I drain the dregs of my espresso martini and burst out laughing.
“Remember when she fried her hair with the hair straightener?”
My oldest friends join me in laughter, as the rain pours outside and the soft glow of the restaurant makes all our complexions look like teenage skin.
“I never liked Jackie,” admits Jen, shrugging in defeat. “She always bothered me.”
The fear of Covid has been enough repressed that my friends and I – mothers all, and rarely able to spare an evening to socialize, so it’s an exciting occasion – have ventured to a café for dinner and drinks. We are currently laughing over obscure recollections from grade school and gossiping about where our old schoolmates have ended up, now that we are all 40. My tolerance down, I am feeling this martini, and I am also feeling enamored with the world.
“Remember when the Girl Scouts met in Jackie’s basement?” Sarah questions.
I nod, a sense memory of old carpet and wood grain and the chattering of little girls flashing through my hippocampus.1
Jen, Sarah, and I have been friends since Love & Learn preschool, the natural consequence of growing up in a close-knit community and a small school district. We parted ways for college, and we all live varying distances from Center City Philadelphia, but we rediscovered our appreciation for one another’s company while we were all having babies, and we amalgamate regularly to continue our near-forty-year relationship.
“I remember a fair bit from Daisies,” I admit, noting the irony.2 “I remember when your mom was the troop leader in elementary school, too.”
Jen and Sarah begin to reminisce about the Girl Scout experience – they are recalling things like sewing contests and fashion shows and homemade dolls, which just goes to show you how different the Girl Scout experience is from the Boy Scout experience – but I am suddenly lost in thought, struck by a memory from the early 90s.
I’m trying to figure out – not for the first time – if this memory was borne of reality or a dream. It’s something I have retained over the years, never quite sure if I actually participated in the scene, a cloudy image of trees and wooden cabins and the shadows thrown by children at play.
And the crosses.
“What is it?” asks Sarah, noticing my silence.
“Ok, this is going to sound weird,” I begin, and then – struck by precisely how strange this question is indeed going to sound – I have to start again.
“Did… did we go camping in, like, second grade or something… and… did we find a pet cemetery?”
“C’mere, you guys!”
It is a glorious Saturday in the very heart of autumn. The forest is quiet, sunlight filtering through the rainbow of leaves still remaining on the branches. We are living in the midst of the Lyme Disease scare – the Satanic Panic of the tick world, straight from Connecticut – and the itinerary for our weekend included a sternly-worded warning to tuck our pants into our socks.
It was the 90s, after all.
“Guys, come see this!”
I might be eight; I might be nine; this might not even have happened.
We are Daisy Troop # 505, and we are on a camping trip.
“You GUYS!”
I do not remember who was out there caterwauling at the perimeter of our campsite, but I do remember running out of the wooden cabin and trampling through the grass – a whole field of it that ended abruptly at the tree line – and I remember the thick woods beyond.
“Look what I found!”
It’s a faceless voice in my head who beckons us all, and anything it says next has faded away into the ether of memory (is this a memory?) and time. What remains is the mental image, something I see from above, like this is all a Hitchcock film and the camera is dollying out3 – a dozen little girls clustered together at the periphery of a deep forest, intently studying the ground.
I see faces I remember – Jen and Sarah, our friend Susan, the ones who would go on to be the Mean Girls in our high school – and other faces that could belong to anyone, or no one, or someone I’ve forgotten. I see the wonderment of discovery and the shock of what has been revealed. I see the cabins, and the trees, and the sunbeams painting this entire scene. And I see the graves.
“Oh, my god! Is it really? Oh, look at that one! Oh, gross!”
There are gasps and squeals, hands over mouths and eyes wide with disbelief. Before us lies an untidy collection of rough wooden crosses, stabbed into the ground at varying intervals, a multitude in number with no rhyme or reason to their arrangement. Some are painted and some are carved, but they all feature a name: Max; Zeus; Good Kitty; Spot. There are other names, too – which I overlook or which I fail to read or which don’t actually exist in the first place – but what I remember most clearly is the air of auspice hanging over the entire vista.
We have found a pet cemetery here at the edge of the woods; and even at eight or nine, we understand exactly how creepy that is.4
The weekend will continue – games and hikes and cooking around the campfire – and we will enjoy it. But we also will not be able to resist the draw of the pet cemetery, returning again and again to the cluster of graves, pulled in by a healthy childhood interest in the macabre. That night in the wooden cabins, we will tell ghost stories by flashlight, then lay down to sleep surrounded by the sounds of nature and the ghosts of Good Kitty and Spot.
We will return to grade school and the Daisies and – in my case – our formative traumas.5 We will all grow and grow up and grow apart. We will get married and procreate and age and – eventually – die and be interred in a (human) cemetery of our own. A lot of life will accumulate in those years,6 and a lot of it will be forgotten. But through it all, the image of the crosses will remain, growing infinitesimally more hazy – hazy like a dream, hazy like a vision, hazy because this might not even have happened? – but never departing my mind’s eye.
