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| Bryan's picture from Canaan. The woods in my story wouldn't look exactly like this, but close enough. |
Pollen
I can't believe that I remembered where I kept the key, but I open the slatted door of the corner hutch of my childhood bedroom and there it is, hanging on the hook where I left it probably ten years ago.
The keychain is some kind of clear round stone, the kind you find at a beach gift shop.
"Well yep. There it is," I say to her, looking up from where I'm kneeling if front of the hutch.
She follows me outside and down the wooded slope that functioned roughly as my childhood back yard. We always referred to this area as "over the hill." The "hill" is not nearly as steep as I remembered it. It's amazing how you eventually grow up to dwarf the landforms that loomed so hugely throughout your childhood.
And I know she's having similar thoughts because she says, "That time when we spent the night out here and heard that creepy sound? That thwack thwack? It was like we had to run up a mountain to get back home? How funny."
She's developed that habit of making all her declaratives sound like interrogatives. My linguistics professor calls it uptalking. It's supposed to signify a lack of confidence or something. My first reaction is to start to hate her for it, but I squelch that quickly enough. Honestly, I do it too. And anyway, and I'm glad that, after all this time, we can still think the same.
After about fifteen feet of gradual decline, the ground levels out. The forest floor is covered with debris and thorns and I love that this, and not some well-manicured, jungle-gymed lawn, was where I was sent to play as a kid. There are a few huge flat rocks down here, roughly five feet in diameter. They always made it easy to pretend that this was the bottom of the ocean. In fact, this part of central Appalachia was the bottom of the ocean at some point during pre-history.
When I was high school, a tree fell during an ice storm and cracked one of the rocks completely in half. That had been a jarring duel lesson in impermanence and geological change.
We cross a small shallow gully--what was at some point either a creek or a mining road--and then we are at its door. The real tar shingles of the roof are sagging in a way that makes me worry, and the plastic taped over the windows droops in some spots.
"Still standing." I say. We smile at each other.
A wind chime hanging from the eaves is too choked with spider webs to make noise anymore.
I unlock and open the front door (Only now does it strike me as hilarious that the twelve by eight foot fort is also equipped with a back door.) to a time capsule covered in pollen.
"Oh my god! Our anorexic hammock!" She's talking about the perplexingly narrow hammock that bifurcates the fort's one-room interior. We always thought it would eventually stretch out width-wise. It never did.
It looks almost prideful, hanging there all abandoned and yet un-dry rotted, like a lady who got old but not fat.
A small plywood table is covered in bird shit. There's a dead robin behind it. Luckily, it's too cold outside to smell.
Amazingly, miraculously, a purple sparkly inflatable chair remains fully blown up in the corner. Its compatriot, a green sparkly inflatable chair with a cartoon frog face printed on the seat, is less fortunate. It slouches, deflated, beside its purple brother, chosen at random to be the victim of the mysterious cruelty of passing time.
I notice some molded plastic lawn chairs--purple and green as well--and I remember that we had actually chosen a color scheme for our play fort.
She's staring at the southern wall, the wall we (how funny to talk about the twelve-year-olds who did this as "we") had covered with disposable camera prints of ourselves.
There we are lying in our bunks at summer camp. There we are in our long john pajamas in my living room. There we are seated behind a cake at my ninth birthday party.
"Oh no! I was so dorky looking," she says.
I'm surprised to say that she's right. She was dorky-looking. She had big teeth and thin hair and round wire glasses.
But I only remember her as completely, enviably, beautiful, all thin willowy limbs and huge green eyes. All the boys we knew fell in love with her instantly, large teeth and glasses or not.
The pictures are starting to yellow and curl up around the edges. Some of them have fallen to the floor, failed by the balled-up masking tape that was once enough to hold them. How can it be that the pictures of our adolescence are aged and yellowed? Are we not still young?
"Maybe we should take them back up to the house before they get any more damage. I mean, it looks like this pollen will probably wipe off." I say it like I'm not convinced.
"Yeah, but that just feels wrong somehow, like stealing."
Again, I see that we can still think the same.
We were always finding things in the woods around our fort: an old rusty roller skate (the kind that would have had a key), a tiny porcelain doll's plate, an old plastic toy gun.
We loved it, but we were confused by it. How does stuff get left out like that, in the woods, for decades?
I lock the door and we leave the pictures, the blow-up chairs--all of it--maybe for forever. I'm not sure but, I think we leave them for two dorky-looking twelve-year-old girls. Maybe they are our ghosts. Maybe they are our heat imprints. Maybe they are our residual psychic disturbances. Or maybe they are the "us" of a different, future generation, two more Appalachian girls who are, like we were, half wilderness explorer and half interior designer.
And I guess we understand the origins of the rusty roller skate, the porcelain plate, and the gun a little better now.
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