Tag: childhood

The Pleasantest Thing

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How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
~Robert Louis Stevenson “The Swing”

 

This pipe swing set, made by my father 60 years ago after my birth, has moved four times. It now sits on the knoll above our barnyard, and the feeling of soaring into the air is enhanced by the slope dropping off beneath our feet.  These swings have seen many swingers over the years, and my time in these seats were full of contemplation and conversation.

The most pleasantest thing ever…

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A Message to the Future

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And this is where we went, I thought,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.

The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran

What’s happened to our boys that they no longer race
And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.

I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
“What were you doing there?” he said.
I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.

{Now} I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!

I brought forth:
The note.

I opened it. For now I had to know.
I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree
And let the tears flow out and down my chin.
Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years
And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers
In the far churchyard.
It was a message to the future, to myself.
Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.
From the young one to the old. From the me that was small
And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.
What did it say that made me weep?

I remember you.
I remember you.
~Ray Bradbury from “Remembrance”

 

I too left notes to my future self, in old barns, and lofts,
and yes, in trees,
but have never gone back to retrieve them.
My ten year old heart tried to imagine itself fifty years hence,
what fears and joys would pass through like pumping blood,
what love and tears would trace my face?

I have not forgotten.
I am remembered.

noaanya

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Liquid Bubble Wrap

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grassmay15

As a child I liked to go out far into our hay field and find the tallest patch of grass.  There, like a dog turning circles before a nap,  I’d trample down the tall waving stems that stretched up almost to my eyes, and create a grass nest, just cozy enough for me.  I’d sit or lie down in this green fortress, gazing up at the blue sky, and watch the clouds drift lazily by.  I’d suck on a hollow stem or two, to savor the bitter grass juice.  Scattered around my grassy cage, attached to the broad grass stems, would be innumerable clumps of white foam.  I’d tease out the hidden green spit bugs with their little black eyes from their white frothy bubble encasement.   I hoped to watch them spit, to actually see them in action doing what they do best, but they would leap away.

The grassy nest was a time of retreat from the world by being buried within the world.  I felt protected, surrounded, encompassed and free –at least until I heard my mother calling for me from the house, or a rain shower started, driving me to run for cover, or my dog found me by following my green path.

It has been years since I hid in a grass fort or tried to defoam spit bugs.   I am overdue, I’m sure.

A few years ago, on a spring morning, when the grass was particularly tall, I was driving into work on one of our county’s rural two lane roads, going the speed limit of 50 mph, in a grumbly mood and wishing I was heading somewhere else on a bright and sunny day.  My mind was busy with the anticipation of my workday when I noticed a slight shift to the right by the driver in the car ahead of me.  It inexplicably moved over the fog line and then suddenly I realized why, in a moment of stark clarity.  A huge empty gravel truck and trailer rig was heading north, moving at the speed limit, the driver seemingly oblivious to the fact his huge trailer was starting to whip back and forth.  As he approached me much too quickly, his trailer was whipping back to the center line, approaching me full force at a ninety degree angle from the truck, filling up the entire lane in front of me.  I had no choice but to run my car off the road into a grassy field to avoid being hit head on by the still attached but runaway trailer.  Only by chance were there no deep ditches at that particular point in the road.  My car dove right into tall grass, which enfolded me, like a shroud of green,  shielding me from a tangle of metal and certain death.  It was a near miss, but a miss nonetheless.

I sat still for a moment, gathering my wits and picking up what was left of my frayed nerves from where they been scattered.   All I could see in front and around me was grass, just like my little childhood fortresses.   It was very tempting to stay right there,  buried in the safety of the grass and hidden away, just as if I had been a spit bug wrapped in my foam cocoon, feeling my heart race from the relief of still being alive.

Instead I drove to work to do what I initially planned to do that day, abruptly made aware of the privilege of having a life to live,  a job to go to, and a grassy field ready to swallow me.

