Dead End Road (blog prompt 2)

“What’s your address?” the receptionist asks me. 

“I live on Dead End Road.” 

 

She looks up at me, incredulous laughter hidden behind pursed lips. “Dead End Road?” 

“Yup,” I nod and smile. I get this reaction every time. Yes, it’s a dead end. No, it is not the sight of some horror story. No, we are not lunatics or murderers. At most, the neighbors are nosy, silent until they have something to report to the police, which really turns out to be nothing at all anyway.

When you drive past my road, you will glance at the sign, point it out, and say, “Dead End Road! That’s creepy.” You’ll shiver a little as you go along your merry way. You will have no idea that it was once called Old Mountain Road. You’ll never see that, along this road that goes on for a little over a mile, the land has grown into us, tree roots curling around our homes so that we are comfortable in the heart of the forest. 

Maybe you don’t know this, but snow falling makes a sound. I’m pretty sure this is true in more places than my home, but I only learned it here, on Dead End Road (which you will drive by on your way to somewhere else). The sound is silence. Isn’t that a sound? The snow says, “Hush.” Then, it frosts our trees. Lace flirts as it swirls about us, whispering that we should stay inside for awhile and keep warm and cozy in the absence of noise. 

You might not know that, when you first turn onto my road in the fall, it is honey glazed. The tangled bushes that reach for the shoulder of the road are golden. They bring their own sunlight. When you pass on by in the summer, you’ll also never notice the way clusters of raspberries peak through brambles and blush happily. Oh, and they are so tangy and juicy and sweet!  When we were children, we picked handfuls and covered them in sugar and ate them until our fingers were stained and sticky. You won’t roll your window down and drift by as honeysuckles shyly wave at you. Their scent is heavenly, you know (You probably do, actually). It’s milky and gentle and it gets caught in a breeze so that it carries all the way to the dead end of our road, where the forest meets up with my backyard.

You’ll be surprised to find that Dead End Road has weaved its way into our lives, vines curling here and there when we didn’t notice. It is a comfort and terribly annoying all at the same time. Have you ever driven along a road encrusted with ice that sparkles like diamonds? Plows don’t make it back here too often. Dead End Road is an afterthought, but a lovely one. Have you ever spent days without electricity because a tree battered and played by the wind has fallen on your power lines? 

But our forest makes up for this. My backyard throws a party every fall. It sings in the wind and glows emerald in the spring. It kindly holds onto remnants of our childhood play and offers them back to me when I least expect it. I’m telling you: The next time you drive past Dead End Road, don’t laugh. It’s not really a dead end at all.

Proof (Place blog 2)

It isn’t until I’ve walked all the way across my yard and down the hill that I realize if I stop and be quiet, I can hear them: birds cheerfully caroling. I have tracked my foot prints in the snow, though, and every step makes a kind of crunching noise in the three inches of frosting that covers my lawn.  I hate to ruin unblemished snow. I always have. The best part about snow is that reverent silence it covers the world in just after it’s fallen. Of course, ten minutes later, the neighbor kids are out, scooping up handfuls and running crisscross in it, their energetic calls sending puffs of breath into the air. 

For now, it’s just me, the snow, and my thoughts, though. It’s 9:50 AM, and I am alone, the neighbor kids having gone off to school. I stand by the edge of the woods again.  Only, this time, the same forest has been transformed. It is hushed, dripping ice. I glance down at the snow gently holding earth, covering the heart of the matter. Around me, branches have oddly begun to bud as if the blanket of snow tricked them into warmth. From pert, new shoots, crystal beads hang suspended. Even the tall trees, their arms spread like webs, look as if they are more alive than they were two weeks ago.  They frame pictures of pregnant, grey sky.  Meanwhile, fine droplets of ice or water or snow (I can’t tell!) whisper as they fall from the heavy clouds. 

Such delicate jewels remind me… A couple days ago, I was driving home at night. I pulled up to my house and gasped. The ground was awash in glitter. Speckles of light flickered in the rays of my car’s high beams. “What on earth?” I puzzled. Then, I realized it was frost! Tiny shards of glass had formed over blades of grass because the ground was cooler than the freezing point. It was lovely. I stepped out of my car and just marveled. 

That’s how I feel now in my backyard, my feet quiet, my mind finally still. I close my eyes and breathe and imagine that snow does not, in fact, cover. It renews and washes and signifies that life will come from death. When I open my eyes again, I see the fog-laced woods, proof of a Creator I sometimes forget I believe in.

