When I was younger, I’d like to think it was over the age of seven and under the age of nine, I had my first encounter with the foster youth system. It was in Tahoe, Truckee to be exact. All the events in their entirety of that night are walled off somewhere in my mind, perhaps forever gone or just tucked away, waiting for whatever trigger will release the memory like a bullet. But I do remember a few things, moments, feelings. Some important emotional aspects.

I remember hiding behind a car in a parking lot, perhaps because I got out of the cop car; cops put the kids in the car, kids wonder out of the cop car if they don’t lock it, or even if they do…

From behind a car I caught a glimpse of my Mother being handcuffed and taken away. Her only crime. She was crazy. Well let’s be more socially and medically accurate, she was mentally ill. In one of her violent fits, I saw my small petite Mother thrashing around, screaming in the cold night air like it was the last battle of a war against suffering, one that eventually would take her life in the end. But this was not the last battle, but she did make a good dent in the hood of the police car and, sadly when I did see her again, the cuts and bruises on her wrists were so deep they were pits from the cuffs gouging, almost like the handcuffs melted into her wrists then were removed. Handcuffs like a waffle iron.

That night, after all was said and done, my Mother taken away to the Truckee hospital emergency and psych ward, most likely, and my Father off to the county jail, my Sister and I were taken to a home in Truckee in the middle of the night. When we got there. I don’t remember much of the first night, but what I do remember was walking up a winding staircase, these stair case styles seemed popular architecture in the 90’s for mountain homes, into a small room with a bunk bed. I got bottom bunk, Kristina got top. After the short, hand off, “Hey it’ll be ok, you’re safe, let’s get you into bed now,” spin. I got into bed, at a strangers house, in a bed that who knows how many kids slept there before me. What was their story? What is my story?

I started to cry. My Sister never cried, and if she did, I never heard her. My memory clouds, but I think she would try to stop me sometimes, but mostly if I recall, she didn’t usually try, or she just ignored my crying. Whatever the reason was, I don’t care or hold anything against her. She is three years older than me, and at the time, going through her own emotions. I started to cry loud and hard. I couldn’t keep it in. I wanted my parents. I wanted my stuffed animal that was a wolf, I called him shadow. I wanted my Dad. I wanted very badly to be in a freezing car with my family rather than this strange place. Eventually the woman of the house came in, and tried to comfort me. In the end, I fell a sleep.

Tonight, over 20 years later I can’t sleep. Every time I go to lay down I start to cry. My skin gets flushed, my temperature rises, and I just get overwhelmed with grief and tears. I was laying on my left side peering down the hallway, and I was instantly brought back to that night in Truckee when the county “Officials” put us into temporary foster care. I’ve been in many foster homes, good, some bad, some just different. Some of the families that took me or my Sister in, I still keep in contact with, some I don’t, as the same for the many foster Brothers and Sisters I had. Like all people in your life. They are here, then they’re gone.

I spent my teen youth in one particular home, from the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-one. They’re good people, and the story of them and me is one for another write. They were the home I was at when I was going through all that horrid teenage stuff that teenagers go through, or, well, most? It was an important place to me, and this past week the man of that house, my foster Father passed away. It was Wednesday, June 24, 2015. June 25^th, is my biological Father’s birthday, he passed away in 1996 of cancer, my biological Mother passed away last year, and it will be a year come this Tuesday, June 30^th. It seems like this is a cluster of time, which is a cluster of loss.

There’s a highway half way around the world, they call it the Highway of Death and it’s between Kuwait and Iraq. It’s officially known as highway 80, as I’ve seen noted in a few places. If you click on the link, you can see the history behind the name. The link I find, is the 80. My own personal reference, is out North America highway, I-80. I-80 was a passage that mapped my childhood in one facet, from the cities of the bay area, through Sacramento and up to Lake Tahoe and Reno, Nevada. I spent many hours looking out a car window traveling on I-80, and when we got to the granite pass, (This is what I called it as a child, but I will include hyper-links to some sites that have wonderful pictures and good content) I felt like it was what the end of the world would look like. As if we traveled through the places no human could master. So naive, the fantasies of a child. It almost felt like death loomed out in those mountains. The Emigrant Gap, and the Donner Party, they seemed like the celebrity ghosts, but over the years, I’m sure death took not only human life as the wind smoothed the stone, all of nature in it’s wildness.

When I discovered the historical part of highway 80 in the context of 2003, I made a slight hum noise and pondered. At the thought of each 80. One to the mind of a child, me, who found her highway 80, this passage to be magical, haunting of wilderness and freedom, the gates and walls to the place she called home. The other, representation of humanities folly.

I don’t know where or what point if any I’m getting to, but it’s almost five in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m thinking of my Mother, My Father, and the man who stepped into be my Father for a time being. I’m sitting in a bed typing right now that is not my bed. I’m house sitting for friends away on a trip. When I am done house sitting, I will go back to a place that I am temporarily staying, that is not my home as well. Many of my things were damaged in a recent event, and what remains is packed up in plastic crates. My anxiety is always high when I think about what remnants I have left in those tubs soaking up the smell of melted molded plastic tub. I’m thinking about home, what it is to me, and is it strange to think that home could be in a persons arms, or standing on a cliff facing oblivion? I feel homeless again, like I did in that age range somewhere between seven and ten.

But it could be worse, these woes I lament. I know I am not dust on The Highway of Death, or gripping at a hopeful sliver of stone on the great mountains of my dreams. But still, it is relative. And I always devalue my pain by simply stating the obvious that it could be worse. Some times its not the best to do. It could, it can, and some day it might be, worse. I’ve lived through a lot, some people who have been there since I was young, wonder how I am either not a drug attack, messed up (Well I’m pretty weird), in prison or simply just have not committed suicide. To myself I say as I cry, I cry so hard. I say be strong. To all you lonely people out there, that cry or sit silently in pain or are lonesome. Find a story to take your mind out of the depths from the rise and falls, mountains of life.

Links to see some pictures of the Norther California Sierra Nevada https://pantilat.wordpress.com/tag/tahoe/

http://www.calexplornia.com/destinations/sierra-nevada/the-crystal-range-and-the-crystal-basin/