When her father burst through her bedroom door at eight am banging on a pasta pot with a stainless steel ladle, Adeline tried to burrow her head into the recesses of her mattress like an ostrich hiding from its prey. When he started singing, “Get up! Road trip! Get up! Road trip!” in a robotic voice, keeping time on his pot drum, she knew her attempts at slumber were futile.

One of the things Adeline loved most about her parents was their spontaneous and sort of magical nature. They weren’t magic magic per se, but she always felt like the air around them, her mother in particular, seemed to twinkle and spark. While the other kids at her school spent their weekends in front of the television, she was usually exploring the kitschy mountain towns surrounding their home in the valley. So far that year, they had visited the world’s biggest kaleidoscope, an out of commission crystal mine, a giant beehive, a canal, and a colonial village believed to have been constructed entirely by witches. That was her favorite place. All of the houses were curved and pointy at the same time. Everything was just a little bit off and just a little big magical, just the way she liked it. She couldn’t decide if it was the legend or the place itself that left such an impact on her and she decided it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that when she stepped foot in the village, it felt like a magnetic force was pulling at her heart, filling it up and making her whole.

Her parents, Gus and Ruby, always woke up at the butt crack of dawn, which, in the early summer, often meant five am. It always seemed like they had gone through the motions of an entire day by the time she got up and joined them in the kitchen for breakfast. She didn’t know how they did it or where they got their energy from and she wished she had inherited it. Sometimes, if they were too impatient to wait for her to wake up, Gus would storm into her room with a pot in hand like he had that morning.

She believed that they never had a set destination in mind when they took their weekend road trips. They just got in the car and drove. Always, as they were driving out of town, Gus would take his hands off the wheel and say, “Oh Mercury Sable gods, may you lead us down the path of enlightenment and adventure” in a deep baritone voice. When she was younger, she thought the car had a mind of it its own, but at thirteen, she was old enough to understand that her father was just playing, like when he would turn on the Spanish radio station and dance to the Latin beat like a Wildman during red lights, pretending he only spoke garbled Spanish.

He was in here room, banging on the pot and singing. Her mother joined him in the doorway, waving her arms over her head so the bangles around her wrists chimed musically. Adeline sat up, hair askew from sleep, eyes bright with anticipation of that day’s adventure, declaring she was up. She took a shower and got dressed while her mother toasted some frozen waffles for her to eat on the road.

They got into the car and drove eastward. On the outskirts of town, Gus took his hands off the wheel and said, “Oh Mercury Sable gods, may you lead us down the path of enlightenment and adventure,” as he winked at her in the rearview window.

The teenage years put such a strain on the parent-child relationship. Although she was young, Adeline knew that her easy and loving relationship with her own parents was rare and sacred. While the other girls in her class were dealing with their mothers criticizing their bodies and their fathers were putting restrictions on their freedom with curfews, rules, and distrust, she was growing up in a loving, accepting, but trusting environment. Ruby and Gus had high expectations for their daughter and though that focusing on her body as an imperfect object in a woman’s eyes and a sexual object in a man’s would diminish her personality, strengths, and confidence. They wanted to make sure she understood her potential and knew she would be experiencing enough pressures about her looks at school.

That is why they put so much stock in these weekend excursions. Adeline always came away from those days with more knowledge and experience under her belt. She was learning to love the big world around her and expanding her sense of adventure. Their destinations showed her that every day places could sometimes be rooted in some other worldly phenomenon and that kept her eyes bright an her nature inquisitive. They made her confident, interesting, and strong.

But she didn’t realize their motivations. She just thought it was fun to explore. And that’s the thing: it was fun to explore. And she knew so many weird things about the part of upstate New York that she called home. And each of those things was different from the next.

The other thing she loved about these trips was just riding in the car. Early summer in New York’s countryside meant lush green rolling hills, blooming roadside lilacs, and mild temperatures. It meant sitting in the car with the windows down, hair whipping around in the sweet floral scented wind, listening to her parents sing along to their Creedence Clearwater Revival tape while she read her book of the week. She especially loved it when Gus belted out Have You Ever Seen the Rain? because it felt like he wrote it just for her—and it would later become her favorite song as an adult. She would turn to it in college, after she moved away from home, and any time she needed encouragement and love and to remember those magical childhood days in the backseat of her father’s car.

