Snowpeople+in+Flight

Snowpeople in Flight ** That summer, I had odd neighbors. They moved to Galena on the seventeenth of June, and it was strange, because no one recalled seeing any moving trucks pull up in the drive in front of their new house. But one morning, I peered out the window to see a tall, unfamiliar boy standing on the adjacent lawn, watering the hedge. “Hey!” I yelled from the doorway. He looked up, his eyes flickering around restlessly. “Oh. Hi.” “Did you just move in?” “Yesterday,” he said, and returned to his hedge. Every Saturday after that, once he was finished watering, we ventured out back behind our houses and spent time knocking down pinecones with rocks from a nearby pond. The first thing I confided in my odd neighbor that summer, as we sank behind the olive gray foliage, was that I never wanted to have children. He nodded and agreed that most children were insolent little monsters, and stated frankly that he wanted nothing to do with them until he was too old to care. “Everyone likes to assume that they’ll grow up and get married and raise families. But I’ve seen what marriage does to people. Everything’s fine, at first, and then they start to grow bored of each oth—” “And fat.” “What?” “They grow fat, too.” He pressed on. “And then after a while, you just have two people sitting around a dinner table and the only thing they can even think to say to each other is ‘pass the butter.’ And they don’t divorce, because they’re too goddamn used to things being the way they are.” “So you won’t get married, either?” “It’s not something I’ll look into. Besides, any notion of settling down would interfere with my plans.” I asked him what his plans were, and he said he wanted to be an Eskimo. “An //Eskimo//?” He nodded solemnly. “You mean, move to Alaska ?” He stared at me. “I’d like to live among the Inuits for at least five years, long enough to learn the language, and then perhaps by the time I’m twenty-five, I’ll be able to—” “You’d live in an igloo!” He smiled. “Uh, yes, I guess I would. But that’s not wha—” “Wouldn’t you get cold?” “Why, no. Igloos have very warm interiors. In fact, snow happens to be one of the best—” “And you’d have a caribou coat, wouldn’t you? And a fishing hole?” “Fish would be a main dietary component. And I suppose I’d have to wear some type of fur clothing.” He sighed and rested his back against the bark of the pine. “Of course, all that’s only if I’m lucky. Inuits rarely welcome outsiders into the community.” “They don’t?” “It’s a very traditional society. Hell, I’ll be lucky if I can spend a year there before one of them tries to marry me off.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “They do that?” “Arranged marriages? Of course.” “But you said you don’t want to be married.” “Correct.” “But then wha—” “So I’ll stick it out as long as I can before they try to marry me off, and then I’ll get the hell out.” He jerked his head about his neck in a careless little gesture, then sat up very straight, sobering himself. I threw him a sidelong glance. “That’s your plan?” “That’s my plan.” He sighed. “What’s yours?” “My plan?” “Well, you must have a plan.” “I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve never thought about it.” We sat in silence for a while, idly tossing pinecones, not looking at each other. After some time, he made like he was going to walk away, but only went to retrieve a rock that had fallen behind a tree. He came back and sat in front of me, passing the rock between his fingers. “You know what I really want to do?” I said suddenly. He glanced up. “What?” I sat forward. “Have you seen those people? They go to the city and set up on the sidewalk and they paint everything that happens around them. For about a month. And then they up and leave for the next city.” “You mean a…traveling artist?” “I want that,” I said, “and I want to paint foxgloves and lilies and Venus flytraps. A whole damn garden.” I could feel myself smiling. My tower was built. My neighbor smiled too. “You can’t have a garden in the city,” he said. “You can have tar.” 