Melora Wolff Joy There was a ladder. And above the ladder, an open door. I saw my cousin peering down at me. She beckoned for me to climb up. The barn below, where I hesitated, was dank and musty, long empcy of animals and in the first apparent stages of decay. At one end of the barn, morning sunlight shone through the top of a half-opened door, and at the other end as well-the day was still there, reachable and easy, but I stood in a dark center. "Come on!" Jessica said. She had managed the ascent up the
ladder by herself. I climbed slowly, reaching across the wide discance between the rungs, watching my own hands, and then Jessica (my age but brave and strong) reached for my arms and pulled me over the lip of the barn floor. Oh, the world smelled so sweet! The sweemess was too much, a solid thing that cloaked our bodies, and we rolled through the rotting hay, flung it at one another, burrowed into it, laughing, and my head was aching with the seem, the air was a visible soft cloud of yellow and blue fuzz that could be pulled deep into the body and held. Jessica pried open the loft window, which swung out, let~ ting the sunlight and fresh air inside. The hay turned gold instead of grey, and there was a rush of wings as swallows started darting and fluttering around us. There were dozens of them waking and diving toward the light, out into the open air and then back in again. My uncle called up to us from the ordinary gravel far below, "What are you kids doing!" We lay on our stomachs at the window and stared down at him. From up there, he looked like a boy in his proper shirt and pressed jeans, a ciry boy left out of all the fun. "Lunch is ready," he called to us, and waved. He headed back toward the house, sing~ ing. I have concluded my fortieth year, and I am waking each day to that sweet~smelling thought that won't quit me as so many of my thoughts have done. It comes to me for some reason I feel I must grab onto, before it's too late. It was summer or spring. There was a barn adjacent to a house on a road in upstate New York. It was early in the day, and early in the 1960s. Or else it was none of these things at all. But I believe that the morning in the loft was the first time in my life that I knew joy. I knew it-that is to say, I looked out of the loft window into the morning and thought, I am happier now than I 126
FUGUE #Z7