Category: Nonfiction

My Shadow’s Shadow

Cheryl Skory Suma

Before

Before the fall, I did not appreciate the power of memories. They were of the forest’s shadow, easily eclipsed by the echo of my forward footsteps upon the broken parts of my now.

***

After

Once I’d become my shadow’s shadow, I saw memories through new stalker’s eyes. I became the observer, concealed behind a forest of lost snapshots of me.

***

Before

My memories were too aggressive. Painfully thrusting themselves to the forefront or tugging me backward to a past best left behind. Even the innocent were more of a distraction than something I cherished. I was focused forward.

***

After

Post the fall, I wished only to travel back in time; to turn around and scoop up those lost comrades. To hold them under my cloak, both the innocent and the pained, lovingly cocooned together. Without exception.

***

Before

I saw memories as slithering, living things. Like earthworms wriggling out of the ground to chase the rain’s song, memories had a sly way of slipping in and out of my consciousness, of gleefully appearing without warning to disrupt my present. The cruel ones were experts at waiting to pounce, cunningly curled up in the darkness until the time was right to show themselves—to remind me of all the burdens and hurt they cradled.

It wasn’t their fault. Like me, memories were at the mercy of time. Time changed us both, without consideration and with few concessions. Memories found a way to embrace time’s wreckage. As the moss that finds new life upon the fallen oak’s shattered trunk, my memories had morphed into something new. They demanded I support their vision even though they’d managed to recklessly color themselves with experiences and emotions that were never part of their beginnings, or mine.

Memories were such a negative presence in my life that I took them for granted. Until I fell.

***

After

Until a patch of ice on a blustery, snowy day. Until a misstep that birthed a head injury. In that instant, a large company of my memories and I parted ways. They flung themselves free, to scatter like mirror twins along with the swirling snowflakes that danced upward into the sky, riding the wind as I lay on my back, watching until my eyes blurred and the last stragglers melted on my lashes.

Suddenly, I became a mess of “Couldn’t” s. I couldn’t wash my face without vertigo shoving me over. I couldn’t write without leaving out expected prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions. I had trouble finding simple words or replaced the desired word with something that sounded or looked the same but wasn’t. I couldn’t smile and say, “Yes, that was a great day,” when my family told a story—a story from a past where I’d lived and loved, but now couldn’t remember.

A large piece of me was left behind on that ice, sliding sideways until coming to rest roadside. No matter how much I’ve tried to retrace my steps, I never found what the snowflakes so merrily coveted. My memories enjoyed their new freedom and chose not to return.

No more past stories to be tainted by time, no thoughts snaking in the basement, no happy memories swinging defiantly in the gallows. Just clean, crisp, nothingness. A decade long hole in my life. The head injury decided which memories were worthwhile and which were too heavy to carry on, and it didn’t care to sort through the good and the bad—it dumped them all. It had its own forward focus.

The encampment that once sheltered my memories now burnt to the ground, I began to feel invisible. Most of my memories were truly lost, although some would occasionally pass by to whisper in the ears of my loved ones, allowing them to share their version of my lost stories. Hearing it second hand didn’t feel the same; the stories didn’t engulf me the way the memories did when they still wriggled around within me. They were not mine. They were not real.

I hungrily looked at photographs from those lost years, hoping to tempt back that nagging tickle. To feel memories’ insistence for acknowledgement—so they could validate that I had a past worthy of remembering. When this failed, I would flee to walk circles around the block. Determined to go anywhere the quiet photographs were not, but with nowhere to go.

***

After the Shadow’s Gift

Post the fall, the initial deficits and memory loss forced me to sell my business—I had to leave behind the healthcare company I’d founded. Nor could I return to my previous career as a Speech-Language Pathologist. I had to find a new voice.

In my career, I had worked with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) patients. So I knew that if I wanted to heal, I should exercise my brain through math, word puzzles, reading. This led me to reconnect with my first love, writing. It took five years, but eventually, I found acceptance. I found ways to embrace my reborn self and the lessons of my head injury. Diving back into writing was only the first gift.

I discovered that I could leave unkind slithering thoughts in the shadows; it was in my power to forget them. I could use the absence of their biases to move forward free of the burden of past hurts. As new memories were born, I could allow them to wriggle through my consciousness and poke without competition at my future present—I could birth my own forest of recollections to echo new life choices.

I learned to slow down and appreciate life’s gifts more. This was a new me—one with a past full of holes. Perhaps, a trail of holes was just fine and dandy. It was the wholeness I could make of today that mattered.

