Let Me Take You to My Special Place

(Natural Environment)

My flight instinct has always been stronger than my fight.

Just as we float above the modest red house that served as my childhood home, here I come running out the door now, escaping some imagined slight. At the age of seven I was even more touchy than I am now, if you can believe that.

Let’s fly along above me, see what childhood salve I may place on my wounded ego. Can you hear the crazy rhythm of my wrenched heart, beating in time with the fierce pumping of my short, skinny legs as I run across our backyard? Past the garage I go, easily jumping the drainage ditch running between the backyard and field beyond. Blind emotion propels me over the open space, preventing the fatal hesitation that would sometimes trip me just before leaving the earth during calmer flights.

I hit the ground running on the other side, but I disappear in the long, long grass. My maniacal path is revealed to us, dear reader, by the movement of the grass. If you concentrate, you can feel the stalks whipping my shins and the fuzzy heads caressing my cheeks. Can you see the furry seeds stuck in the rivulets of tears on my red and puffing cheeks?

Oh, the grass has stopped moving. That’s me, right there, standing in front of that stand of three gnarled apple trees. What, dear reader? You couldn’t tell those were trees? Yes, from here it is difficult to see that, as the trees are draped with an ivy veil. I’m not sure what that plant is, but it has grown completely over the trees, creating a natural thatch house.

I’ve paused there, dear reader, to contemplate the large, six-point leaves. I reach out a small hand like a trembling, featherless bird to stroke the stiff, fine hairs on the velvety front of one of the leaves. Notice how my hand stops quaking as I do so, the nerves of my fingertips comparing the texture to my Dad’s Sunday whiskers.

Now I’m crawling inside the dome, carefully navigating a path through the thicket. I don’t want to rip the leaves or break their life-line vines. But I cannot resist the feeling of all those rough hairs and leathery leaf backs caressing the soft skin of my youthful body. A vine twines itself around my wrist, a quick and leathery noose closing around the delicate bone. I gently release myself and I disappear from our voyeuristic gaze. We must also enter the dome now, dear reader, but don’t be afraid.

See? It’s really quite pleasant in here. Small birds twitter around us, the enclosing leaves magnifying their tiny voices. The filtered sunlight imitates light as seen through water, the dapples illuminating parts of my seven-year old self as I twist and climb one of the old trees. I reach a rudimentary tree house, really just three rotting boards nailed in the junction of the massive, low-hanging branches with the wide trunk. The boards have been here so long, the tree has began to grow around them. Just as the ivy has grown into the trees. Just as the whole soothing mess has grown into me.

Take a deep breath with me, dear reader. The smell of damp earth, the sweet aroma of fading rot surround us. Can you taste them on the back of your throat as I do? I absorb these smells, plucking a premature apple, small, dark green and hard, from a branch above my head. The crunch disturbs the little birds’ song. Surely you can taste it, too, sweet and sour and forbidden. A secret gift, staining my hands with its sticky, clear blood like a sacrifice.

It’s life is not lost in vain. I am soothed by the taste, by the sweet aroma. Watch as I savour it as though it is the last apple on earth.

“Aaaa maaaannnnn daaaaaa!” I felt you jump, ever so slightly, at the deep baritone of my father’s voice, dear reader. Alas, it is time I take you somewhere, sometime else, as this moment is over. We’re rising through the top of the thicket, all we can see is bark and then leaves, and now we’re in the bright sunshine again. Let’s fly together, dear reader, and leave seven-year old Amanda as she begins her short - yet so long - journey home.