It was only later, after I called my husband about what had taken place, that I cried.  Until then, I couldn’t stop smiling.  I had felt encased in liquid bubble wrap, spit-protected by something bigger and stronger, in whose image I had been made.

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So Pressed For Time

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dictionary

Six years after her death, I’m slowly sorting through my mother’s packed up possessions stored in one of our farm outbuildings. Some boxes I am still not ready to open, such as the 30 months of letters written by my newlywed father and mother while he fought in several bloody island battles as a Marine in the South Pacific during WWII. Other boxes contain items from too distant an era to be practical in my kitchen, such as the ones labeled “decorative teacups” or “assorted tupperware bowls”.

But I do open the boxes of books. My mother was a high school speech teacher during those war years, and she had a good sense of a classic book, so there are always treasures in those boxes.

Recently I rediscovered the 1956 Webster’s New Dictionary of the Twentieth Century that I grew up with. This book was massive, easily weighing 10 pounds, and served as a booster seat for haircuts, a step stool for trying to reach the cookie jar on the kitchen cupboard, and of course, for looking up any obscure word that ever existed in all of history. Or so it seemed.

An amazing tome. And as I flipped through the pages, I found some old familiar friends that were neither black nor white nor read all over.

Wildflowers had been carefully pressed between the pages–over two dozen specimens paper thin themselves, their existence squeezed into two dimensions–still showing faint pink or blue, or purple color, almost exuding a long ago fragrance from a summer over fifty years ago. As a child I regularly wandered out to our fields and woods to gather crimson clover blossoms, buttercup, dandelions, daisies, wild violets, wild ginger, and (shame on me!) trillium and calypso lady slippers for bouquets for my mother, and she would select the most perfect to slide between the pages of the dictionary. Occasionally she would pull out one to gently paste on a hand written card she sent to a friend.

Here were my once perfect flowers, preserved and pressed for time, just waiting for the middle-aged me to rediscover them lying between wonderful words that I love to roll in my mouth and type on a page. They are too fragile to paste to a greeting card, or even to handle due to their brittleness. They need to stay right where they are, for another generation or two or three to discover.

I too am so pressed for time, becoming more fragile, perhaps more brittle than I care to admit. My mother and father are now blown away like the puff ball seeds of the dandelion, on to other horizons, but the sturdy old dictionary is going nowhere. It will be passed down, its delicate passengers preserved inside, a long ago far away summer afternoon of flower gathering to be shared as a great grandchild opens the book to look up a favorite word sometime in the not so far off future.dictionary2

 

 

Even the Branches

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hereboys

plumtwinswinter

Regarding the Home of One’s Childhood, One Could:
forget the plum tree;
forget its black-skinned plums;

           also the weight
of their leaning as they leaned

                      over starry hedges:
also the hedges,
the dew that turned them starry;
the wet-bellied pups who slunk there

                                               trailing ludicrous pedigrees;
even the eyes

of birds
                                                            glittering

                                                            in the branches;
                                                            even the branches
~Emily Zinnemann

 

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photo by Brandon Dieleman
photo by Brandon Dieleman

My Heart Bleeds

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A weft of leafless spray
Woven fine against the gray
Of the autumnal day,
And blurred along those ghostly garden tops
Clusters of berries crimson as the drops
That my heart bleeds when I remember
How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children’s childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.
~William Dean Howells  “November: Impression”

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A Wonderful View

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noaanya

As I age in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased with the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground
and the sound of the wind in them.
~Wendell Berry ‘Planting Trees’
Deciding whether or not to trust a person
is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree
because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch
or you might simply get covered in sap
and for this reason many people choose
to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter.
~Lemony Snicket from The Penultimate Peril

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.
~Robert Frost “Birches”

At the Heart of the World

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walnuthouse
My green, graceful bones fill the air   
With sleeping birds. Alone, alone
And with them I move gently.
I move at the heart of the world.
~James Dickey from “In the Tree House at Night”
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photo by Dan Gibson
photo by Dan Gibson