When I was growing up my mother and my aunt Gretchen used to take me hiking though the woods behind my grandmother’s house. We would be gone for hours ‘journeying’ as they referred to it. I was entertained by stories of their childhood, like the overgrown path they remembered being a meadow or the fence my mom cut her head open on sledding one winter. We would practice bird calls, watch bull frogs in the ponds, and one early spring day we even came across an ice skating pond.
They terrified me, “I know someone who caught their leg in a bear trap out here and he walks with a limp to this day.” One of my all time favorite childhood memories was when we had stopped for lunch and my mother surprised me with a bag of Cadbury mini chocolate Easter eggs. I remember sitting on top of a hill of hay looking out into the trees while savoring the chocolate taste. We saw broken down cars, abandoned furniture that my aunt said would make a nice sketching, baby birds, and once two black and white baby snakes under a piece of construction wood.
Sometime between when I was eleven and now I have become so afraid of snakes that I feel numb tingles on my legs when I walk anywhere near high grass or piles of old leaves. This year I am trying to be less of an insane person about it and have spent every warm day outside all day with Matthew.
“Will you take him walking in the woods one day when he is older?” I asked Bob one day, looking past him into the patch of woods behind out house at a rusted green car you can make out in the distance. I think of my aunt Gretchen, now living in North Carolina, who would have already hiked out it to and repurposed the metal into wind chimes.
“I don’t know, maybe,” he was distracted at the time that I asked.
When we rake the yard he gives Matthew rides in the wheelbarrow and I can hear the giggling before I see them, come around the back of the house. When the wind blows I can smell a neighbor burning their brush which reminds me of cookouts. In the distance I can hear the playful barking of a dog. I really do love the outdoors, I think I just need to be reminded sometimes.
Ahh.. if we went back - we'd have to wrestle with wild, over grown shrubs.... and wild coyotes. Nevermind the snakes.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up, it was my younger brother and I that went 'journeying' in the woods behind our house. There was a creek there, and my mother had gotten upset at us for getting our shoes wet, so we developed the habit of removing our shoes at the edge of the woods and exploring barefoot. Such fun.
ReplyDeleteWe pretended we were Indians, trying to walk silently and leaving no tracks.
We pretended we were biologists catching crawfish and tadpoles.
We climbed trees and boulders and waded in the creek.
And still, when we came home, we had perfectly dry shoes.
Those sure were good times.
- Julia