As I walked across the train trestles trying not to lose my balance, I
glanced down at the hundred foot drop knowing that tripping would result
in more then just a sprained ankle.
I didn't really need to look down, I'd been walking this particular run
of track for longer then my memories existed, I knew where every sun
bleached crosstie lay, every rusted steel spike that had been driven by
hands long gone.A magical bridge, only a little dangerous,
but what's the price to pay for magic?
Step by step I became drawn into the hushed place I'd spent many an
afternoon, when things were simple and the most problematic thing I had
to deal with was getting back in time for supper, or the leeches in the
pond with the rotting logs floating halfway out of the water looking like
disembodied arms and legs of giants. I looked up at the sky, the ground
spiralling dizzily under me under that endless expanse of sky, clear
bright blue, the kind you only see in pictoral postcards of far away
lands.
My attention is brought back to the walk at hand by a crow cackling
omionously at me from the side of the bridge I'd started this little
journey into my past.
I look back, half wave at the crow, smile ruefully at myself for doing
such a foolish thing, and begin my slow careful steps across the rickety
old bridge once more.
Now I could see the crabapple trees that I once gathered sour fruit from,
insisting that they were just as good as "real" apples.
Grimacing at the memory of flavour, I quicken my steps a little more,
phantom trains in my mind.
I reached the other side with little trouble, but wasn't the track longer
when I was 8? I remembered looking across and down at the gorge, and the
massive distance between me and the way home, a 5 mile hike at least, to
my youthful mind.
I do remember there having been more trees, the few that are left are
stunted, frighteningly ancient, and standing under them, they reach for
the skies just over my head like crones hands, ever seeking that
painfully bright blueness that encompassed the sky. I take an apple,
but I know better then to eat it, instead I shove it deep into the pocket
of my jacket, knowing that it'll likely forget it's existance entirely,
and have to dig it out of the lining at a later time, or maybe I'll shove
my hand into the pocket, seeking warmth and encounter it's strange
lumpiness.
I walk past the trees with their strange clutching hands, to the reason
for this odd little trip into my childhood.
I pull my coat around me against the cold Autumn air, already I feel the
frost in my bones, making my knee stiff and uncomfortable, but still I
walk on to the long grasses I can see from my vantage point on a small hill
past the trees, and even though my knee burns a bit, I hurry again as a
cloud passes over the meager Autumn sunlight.
I round the bend of warped and dried bushes, the ones I'd always searched
for rabbit warrens in, and emerged from covered in scratches, with twigs
in my long windbrushed hair.
I spotted the item I'd come so far to behold.
I walked over to it reverently, plucking it gently from the stalk that had
held it captive since Spring last, and very carefully split it down it's
greenish-brown casing.
The wind began to pick up, and I sheltered it's precious contents until I
reached the edge of the woods that lead to "my" pond, and then held the
vessel so the wind could catch the contents and carry them aloft.
I kept but one of the seeds of the milkweed pod, I needed something to
help me remember the magic that the colder Autumn days of my youth had
produced. For intersperced between the proud milkweed plants that had entertained
and entralled me as a smiling, oblivious child, were orange painted
markers, the kind that developers planted in the earth like gaudy
foliage.
The next time I came to see my field, it would be gone.
And gone with it, the magics contained in this timeless place, and I knew
it could never make me smile and feel young again.
So I'm cradling this small seed in my hands as well as my heart on the
long drive back to the city, in hopes that maybe someday, I can plant it
and it'll grow for me.