Home Is (Blog Prompt 1)

This is home: Branches reaching for the sky in prayer above my head, tangles of thorns and thickets to run and hide in, trails that curl and disappear, plump raspberries, endless imagination.  I have lived here since I was three, which is as long as I can remember anyway. My brother and I did not sit in front of the TV. We pushed open the sliding glass door in our kitchen, bounded down the deck stairs, and got lost. Who needs TV when you have an entire forest at your disposal? 

When I look out at the woods in my backyard (my chosen place), my back a silhouette in the golden sunlight, I understand that this is where I belong. I suppose we have thought of moving in the last several months because the memories here are thick and warm as the smoke curling from the chimney, but we simply cannot leave. 

We cannot. 

This is where my brother and I snuck out of the house at 2 AM one morning to explore the trails across the road from our house. Home is where Dad built us a tree house in the backyard. It’s the place we crouched by little springs of frigid, flowing water and watched closely for frogs and crayfish and salamanders. As Wendell Berry writes in his poem, “Stay Home,” “In the stillness of the trees I am at home.” The trees are disappearing, now, though. To the left, new neighbors have chopped grandfatherly trees and cut thick, twisted bushes for fear that these behemoths will fall on their newly-built house. I say, why did you move to the woods? Across the road, where the forest used to be so thick you couldn’t see through, they have cut thousands of feet of trees for no reason I can see. The trunks lay there, sad and forgotten, silent. 

Home is where Dad planted a garden in the rocky soil and loved it kindly so that it would produce green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. It is where Mom planted flowers carefully in our front yard so that they would bloom bright reds and pinks and oranges. This is where she sewed seeds for hyacinth bushes that blossom sweet blues and pinks and purples. They smell like balloons to me when they celebrate spring.  Home is where we planted a still-miniature evergreen tree by our clothesline in the backyard. I glance at it every time I pull into my driveway and, now, I see that there is an “otherness” to it that Cronon would appreciate when he wrote, in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” that “The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect than the tree in the ancient forest…” 

Here, my imagination grew alongside the budding raspberries in July. My feet calloused from walking over rocks and sticks and cold dirt without shoes. My eyes widened as I watched Dad with pride when he nurtured his plants and gave them names I had never heard before. My trust in my brother developed when he protected me from falling trees (even if he did trip me with his next step).  This is my “wilderness.” It is so full of me and Dad and Mom and my brother that we cannot leave. 

"You stay home too" 

~"Stay Home" by Wendell Berry~

My Backyard Remembers (place entry 1)

I am sitting in my backyard (my chosen place) at 11 AM with the sun shining and a barely-there breeze, and I am terrified to go any further. I cannot take a step into these woods that have surrounded my home for as long as it has been my home. So, instead, I pull out the camera and look up at the skeleton branches above me. This tree turned every shade of yellow in the spectrum before it finally gave its last leaf in November. I remember sitting under it then and thinking, “Brilliant. It’s lit from within.” Now, it is bare, a silhouette against a peaceful blue sky. 

Next, ribs shuddering because it is 33 degrees, I tentatively step a little further into the forest. There is an odd little plant that bends wistfully, but still stands. Its top is a cluster of delicate grains. It survives against a backdrop of brown and brittle thorns. On the hill behind me, shale scatters among dirt and pokes up between tiny green shoots, reminding me that these woods are still alive. Enticed, I push aside branches that reach for my scarf to snap a picture of verdant leaves poking hopefully from a knot of barren brambles. 

Here, I stop. “All I see is you,” I whisper. Twittering birds answer back. I don’t look up, though. Instead, I glance down at my feet where the steep hill has finally evened out to meet the forest floor. I look and fearfully wonder. Is this where my dad died? Is this where he lay? I will never know for sure. I suck in a deep breath, and the trees go all wavy before my eyes.

Yet, the sun shimmers more strongly where I stand. For the first time since I’ve come here today, I feel its warmth settle on my chest. The clouds are gauzy, stretched thin. They drift so lazily that I wonder if it’s a trick of the eye, a figment of my imagination. To bring everything into focus, I take another picture. I am safe behind the camera. I hug it to my chest.  I didn’t come out here to be safe, though. I came out here to explore, to heal, to get to know my own backyard again. And, just like that, I wonder what has been in these woods that I have called home for as long as I can remember.  Surely it is a record of my childhood, but what animals have left word of themselves here? What plants have poked through to make room for themselves? What does my backyard remember? I will not ask it now. I will not wonder too deeply about how this forest remembers my father.