Shinnecock Voices: When the Nest Has Changed

My first time back home from college, I cried because too much had changed.

It was Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend — the first long weekend of my very first semester of college. I booked my train and ferry tickets as soon as I saw the break on my calendar. I had only been at school for about six weeks, and I was a baby bird ready to fly right back to the nest.

I had three days home. Three days in the comforting arms of predictability — the sound of my father’s old truck grumbling down the driveway, the smell of my mother’s shampoo, the view of the water from the sliding glass doors in the living room.

To my surprise, it seemed predictability left the moment I left home for college. In the six weeks I was away, my parents started cooking meals they never had before, the storage closet across from my room was turned into a bathroom, and the thing that threw me off the most was the new flooring in the upstairs hallway.

Everything under my feet was smoother, but my big right toe was used to the way the very top stair was raised just a knuckle above the floor — a hitch that served as a warning to my feet that they were about to travel down the 14 steps in front of them. It’s the type of thing I didn’t realize was there until it was gone. All weekend long as I’d walk out of my room, take a few small steps to my right and inch my toes to the first stair, there was nothing there for them to feel. The floor had extended an extra slipper length, and at the end of those extra inches my toes dropped into open air. My heart dropped with them too. Why couldn’t things just stay the way they were?

After that, every time I went back home there was something new.

Eventually they took the tub in the downstairs bathroom out. There are still some days I go to sit on the edge of the tub to paint my nails and have to catch myself midair.

My mother’s passion for gardening has grown. There’s now a greenhouse bursting at the seams with sunlight, lavender and bushels of basil. When the colder seasons come, she brings a tiny lemon tree into my old bedroom.

My father no longer drives a truck with a monster for an engine.

This past spring break — my last spring break as an undergrad — my grandmother told me she dyed her hair before I came home. She said she didn’t want all her new gray to scare me.

Her comment threw me more than any strands of gray ever have.

Every time I imagine home, I imagine it the way it was when I was 7 — fire engine red bathroom walls and the forest green living room carpet that made us all sneeze. The playhouse that still had both yellow swings. My legs were short enough to pump back and forth, and if I tried real hard I swore I could’ve landed in the big oak tree.

Sometimes I still imagine the black house phone on the side table by my favorite chair. We don’t have a landline anymore, but we still use the number for rewards at Rite Aid. In August, we used to hear the drums from the powwow grounds all the way from my house on the east side of the territory. Daddy says there’s a new sound system down at the grounds. Now I have to close my eyes and try to feel the bass through my feet.

I remember my siblings and cousins standing in our driveway, ready to walk and bike to the powwow grounds. Even if I had known how to ride a bike when I was 5, I still probably wouldn’t have been allowed to ride over with the sticky bunch. Instead, I would stand on the back steps, watch them ride away and wait to grow older.

When I was 7, Uncle Wayne had a bike for me, but my parents said it’d be years until I was big enough to ride it. I had to wait to get older in that boring way. I always felt late to the next milestone. Bella tied my slippers for me in dance class.

I practiced floating while the other kids swam in the deep end. When I did finally learn how to ride a bike at 9, that too-big bike was still too big. By then, my parents had already bought me a bike that was just right for me, but in my head, that big kid bike was all I wanted. So I waited some more. And some more.

Uncle Wayne passed away when I was 20. One day I asked Mama about that too-big bike. “It’s the one you have now,” she shook her head with confusion. Glittery purple paint, green stripe and janky gears, I had already spent four sticky summers on that big kid bike. I didn’t even realize it was the one I had been waiting for.

One day you just wake up and you’re there. You’ve grown older in that bittersweet way, and everything has taken its next form, including you.

Gram, if you’re reading this — and I know you are — let your hair go gray. I won’t be scared. I promise.

Asia Cofield is a citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. She’s currently pursuing her Master of Arts in Teaching at Brown University.

“Shinnecock Voices” is a monthly column in which citizens of the Shinnecock Nation share stories and opinions and discuss the projects and campaigns they’re working on, to allow readers an inside view into their incredible community.