These choices, this acceptance of my reborn self—it ensured that my new memories and I could cast our own shadow, instead of only belonging to those we’d left behind.

Cheryl Skory Suma

Nature Sketches

Maria S. Picone

As a child, I loved to pinch the suckers from the tomatoes out underneath the terracotta sun. They grew in between the branches, signaling a riot or a disorder too deep to be named, other than Nature. In my own garden slept a forest of herbs and wildflowers—blue delphinium, purple Johnny-jump-ups, catnip, and spearmint. I made tea, potpourri, and magical concoctions from this bounty. To me, bliss could be nothing other than a summer day on the deck, drinking a lemonade and watching my cat, Elizabeth, frolic like a kitten in the  grass, or exploring the woods across the street with my friends, hiking to the mysterious wooden bench where we sat to discuss middle-school secrets, wishes, and dreams with no witnesses but tall patient oaks and each other.

*

My parents grew eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes to stock my grandmother’s fridge. If we didn’t have them for her, chances were that her brother would bring them by. He kept a plot the size of a house’s foundation out underneath the pine trees bordering his land. My grandmother cooked until she fell for the umpteenth time, entering a nursing home to give her time to heal.

We paved over the garden so my grandmother could come home; the slope created a driveway, solving the problem of too many stairs for her wheelchair. It was the first time my parents killed something I loved. But I knew about death. Once, I overwatered an African violet. The fuzzy leaves reminded me of a cat’s tongue, their shape the spades in her deck of cards. It burgeoned with good health before it dropped, wilting and half-rotted, its leaves coated in gray dust.

*

My grandmother’s room at the nursing home faced the nursing home garden and the woods, and she had a large window. In every season, her brother and his wife would decorate it with window clings to brighten the room where she spent her last ten years.

Coming back from college for her ceremony, I ran to the woods when it got too much to be in the house, the darkness. It was a damp March and the slush of the forest floor gave way to rotten leaves. The bench remained, a little grayer than before. I took off my glove and stroked the battered wood with my bare hand. Content in what did and never changed.

I saved the roses, dramatic and dark, from her funeral. Their stems had sharp thorns like a cat’s claws.

*

My senior year of college, my great-uncle and aunt emailed to tell me that my grandmother’s Christmas cactus, a sickly old plant that had languished with her in the nursing home, had bloomed. “I know it sounds crazy but I’m convinced it’s a message from Gus for Maria’s graduation,” they wrote. I could see in those fertile green leaves, the sharp edges, the red holiday cheer of my childhood home, living on with my cat in the afterlife.

The last time I visited her headstone, we planted geraniums. Someone had left a pot of petunias, the potting soil black with rain. I looked at the slick granite that bore our name, Picone. We pulled a pile of weeds to put in the plastic bag, an offering of clover, bluegrass, and dandelions. The cemetery, like a sacred grove, is wrapped in forest. Neither the sky nor my eyes were clear, but a bliss lingered in me nonetheless as I swept away the browned pine needles blown down from the trees.

Maria S. Picone

One Night I Walked into the Woods

Christie Megill

The forest raised me, like it did so many others, with dirt-caked jeans, untamed eyes, and imaginations that could be barely be contained inside a single mind.

I was brought up by the towering trees, the woodland animals that delighted in frightening me by skittering under leaves and rustling thick bushes, the breeze that made branches sing and my own skin flush.

The shadows. The ghosts. Their whispers.

I grew up in the woods, where farmers once settled, where crumbling stone walls marked property lines and cow paths. Woodland advanced upon every angle of my house, surrounding us like a decaying castle in an old story. My mother could never get a garden to thrive in the rocky soil, yet the forest flourished.

Back then, I didn’t know the extent of what could be hiding in the woods. Never mind the fairy tales I devoured, ripe with the threat of wolves and witches. Wolves did not roam in Connecticut. Witches always seemed misunderstood

And so I believed I was safe. But now I know what is there, watching and waiting, sliding into the gloom and traveling on the backs of songbirds and foxes. Still, I continue to return to these woods. I return home and I peer into the thicket.

One night, I walked into the woods. I was grown by then, nothing like the little girl who once stalked that property. Or, I was exactly like that girl, but with a woman’s skin and a more battered soul. My children slumbered soundly in the bedroom where I’d slept when I was young. They did not fear the forest the way they should, either. I told myself they would learn. But then, had I?

