dodging the Norfolk Southern as it blasts out of Abram's Yard.
They come out of the woods below the parking lot, behind the tiny stone chapel where Julie Nixon was married. The site is pushed up against Route 23 like a tenement with a carillon, but the grassy slope across the road—down to the white spring house and back up to the high ridge of County Line Road—is the subject of many photographs. The children with sleds and toboggans put Currier & Ives to shame.
Over their shoulders, looking back across the Schuylkill River valley, Vaux Hill Mansion is too perfect—an historic fiction, a trompe-l'œil. Beyond its tree-lined driveway the slopes of John James Audubon's home recline like firm green buttocks.
I sat with a glass of Christian Brothers Burgundy—even at 16—cheating on my homework with the Bible. Our new minister was 'Full Gospel' and I chased the Holy Spirit like a lover; but I was too intense even for Christ, who needed His space, in the end.
But Glen complimented the beauty of my glossolalia.
I loved words.