                                [Someone told me long ago there’s a calm before the storm

                                I know it’s been coming for some time

                                When it’s over, so they say, it’ll rain a sunny day

                                I know, shinin’ down like water]

That Saturday they drove for four hours before driving up a winding and skinny mountain road. With each lefthand curve, she could see the Hudson River, hundreds of feet below with tiny dots of people floating lazily down.

They stopped at a small Cliffside café that extended its dining room over the land into thin air for lunch. The bright and rickety room was happily infested with ladybugs and Adeline watched them with crawl around the window screens with wonder as she ate her grilled cheese. The old nursery rhyme came to mind and she sang,

                                Ladybug, Ladybug fly away home

                                Your house is on fire and your children are gone

                                All except one and that’s little Ann

                                For she crept under the frying pan

She asked her father if the Ladybug Café was that day’s destination and he told her he thought the Mercury Sable gods had something more in store for them. He paid their bill and led her outside. He pointed up the winding road toward the top of the mountain and said, “We’re not going to stop until we’re at the top of the world, Addie.”

The top of the world. She wondered what was at the top of the world. She needed to find out. She ran to the car and pulled at the locked door’s handle and said, “Well, come on then! We’re burning daylight!”

They got in the car and drove. She read that week’s book, L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Gus and Ruby sang along to CCR.

Two and a half hours later, they reached the top of the world. Gus parked the car on a dirt road near the summit and they got out, taking care to stretch their legs. The top of the world was marked by an enormous twisted tree, its branches extending in all directions, arching over the edge of the cliff, unafraid of the ground so many thousands of feet below. A jagged boulder stood closeby, inches away from teetering over the edge. This place felt powerful and scary at the same time. Just like with the witch village, her heart seemed to be pulled toward the tree, filling up inside of her body until she was nothing but heart.

Adeline walked to the boulder and sat down looking from the twisted old braches overhead to the base of the mountain far below. She felt like this place had to mean something and searched for a plaque. Sure enough, she found one buried beneath overgrown bushes. It was cracked and the lower half was missing, but that seemed okay to her. The top half said,

THE HANGING TREE

On this site in 18–, the Fox sisters conducted the séances that brought upon Upstate New York’s Spiritualist Movement. This site attracted notable people incl. James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, and Soujourner Truth.

“Daddy, what is a hanging tree?” she asked as Gus stood with his arm around Ruby’s shoulder, taking in the brilliant red, orange, and purple sunset over the mountains beyond.

They turned and walked over to her, happy she had found the plaque and even happier that she wanted to know more.

He said, “Well, it is a place that convicted criminals were hanged.”

She took a second to understand and said, “Oh, so people died here? That’s creepy. No wonder this place feels so weird. What’s a sea…?”

Ruby, whose aura looked extra twinkly at the top of the world, crouched down next to her and said, “A séance is a sort of magic way of talking to the spirits of the dead. Because this is a hanging tree, there are a lot of lost spirits floating around unseen in the atmosphere, looking for a way to communicate before they can move on.”

“so they talked to the dead people?”

“Yes, honey, they channeled the spirits of the dead here to talk to their own lost loved ones. We brought you here to tell you that you can do that too, if you wanted, because the Fox sisters are your ancestors.”

“So I’m magic?”

Ruby smiled and said, “In a way, I guess. It means you are different, inquisitive, strong. There is something special about you that no one can take away.”

Gus added, “And it will always be there. It has been passed down for generations and it is in you.”

Adeline scrunched her nose, considering this. She said, “So that’s why the magic witch places we go to feel so much like home?”

“Could be,” said Gus.

She didn’t know if she should believe them, but she liked the sound of it. She liked thinking that she had abilities no one else had. It made her feel more comfortable in her own skin.

                                [I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?

                                I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?

                                Comin’ down a sunny day]