Louisville. 

In my childhood bedroom, my mother painted a border on the wall around my window. Toy alphabet blocks in pastel blues, pinks, and yellows, alternating with tiny teddy bears. All hand-painted. We didn’t move until the week I turned 16, and I didn’t let her paint over the border, even when the realtor told her to freshen up every room.

“No,” I yelled, not meaning to, when she asked if I wanted her to paint my room before the house went on the market. 

“Okay,” she said, turning quickly away, maybe not wanting to know what teenage trigger she’d tripped.

It felt like she was asking me to leave before everyone else, like I had to vacate my room before the new owners even bought it. But it was mine still, not theirs. Maybe she thought it would be fine, since we couldn’t see most of the border anymore anyway, that wall in particular collaged over with pop band posters from magazines, scraps of wrapping paper, pieces from art class, and CD covers.

By that point, something deep down in me understood that it was structural, all of it. The paint, the posters, these layers. Structural. It’d be hazardous to the integrity of the building to remove them, yet.

Smith Hall.

The walls weeped, all summer long. Smith Hall—the men’s hall during the academic year—didn’t have air conditioning, and our beautiful campus glowed green, thick, and humid. It may have sat on top of the hill, a jewel above the Blue River Valley, but that summer I couldn’t catch a breeze or a break. I’d shower in the late afternoon after giving walking tours for the Admissions Office, and my hair wouldn’t dry until the next morning, back in the ice box of Admissions.

One day, Nancy wasn’t at the front desk when I entered, dripping, of course. The counselors walked behind and around her desk all day, trying to piece together their own schedules from the notes Nancy kept. She was gone a day—under the weather, I guess—and they were undone. When I asked for instruction, Kyle snapped, “We’re a little off today, Caitie. Just hang tight.” No tours on the agenda. I played solitaire for three hours and took a long lunch.

Cedar Creek.

The fridge was the biggest thing I’d seen float by, and it had me doing a double-take. Most of the debris looked like debris: broken boards, ripped tarps, trash and containers. There was no mistaking the fridge, though. It looked how I might have drawn it in a cartoon, face up and spinning in the eddies, bobbing as the depth changed along its path downriver. 

The Otoe people and the French lived here before we did, and they both called it some version of the name Platte River. Platte means flat, and it inspired our state’s name. Nebraska is somewhere between Otoe and Omaha for “flat water.” The fridge should have been absurd. Some years, I could cross the river to the next county over and only get wet up to my knees. It was the other years we had to watch out for, though. When everything’s so flat, where would the water go?

Farmers in their pickups drove by the house most afternoons, wanting to cruise along the river road and assess the damage for themselves. I sat on a patio chair and watched them and the river go by. The Platte stretches the whole state, coming our way right before it trickles into the Missouri. How far would the fridge make it? I wondered. Should one of us clamber aboard, pry open the freezer, and throw a message in? Make it a vessel for something? It seemed to be an occasion worth marking even if I didn’t know why. I sat still while the fridge went by, but I felt moved.