Worth Writing

Around about October when the air had become really crisp I went out to carried away by the weather.  So small I was then.  So very small.  I would crawl under the stairs where the clothing barrels were and get my sleeping bag.  It was bright red nylon with a flannel lining, the pattern of which is just so oh barely on the tip of my memory…a yellow and brown something it was….and it had the sleeping bag smell.  Mother rolled them up like miniature hay bales and tied them with rough yellow nylon cording.  It took quite a while to undo the knots.

Making sure my mother was busy with something or other and completely distracted from me I would take a bear, a book, and the sleeping bag out the metal side door and into the backyard.  Just past the pale green aluminum shed on the right edge of the property was a row of enormous white hydrangea bushes, tall as trees, messy as hell, we call the blooms “snowballs” and threw them at each other in delight as the blooms burst and scattered everywhere.

I had to make sure there hadn’t been any recent rain because the ground got spongy underneath the hydrangeas and stayed icky sloppy for the rest of the season once throughly soaked.  Picking a spot sheltered from the October winds by the shed and just halfway under a hydrangea I crawled into my sleeping bag with bear and book.  It was so cold! The air was sharp against my face but my body was overjoyed by the soft warm flannel and fluffy insultation. 

Pulling the top tight around my chin I snuggled down onto my side with arms full of bear and book.  I would always intend to go out to read but ended up just holding the book to my chest.  I still love the feeling of literally curling up with a book against my chest, fingers jammed between the pages to hold my place, and drifting off into a fanstasyland of sleep.  And sleep always came to me there.  No matter what time of the day it was.  But first I would lie there for a long time enjoying the dichotomy of the crisp air on my face while my body was comfortingly warm.  I closed my eyes and listed to the sounds of the season.  I heard the wind shaking all the trees and bushes with their semi-dried up leaves and heard the squirrels, of which there were plenty, running through the crisp leaves on the lawn around me.  I listened to the sound of the far off traffic.  Sound carried so much farther on the clear sharp air. 

It didn’t take long to slip into a very peaceful sleep immersed as I was in the warmth and the fallish sounds and the scent of woodsmoke from all the neighbours fireplaces.  There was so little peace in my little world.  But I knew what real peace felt like.  Maybe it made the rest of the time harder on me than on my siblings because I knew how far I was from what I thought of as the natural good feeling.  Those moments were heaven where I blocked away all thought and feeling for the life I was living and slipped entirely into the delicious moment, floating sort of, free for a while, safe for a few minutes.  No matter how awful it got inside the house, I always knew, at least while I was very young, that the world around me was beautiful, that there was so much pleasure to be had if I could sneak away to grab hold of it, though never to keep, I knew that.

I enjoyed several hydrangea days when I was so wee wee small over the course of a couple or three years.  When I was old enough to go to school it became harder to detach entirely like that and just float away on the weather and the scent of woodsmoke and sound of scattering leaves.  Each time I was discovered by my screaming slapping mother who was infuriated that I’d left the house without telling her and had taken the sleeping bag without permission and dared to put it on the ground where it would get soiled.  The hydrangea days, like most days, ended very badly.  But they were important.  Very important.  They did some kinda magic on my soul, you know?  Made reality so sweet for just a while that it nourished me deep and good and long. 

Today, just a little bit ago, I wraped myself in that wool sweater again and sat on the peeling picnic table bench and lifted my face to the crisp lively air with head back and eyes closed.  Listening to the rustle of the leaves, the sound of far off traffic, the harumph of dogs playing around me, and inhaled the delicious scent of woodsmoke from my neighbour’s firplaces. 

My mother always came at me screaming, “What the hell are you doing?!”  She was always confused by my behaviour when I was very wee young.  I was known as a strange child.  I could never answer that question.  I wasn’t doing anything.  That was the point.  I was, I realize now, perfecting the art of simply Being.  It is sad that my Being was construed as something so wrong and earned so much anger.  But I got the healing experience logged in my soul first, unaffected by the following tirade. 

I am comforted to look back and realize how many ways and days and moments I did manage to escape the undeserved harshness of my life.   I was a fantasy-er.  I escaped into stories I saw unfolding before my eyes.  I watched them like movies, sitting ever so still for sometimes hours on end.  Not a way to live one’s whole life, but it preserved my humanness.