windblown.

i remember the day we drove four hours in our dodge caravan that smelled of old tuna sandwiches stuffed into crevices to get to billings montanta, the closest mecca of civilization to wyoming and home of our first experiences with costco. man, we loved costco. we would always beg my dad to get one of those huge orange flat carts to push around so we could ride in style while keeping an eye out for the next old sample lady to ambush. but we always got the normal carts for normal families and got our boring old groceries in bulky bulk to last us the next several months until we could get to billings again.
this trip, however, was monumental.it was near the beginning of our stay in wyoming, and dad was about to make good on his end of the bargain. in order to pry us away from our beloved solar-heated house in the midst of the sierra nevada mountains (home to the best trees in the world for making forts), he had told us that he would buy us a trampoline. a real one, not a baby one.
that sold us completely, and we once again begin packing our belongings.
at costco, surrounded by cardboard boxes and concrete walls, we saw our bribe hanging high on the wall: it was so big you could have sleepovers on it and it was so shiny and black you could jump as high as the tree tops.
we were giddy with excitement, and the trip back to cody had never felt as long. as soon as we got home we bullied my dad into putting it up right away, which turned out to be an ordeal of metal pipes and springs that could severely pinched fingers if handled incorrectly. candyce and i backed slyly away and just watched expectantly as lindsay and dad grunted and pulled and pushed our dream into a reality.
we were officially rich: we had a trampoline.
from that day on for the next 18 months we were on that trampoline whenever we could be. we gloried in our new status of luxury and endless entertainment, and our isolation didn't feel as claustrophobic anymore. now we just had more time to jump on the trampoline.
cody was the windiest place i had ever been in my short life, and for the first few weeks we lived there it was hard for all of us to sleep at night. it always sounded so angry outside, and it felt that way too. as a result of the wind, we learned that we had to chain our trampoline to the ground in order for it not to be blown away, and we learned that wind is the best thing in the world to help you fly away.
when it got really windy outside, where you could hear it whistling around the corners of your house and saw the long brown grass flattened first one way and then another, you knew it was time to go outside and jump. we would start at on end of the trampoline, launch ourselves straight up in the air, and find ourselves at the opposite end of the trampoline by the time we came down. we were flying, we were really flying. we just had to be careful that we didn't fly off to far, because the wind didn't make the ground any less hard, and it didn't feel very magical to get dirt ground into your knees.
we did have sleepovers on the trampoline, and we would wake up in the middle of the night to find everyone crammed together in the middle of the trampoline, and all night long you would try to get back out to the edge but in your sleep you just rolled back into the center, back to where your sisters were, and eventually you stopped fighting it and fell asleep with your face smashed into someones arm or knee.
we never got exceptionally good at doing tricks on the trampoline, except for maybe lindsay. lindsay could actually do flips and candyce and i would crouch on the edge of the trampoline, watching wide-eyed as she tried to "land it" on her feet. i was terrible at flips and such because i had such a terror of feeling my neck crunch underneath me that i could never bring myself to fully flip. i would land on my back and sigh, knowing deep in my heart that i would never fully flip around, and knowing that it was okay. candcye was never very interested in performing acrobatic feats, and instead she created elaborate games of make-believe that all took place on the trampoline, and candyce and i (lindsay could never be bothered to participate in anything that wasn't a contest) would bounce around on all fours pretending we were ponies looking for our moms or foxes that needed to get out of the jungle or dolphins that had just met and were going to be best friends.
sometimes we would just bounce up and down and look at the few trees around and see how far our eyes could make it, but they never saw much more than long brown grass and barbed wire fences. we created contests for ourselves that involved singing as loud and as good as we could while bouncing so high that we flew. we recreated our facorite commercials or funny parts of movies, cracking each other up with our impersonations. my very favorite one to do, the one that brought the house down with my sisters, was my impersonation of a foster's commercial. in my best, most outlandish australian accent, i would scream out: "FOSTERS--IT'S AUSTRALIAN FOR BEER!" and we would collapse on the trampoline, laughing at how ridiculous australian people sound.
i think my parents thought that the trampoline would be a good way to get us excited about another transition in our life, and that it would be a good source of exercise for us.
really, it was our place to go and hang out with each other, to escape the loneliness of being new in an ugly and dry place, a place where the wind became friendly and the possibilities seemed endless. we were pioneer children, or pioneer ponies, our faces straight into wind, our chins lifted high, we were flying over the wildness of it all.
in all of our family pictures from this period, our hair always looks long and bedraggled.
we were forever being windblown, and we loved it.