I remember those hot afternoons spent in the woods with my older sister before we moved to the monotonous street of a suburban neighborhood. We live on top of a mountain, my older sister used to say. We used to wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the sun, and all the time in between was spent outside. We had no neighbors or anyone that lived remotely close, except for an elderly lady Gene that we used to take apples to even though her teeth were rotting and she could only feed them to the deer. There was a big cypress tree that I would climb and get stuck in every day because I thought that maybe tomorrow I would conquer my fear of heights. It became a ritual that my sister would inch her way up to me and whisper in a soothing voice while tears ran down my face because I could feel the tree swaying in the wind and I thought it would fall over. She would create an imaginary barrier and say that even if I fell I wouldn’t get hurt because I’d land on this force, and then we would make our way down together.
Whenever we’d get into trouble with our parents or we simply couldn’t stand being in the house, we ran up the field to what we called “Our Places,” which were two small coves at the beginning of the woods formed by rocks and trees. We would stay there all day and eat sassafras leaves, wild strawberries, and “butter” made from crushed buttercups for lunch. We created beds out of pine needles and took afternoon naps in them. We made tiny graves for deceased creatures or bugs that we would find, buried just outside Our Places in the designated graveyard. We would always say that if we ever needed to run away from home, we would run away there, even though home was just through the field and down the hill.
Getting lost in the woods and finding our way back right before dark was such a terrifying and wonderful feeling. Exiting the woods and entering into the field where fireflies were out made us forget our fears of being lost and we would immediately go into a frenzy to see who could catch the most. Everything was illuminated and nothing else mattered but this contest of gathering lights. Not knowing any better, we would catch them in a jar and let them out in our bedroom where we could watch them light up in sync with the glowing stars on our ceiling. We had trouble letting go of any of our our creature friends that we could find and at one point ran a salamander “sanctuary” under our beds.
The woods and the field would turn into a dreamland during the winter. There was a steep hill leading from the top of the field to our house that we rode sleds on. We would crash into trees and we would wipe out, our limbs would go numb from the cold and our mum would call us inside after being in the snow for hours on end, but we didn’t care. We would sled ride from morning until night, and then follow the deer tracks into the woods to scheme and plot our escape. We were always plotting an escape, from what we didn’t know, but we lived in a fantasy world at the top of the mountain where our earliest and most precious of memories lye.