[Nat]

I remember another Natalie - the roommate and lover of my dad and stepmom for a time. I was maybe 8 years old and she was a musician, tough, with short blond hair. She sang and played the guitar. I remember one night going to see her perform, going into a dark room behind a dark wooden door and seeing her there bathed in a bright light, singing and playing, full of grace.

I remember waking up before the adults, tiptoeing into the living room, carefully putting her guitar in my lap, attempting to sound out something pretty, but mostly just holding the guitar and enjoying the magic feeling of imagining being able to play it and sing under a spotlight in a dark room. I remember liking her guitar picks, remember the feel of them in my hands.

And I remember after she moved out, she arranged once to pick me up and spend the day with me. I didn't know it was goodbye, and maybe she didn't either. She picked me up in an old bug without seatbelts. We went to the toy store and got bags to color and return for a small amount of money. We went out to some commune where bees were kept and children ran barefoot and we visited an old man who lived in a school bus. he gave me a hawk feather wound at its base with leather and beads.

Years later I heard her on the local public radio station. I found her cd at a local record store. I listened to it a lot in my early twenties. She was to me an unanswered question. She was family for a time. She became an absence and then even her absence eventually dissolved to a point where only the slightest residue remains of her in my memory.