The woods.
I grew up away from most everything. I lived on the “dead end” part of our road, which is the most misleading way to describe it since beyond the “dead end” was LIFE. So most days were spent adventuring and exploring what was beyond the cattle guard at the end of that road, tucked into the woods, just before you came to the creek. I was lost in my own little world of pretending to save the world with Buck Rogers by my side, flopping down in our field to watch the clouds, counting how many baby bunnies I could find in a burrow, and running away from the mean old hog with the big brass ring in his nose (we had the best bacon the next year and I enjoyed every bite. Just sayin’.).
Back then, I dreamed of living on a street with neighbors. Kids my age. Playdates before they were called “playdates”, and ones that certainly didn’t require anyone pulling up a calendar or calling to make plans.
Guess what I do now that I’m all grown up, living on a street with neighbors, with “kids my age”?
Search for the woods.
And would you ever think that I could find a very nice spot, right in the middle of everything?
Ewan and I had been there a few times, but never with Holden. We couldn’t wait to take him and see it through his eyes.
Ewan wanted mostly to show him the cattails.
And they went hunting for the biggest, fattest, ripest ones.
I do believe that they single handedly bumped up the cattail population there by about a fafafillion.
Funny how we spend a lot of our childhood running like hell toward something different, only to spend the rest of our lives running back to things in our childhood that built the strongest parts of who we really are.
But I realize that “who I really am” is rooted in both of these worlds.
And I love sharing that with them.
