Dear Reader,
Have you ever started writing and you had
no idea where you might end up?
It’s like cruising, but with a laptop and maybe a Coke Zero.
Word Raccoon pushes her porch swing sometimes like it’s a time machine.
The first time she remembers sitting in one was in West Virginia, with her grandmother.
The Morning Glories were blooming and little one was entranced to see that the flowers visible opened like a hand holding out its fingers to grasp the day. (Or that’s what she remembers.)
Just beyond, the huge, orderly garden, grids of green beans and corn; gooseberry bushes and tomato plants. Mounds of cucumbers and squash, mounds it was hard to distinguish between until the vegetables became visible. Word Raccoon began watching the shapes of leaves.
Grandma (my father’s mother) whistled a lot while she worked or went about her day, just a quiet noise in the background. She was a bit hunched, her hair short and gray. She loved her Juicy Fruit and I’d often catch her opening her mouth, wrapping her gum about her finger, and stretching it.
It never occurred to me to ask why.
And I never asked for any Juicy Fruit, either. No thank you.
Her front yard was paradise, with its tall pines that I would play beneath and feel absolutely dwarfed, almost faint as I stared upwards. So many other flowers and pinecones. (I know, I know.)
There was a tidy sidewalk from the road’s side to the porch, a bit of an uncommon accommodation in those parts. The front porch, too, was concrete, an addition, no doubt, when they sided (regrettably) what had been a log cabin built by my grandfather. He and my great-grandmother, I believe, had once owned a grocery store.
But I really do believe I remember visiting the house before it was sided. Or maybe I just remember pictures, but I really think I was there before they did, because I was enthralled with the logs, how a gorgeous tree could also be substantial and just as pretty when sacrificed for a house.
There was a tiny cave in the hillside out back that I wasn’t allowed to explore. They made sure to warn me about the dangers enough that I wouldn’t go on my own, but I wanted to.
Moving to West Virginia was the second chapter of my life, and it opened up so many things in me that might never have opened had I not. Nature went from a way I spent time with my dad on the weekends to a daily preoccupation on my part, although my dad worked so much at his day job and then on building the house that I felt like I was on my own with nature, in a way. (I am not implying that I was unsupervised, but my mother’s love of nature was not his. Or mine.)
(He included me in many of his projects, and I must confess to grousing about many of them. Especially when I was a teenager. I wanted to read. I wanted to sleep in, not help dig a basement with shovels and buckets.)
This post is a hydra, but one with positive heads, and I may later take on one head of it at a time.
Word Raccoon has stilled her feet. She asks if my heart is a pinecone.
Shush, WR.
Shush.
Looking for the sun,
Drema
dremadrudge.com 