The moon, engorged and luminous, hung in the unhindered sky like a lantern, though it could not possibly illuminate all that was obscured by inky tree trunks and stirring ferns. Even in the light of day, nightmares can haunt the mind. We like to believe if we shed light on the shadows, we will realize there is nothing there, nothing to be afraid of after all. We turn on closet lights and shine lamps under the bed, certain that the monsters were manufactured.

I walked into the woods in rubber boots and a woolen coat, my hair loose and the wind on my neck. The woods were a landscape teeming with flora and fauna. They were nature and beauty. Still, my body tingled and my stomach cramped as I left the protection of a grassy yard, walking into the wild.

Since that night, I’ve learned to trust myself more expertly. Intuition, as throbbing as a full moon, is not a hysterical reaction to a normal circumstance. It is the truth, sighing through the body and shocking the brain.

Shadows slipped past, hiding in faraway corners beyond my sight. Charcoal tree trunks blended into the unending night, black against black. Moonlight slipped through to the ground so that I could almost make out my feet against the chilled earth. A spiderweb grazed my face, sticking to strands of hair, and I brushed away its fine threads.

The air tasted sweet and melancholy, crisp and alert.

When I was young, the forest spoke to me. I see that now. And I better understand what it was trying to communicate in its imprecise, ancient way.

There were no apparitions or disembodied voices, no tangible monsters that materialized before me or secret books I uncovered in the dirt. Though I did leave many messages, I remember. On lined paper torn from my school notebooks, I scribbled snippets of prose and desperate wishes, burying them under the earth. Perhaps I’ll never know, or recall, the contents of those notes, but the forest does. The memory of trees is long and unhurried, unlike a brook or a cloud. Trees soak in our stories through their roots, like so much water, and keep them stored in their hidden grooves. The trees knew me, and they will know me until I am no longer here.

Small mammals stirred in the undergrowth and the hallmark call of owls echoed eerily through the branches. I walked down the familiar path of my youth, dry and dusty, though then it was narrower than before. Soon enough, the forest would devour it and the next generation of girls would not find it there, under the vines and thorns that time would grow. They would take knives, or bats, or their bare hands to clear away the trail. But for me, it was still there. A ghost of what it had been.

My foot caught on an exposed root and I stumbled, though I did not fall. When I came to the clearing, I did not need moonlight nor markers to know of my arrival.

The quiet told me.

This spot was the farthest into my forest I would venture when I was a child. It was a gate and a barrier, and even then, in my daydreamy ignorance, I knew not to cross it.

When a wood hushes, it’s not merely the sound that vanishes. The air lightens and the shapes sharpen. The body changes, becoming acutely aware of every twig on the ground, stone blocking the way, and bird sitting silently atop a tree, staring but not flying away.

When the forest speaks, it makes sure you have no choice but to listen.

Under the moon and the shadow canopy, time stopped as my muscles tensed. My ears grew larger, waiting for the inevitable and ethereal call to retreat as quickly as my rubber boots would take me. Hairs stood on my neck while under my wool coat and thin pink pajama top, goosebumps dotted my arms.

In my youth, I was frequently consumed by this sensation. It was the faint murmur of a change in the surroundings, a shift in safety, a breath of clarity. I would often write outside, a notebook propped on my skinny, bug-bitten thighs. A stone fence still stands over a vanishing stream, and it was my outdoor office before I knew it was what I needed, and what I would eternally return to.

As a young girl, I was sitting on the fence one summer day, deep in thought about a story that ached inside me. Then, it happened. My surroundings were suddenly altered and I knew, in the well of my instinctual awareness, that I had to leave that place immediately. I closed my notebook, swung my legs off the fence, and ran up my driveway. I ran.

That night in the woods, the same feeling passed through me. The shadows darkened and the crackling leaves overhead blocked out the moon’s comforting glow. Patches of stars were visible until wind-battered boughs blotted out the only spots of light. Cool air pressed upon me.

Again, I sped through the woods toward shelter and warmth. The forest wanted me to listen. No wolves were following my trail, but as for monsters, I did not know. I thought I was safe because I had become the witch.

When I glanced in a mirror at home, I gasped at the sallow image reflecting back. Silver moon spots dappled my face, along with a fresh scratch from a stray branch in the woods. A thin, elegant strip of blood ran down my cheek.

The forest promised no safety. It cut and bruised, leaving marks etched into my skin and my soul, no matter how wise I thought myself to be. Still, I knew I would return again.

Christie Megill

Lake Oswego

Colin Lubner

The road went on longer than prior adventures dictated it should. Disappearing required predictable space and time, they’d found: the last street lamp on a wooded road announced an immediate narrowing. A half-mile more and asphalt turned to sand. Farther—another two minutes, max—and the path would grow unpassable. Potholes and puddles and fallen trees would bar the way. Joking to conceal their relief, they would turn the car around. They would return.

