Honea Express

Archive for the ‘outdoors’ Category

I do not need to see the paint to know it is there — a fresh coat of white where once grew the notches of their youth. Memories written in pencil tend to be erased, and those are the things you never like to think about. It was a trace of them, and it is gone.

The boys grow here, too. There is sunshine and warmth and toes sinking in sands ever shifting. The waves crash upon their laughter, and the boys wave back with salt-soaked smiles. Their hair is soft in strands of gold. Their shoulders brown and growing broader.

Somewhere in an overgrown garden are the fruits of their labor. Tiny leaves spring from seeds once carried home in love and paper cartons. They have been set free and forgotten — something new for countless raindrops to fall upon. They will grow and bloom and nobody will ever know that the boys were the ones to place them there. Only the roots will remember.

Here the ground is hot and it rolls towards the horizon. The boys are shouting as they run across it. There are paths worn in the hillside and their small steps keep the tall grass always parted. Rabbits dart, birds flock and the boys sing songs made of their own device. They glow in the midday sun and their brows glisten accordingly.

Such is the way of chapters closed, next and those being written. We have left pieces of us, some by chance and some with purpose. For example, there are places in the glen where our voices softly echo, and there are stories tucked away to tell when such things are needed. One is about an old dog asleep forever beneath the cherry tree, and it should be told fondly with just a hint of tears. Others are filled with countless bottles growing light and rather quick to empty. They should be told loud and often. We left all that, and a spot of quiet that wasn’t always so.

These are the things that fall from your postcard.

The sound was children laughing. The distance was measured in steps. There was skipping and screaming, and toys thrown asunder — the usual suspects of happiness that have lovingly littered our small street for the past two years.

“But there is something missing,” said the neighbor.

I said nothing and watched the children run by us. They took the hill with confidence, a blur of open mouths and hair blown by the wind. Between them flickered empty spaces of sunlight where my boys used to be.

I said nothing and watched the birds fly overhead. The clouds were low and pulled further down by greedy trees with nothing better to do.  The mist fell across my face, cool and sticky. It saved me the trouble of crying. The house just stood there with a blank look across its face, its door wide open. Inside it was nothing but boxes, echoes, and the ghost of a home slowly dying.

The children ran back up the hill, a pack chasing after laughter. Our eyes met as they passed me by, and for a moment the world fell silent.  I could read the writing on their wall, the smiles upon their faces. They were happy, but they knew it too, for they had left the spaces.

______________________

Reading this post again, I can see how those that don’t know our story may find it cause for concern. My children are fine. They have just moved to California ahead of me to spend time with their grandparents while my wife starts her new job.  Unfortunately, they left some great friends behind in the process.

It’s Father’s Day and I spent it at a beer festival, forgive me for waxing melancholy.

The truth is that the tree in the previous post was already cut down. We didn’t do it. I don’t need to report to the FTC that we received a boat or a house or a bushel of apples in exchange for the photo. It was a stump when we found it, and I have no idea if the tree ever gave or loved at all. For all I know it did nothing but take, and it could very well have deserved to die.

Also, the boy is not sad. He is doing this thing called “acting.” You could learn a lot from him, Nic Cage.

Here’s what happened:

We were almost home from the farmers’ market. We were on our bikes. The boys were between the rainbow dyes of a shared shaved ice and the promised painting of the hard boiled eggs that waited at home. I had fresh tulips sticking out of my backpack. The sun was warm and high above us. We could pass for a photograph.

There was a woman playing her ukulele under a large willow along the edge of the path and we slowed down as we rode by. That’s when we saw the stump. It was just siting there.

“Hey,” I called to the boys. “Come over here and let me take your picture.”

Zane jumped up first.

“Look,” he shouted. “I’m a sundial.”

He made a few more poses in the warm sunshine, the sound of a ukulele floating from the tree behind us.

“Our Easter eggs are white,” he said for no apparent reason.

“Don’t be racist,” I answered. He continued to work the camera, which in this case was my iPhone. He looked like he was in pain. “Now what are you doing?”

“You said to be fartsy.”

“Artsy. Get off the stump and let your brother have a turn.”

Atticus took over. He also opened with the sundial.

“It’s like the Giving Tree,” he said.

“And you’re like Einstein. What did you think we were doing out here?”

“Should I look sad?” he asked.

“Own it,” I said.

So he did, and then we got back on our bikes and went home.

The ukulele faded quickly, but the sun stayed up for hours.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.