Because nothing stays with a child like their first brush with mortality.
“…but did we ever go camping in, like, second grade or something… and… did we find a pet cemetery?”
I realize how absurd this sounds, so I am already ready to laugh it off in a self-conscious moment of embarrassment.
“Oh, yeah,” says Jen calmly.
“Wait, what?” I stutter. “We did? You remember that?”
“Yup,” she affirms. “That camping trip in elementary school.”
I am flabbergasted, so certain was I that I had made up the pet cemetery and conjured it into my own reality through the sheer power of imagination.
“Wow…” I draw, grappling with this news, considering how it feels to have my experience validated. “I always kind of thought I made it up.”
“Nope,” Jen says cheerfully. “I remember you were way into it, which turned out to be totally on brand.”7
That is something I do not remember – I’ve always felt eerily detached from the entire scene, like I’m watching myself participate in a play onstage – but I have no doubt that it’s true. There must be some reason it has stayed with me all these years, after all.
The waiter comes over and I decline another espresso martini; we all have children to put to bed. Jen, Sarah, and I exchange hugs and part ways, promising to meet again the next time life calms down. To me, our friendship is not simply a shared appreciation for the occasional cocktail with similarly-aged women. Rather, it is representative of coming full-circle, of coming out on the other side after you were almost lost in the darkness.8 And the memory of the pet cemetery, in all its creepy, hazy glory, now remains a milestone, a lamppost alongside my journey, a companion through it all that reminds me whence I came and how far I still can go.
I drive home, tickled somewhat inexplicably that I have been right all along, that my Daisy troop did find a pet cemetery, that this picture which has existed in the bowels of my memory for so long has also existed in the timeline of the world. I reflect on the course of my life since then, the changes I’ve seen and the sickness I’ve endured, the path from childhood to adulthood and all the growth in between. I think about my childhood; I think about my children. And then I realize how lucky I am – how lucky to be healthy, how lucky to have stumbled into a life full of love and joy and gratitude – despite everything that’s happened along the way.
However, when it inevitably becomes time for my family to bury our own beloved kitty, you can bet I’m steering far clear of the local pet cemetery. I do not want my children to have their own haunting recollection of graves in the ground, a vision of crosses and animal bones and the tears of loss. I do not want this specter as a formative memory in their heads; I do not want them to yet witness this bittersweet grief.
Because nothing stays with a mother like her child’s first brush with mortality.
Notes
1 I had a rough time of it as a kid, thanks to relentless bullying, undiagnosed mental illness, and childhood trauma. A late bloomer, it took me a long time to learn who I was and who I wanted to be. Getting to adulthood was a rocky path that required enormous amounts of effort to endure, and I harbor no small degree of resentment for the hand of cards I was dealt by the genetic lottery.
2 There is not much about my hometown about which I recall fondly. Thanks to compartmentalization and a healthy dose of trauma responses, I don’t think about the circumstances of my upbringing very often. But I do have distinct recollections of the Daisy troop, perhaps because it was lodged within an era of my life when I still felt worthwhile; when I still felt safe.
3 See that scene in The Birds when Jessica Tandy discovers the dead farmer.
4 We were too young to have read the novel by Stephen King, or to have seen its movie adaptation. But there is something innately off-kilter about pet cemeteries, something alluring and ghastly, something sweet and sad. It is a place where so much love has gone to die, and that leaves behind an imprint of energy human beings cannot help but notice.
5 Public school was a nightmare. My home life was a nightmare. College was really a nightmare. It would take until the age of 28 to figure out why my brain was trying to kill me; then I would have to unlearn everything I’d ever learned about coping mechanisms, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness.
6 For me, things will get bad, and then they will get worse; then there will be a metric ton of therapy and tears and work; and then things will get better. It will take years; it will cost me a great deal. I will learn a lot.
7 I’m not saying I’m goth, and I’m not saying I’m a nihilist. But I do tend towards the dark and mysterious, towards the fascinating and enigmatic. As Tyrion Lannister said, “I have a tender spot in my heart for cr*pples, bastards, and broken things,” and my lived experience has constructed an entire self itself around that tender spot. Plus, I did grow up to venerate Stephen King, so that probably says something, too.
8 These days, the dark is no longer all-encompassing; these days, I don’t have to fight quite as hard to find the light.
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of Pray for Us Sinners, a fiction collection with Alien Buddha Press, and An Oral History of One Day in Guyana, a chapbook from Bullsh*t Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Parentheses Journal, and elsewhere. shannonfrostgreenstein.com @ShannonFrostGre @zarathustra_speaks
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