Jumble of Jungle & Thoughts

Note: I promised you and our Sunday crew that I’d use these posts to work through the new book. I meant to ask for your advice, share my progress, and use that commitment to keep me on schedule. But all that’s changed. Here’s a crazy little essay I dictated while I walked in the woods this morning. I edited it a bit but we can’t print anything since we don’t have power. I really, really like to edit by reading aloud to myself and making notes with a pencil on paper. One day soon, we’ll get back to those things.

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At the top in the dark, there's the road that’s passable now that we’ve chainsawed through. It's straight and clear and there’s a little dawn light. But a one-car track only; don’t look away because the sides are lined with massive tree trunks, jumbled in a tangle and forming a fortress of fresh, round trunk stubs.

I crawl under to the beyond which is dawn gray. Nothing to see but another tangle - in fact, a basket of a mad knitter's yarn with lianas of wisteria, grape, and pepper vine that used to climb straight up, now in curls and contortions. The pushed-over trees brought them down. I know by 50 years of muscle memory where the ground drops off into a canyon of red clay, probably the thing that gave that little dirt road its name: Redcliffe.

Our favorite bolder has broken away. Pushed by our favorite magnolia tree, splintered golden trunk magnolia wood so sharp it would pierce a body. The spicy smell of magnolia wood takes me back to when that boulder was our childhood fortress, when held out an arm, a sturdy branch for our rope swing. Our hideout, look out, and a place to push each other down the slopes, playing fun but mean games of king of the hill.

I hear a horn blowing. Or I hear a memory. That’s Momma's signal that it’s time to come out of the woods, to wash up, to have supper. I’m not out of the woods. I’m sliding in, down the hill along the trunk of a tulip tree laid over on its side.

It's cleared a way through the tangle for me, and in the bottom, where the water starts, it's a slimy, fantasy land of uprootedness. I see ferns thrust in the sky way over my head, mosses and lizard's tails jacked up to 15 feet above ground. Shade and ground dwellers now high and soon to be in the sun that's piercing this opening. This dark woods is no longer dark. Partridgeberry dangles from way over my head. Roots that should be going straight down are poking out at me like daggers, a medieval bed of nails, some pain now in seeing them and some pain to come as they dry and die.