Guest Column - Reflections of Childhood

I took a walk just at sunrise. First time I have been over in the woods behind our house in a long, long time. Feeling melancholy and almost lost...

Out past the slam of the screen door into the tangled brush, into the holy backyard dirt where we ran like mad feral saints in grass-stained sneakers, I walk the old path and look up where the great pine used to scrape the sky, but it’s just a bruised empty space now, a missing tooth in the canopy, a phantom trunk my blistered hands still remember how to climb.

I kick through the dry rot down into the hollow, down to where the old frog pond used to sit heavy and wet, it’s nothing but baked, cracked mud now, but right across the dead basin, some crazy sapling is shooting up, green and desperate, drinking the ghost-water, waving its wild new leaves at the afternoon.

And standing there in the damp smell of pine needles and decay I swear to god I hear it; the loud breathless howling laughter of us all, echoing through the scrub, sweating in the dying golden light as we dragged busted limbs and heavy deadwood and briar-rot, heaving it all together to build that great crooked barricade, that ragged holy wall of dead trees and debris, our dirty fortress against the whole sad adult world, still standing there invisible in the quiet woods.

Where did that wild blood go, I wonder, staring at my clean soft hands that used to bleed sap and summer mud, we were immortal kings of the bramble back then, untouchable by the ticking clocks of kitchens and classrooms, trading scraped knees like currency, pocketing smooth river stones like holy diamonds before the years came rolling in heavy and blind, paving over the sacred dirt maps we drew with sticks.

Now the horizon looks too small, the trees don't scrape the moon the way they did when we were three foot tall and electric, it’s just a patch of scrub oak and suburb edge, a forgotten slice of earth behind the barbed wire fence but god, back then it was the whole spinning universe, a dark green sprawling continent where time hung suspended in the thick humid August air.

I’d trade it all, every tired adult dollar and sensible shoe, just to hear the screen door slam one more time behind me, to feel the panic and thrill of hide-and-seek in the deep bruised twilight, running blind and panting through the thorns until the yellow porch light flickered on like a distant lonely star, calling us back from the wild into the quiet houses where we eventually had to grow up.