In my last letter I wrote about my fear of potential. But now, there is a change approaching, a turn of year and tides of spring, and there is a soft excitement thrumming in my veins for the unknown. I am always so easily taken in by events, swept up in color schemes and themed snacks, that the world tricks me into looking forward to all of its weird comings and goings. So this week, as the Year of the Dragon takes a bow and Year of the Snake slithers in, I find myself looking for signs of what is to come, and what will be asked of me.
When these shifts come about, I fall into memories of my childhood. Growing up, we moved a lot, for no reason except that my parents were indecisive. There were themes to our houses: trees, remoteness, four or five cats. For a couple of years we stayed in a single-street neighborhood shaped like a ‘J’, with my house at the hook atop a cul-de-sac, where I would sit and scoot around on my skateboard instead of learning to ride it. Surrounding the street and between the bend was a forest that fell into the earth, with streams and ponds and hills going down, down, down. As long as I lived there, all year round I walked through this forest with mud in my shoes and the underbrush up to my knees.
Today, I’d shudder. I’m too aware of the little creatures and their potential consequences to risk a bare strip of skin to the forest floor. But little me didn’t know that ticks could destroy you, and the risk of venomous snakes seemed more like the fantasy of quicksand than a real threat. So I would keep walking, alone amongst hundreds of trees, no one knowing where I was or where I would go, not even me.
I’d follow paths made by the local deer, little indentations in the brush that I could barely make out, and being that I was not a baby deer but a baby human, I often lost the track. Still, I’d push through and find myself deeper in the woods, alone but for the crunch of foot on earth, and come to realize that the path had been lost. In that moment there were two choices: to stop and turn back, or to create my own path. I often chose to push ahead. There would be something in front of me that I wanted to discover, a mystery ready to unfurl. I would accumulate ticks and bites on these ventures toward a fell tree or an interesting rock, I was constantly lost, and once, I sacrificed a sneaker to the mud and walked home half-barefoot.
But every so often, on lucky days, I would come across some magic: a riverbank inundated with mussels, or a trickling stream with pools of cloudy blue water like cotton candy. Once, I found a clearing covered in moss and soft afternoon light, which became a tea room for my brother and myself, who never drank tea. One day, there was a waterfall with a hidden cave behind it, dark stone wet, cold, and exciting. Another day I found a cluster of rocks that towered over my head, like they’d been thrown from the sky by God or a dinosaur, and I spent hours trying to crest them. I’d come to these places with scratches torn into my skin and mud caked through my clothes, just an hour or two from my backyard, and I’d think—I made it. This is where I was going all along.
INSTANT sub. this reads like a fairytale. gorgeous!!!