A poem for my sisters

When I was five or six,
before the garden was in,
we staked our claim
on the new-plowed ground
to dig a hole to China;
Sarah and Susan and me
and Donnie from next door,
in search of the most exotic
thing we could imagine –
China cottage cheese.
Someone, I guess, had told us
that straight through the other side
of where we lived was China,
and we knew we could reach it,
if only we kept digging
all the way through the cold, disced earth
and the hot core of the center
until out the other side
we would emerge in China.
The hole never got much deeper
than a place to hold four children.
Once we got that far,
we did more talking than digging.
One day when it was raining
and I was in bed with tonsillitis,
they put boards over the hole
and sat underneath smoking licorice pipes
that must have come from Eversol's store.
Shortly after that, I think,
the garden was put in,
and we gave up on China
and went on to other things.
Years later I felt left out
when we talked about our hole to China,
because what everyone remembered best
was the rainy day and the licorice pipes.
But now I am on this airplane
flying all the way to China –
three decades from that garden,
light years from comprehension.
And I wish that they were with me
to ask the Chinese children:
Do you ever dig to our land?
And what do you hope to find there,
in our topsy-turvy country?
And do you know where I can find
that China cottage cheese?