***

South Jersey’s Pine Barrens spanned over one million acres of cranberry bogs and disused furnaces. From the late 1700s to the middle of the following century, its forges had shipped bog iron (notable for both its high quantity and its low quality) to markets in Philadelphia and New York City. Towns had grown and thrived and died in a decade. Other towns—like Southampton, Shamong—had endured.

The boys did not know this history, not that night: all they knew was of the absence that had come after. Mobsters had buried mobsters. Devils had multiplied and terrorized before returning to the ground once more. These and other legends: ghost towns whose populations had pulled Roanokes of their own. Backwoods cabins whose respective owners lived on in their respective cellars’ womblike darks. Colonies of incestuous racists. These they knew. These were the Pine Barrens, wherein weirdness and mystery abounded. And on this night, as they had spent so many nights before, the boys were on a quest for a story of their own.

***

But the road did not end. Not for mile after mile. Until, at last, they saw light up ahead. A golden glow pooled among the ruts in the sand. The eyes of some small nocturnal mammal—opossum, raccoon—blinked in and out of the headlights’ beams. They sensed the sudden openness to the night, the man-made space. The boy driving did not want to stop, but the other three in the car wanted him to stop. So he stopped.

Research facility. Or some shit. A prison.

One of you fuckers want to check Google Maps?

I’m not getting service.

Fuck.

That’s barbed wire.

We’re in the asshole of fucking nowhere.

I’m pretty sure there’s a mental hospital—

Shut up.

I’m serious!

Why the fuck—

I don’t know, dude. I’m as lost as you.

***

The boy driving did not say this: Hey, guys. I’m tired. It’s late. Why are we out here in the first place? Let’s go home. Smoke. I don’t know. Play some Skyrim. I don’t know.

Instead, he turned off the car. He joined them outside. He did not lock the doors behind him. He did not know if this was a mistake; slasher flicks presented compelling cases both ways.

One of the other boys was approaching the fence. The boy who drove wanted to warn him not to touch the wire, that there was a chance it was electrified. It was not.

After a moment, he joined the other boys. He wrapped his fingers around the cool, rusted links. He strained his eyes.

***

It’s like a lab or some shit.

You see The Thing?

Shut up.

Sounds like something the Thing would say.

Shut up.

I’m just saying—

AWWHOOOOOO—

Dude, what—

Don’t howl—

Stop it—

There might be, like, a guard, or—

AWWHOOOOOO—

***

There was a moon, of course. A great golden rotten fruit tossed with disgust into the sky. But it was not full, and the Thing was not a werewolf; it was unclear what joke, if any, the boy who’d howled was trying to make. But they laughed as they stepped back from the fence and piled back into the car. The lab/prison/asylum had stayed silent and still. Nothing had moved among its low white buildings. A light had not even blinked.

***

They drove on. The boy drove on. Lake Oswego lay ahead—a blue hole, according to one of the other boys. One of the Pine Barrens’  abandoned mines. And/or a portal to Hell. And/or a summer camp. Earlier, they’d remained undecided. All they’d been certain of inside Arnold’s Diner was that there was a gap in the map marked Lake Oswego, that it was only some ten miles away. Down a long, lonely road. And also this: that it was the summer before their senior year. They had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, no one else to be. The boy who had driven them there would drive them again. He would protest, knowing full well he would do it, that part of him even wanted to, that there was no other choice.

***

A minute later, they came to water. Perhaps twenty yards of it. Of unknowable depth. In the headlights, it shone a radioactive yellow-green. The boy braked. The boy swore.

What?

I’m not driving through that.

It’s a fucking puddle.

And this is a fucking 2007 Honda CRV.

Perhaps the protests continued. Later, looking back, the boy would not remember them. All he would recall was the relief he felt upon regaining asphalt. Then, soon after, passing again the first streetlight. Spotify kicking back in soon after that, and another of the boys asking him to turn it up. Which, gladly, he did.

***

No one followed them back from the facility. Lab. Asylum. Whatever it was. The car did not break down. All of them made it home safe.

***

The next day one of them re-Googled Lake Oswego, retraced their route. The facility was Rutgers University’s Blueberry and Cranberry Research Center. No joke. Dead serious. The others were furious with him for disclosing this fact.

***

Later, much later, one of the boys, the boy who howled at the not-full moon, would seek treatment for schizophrenia. They would not hear from him for a while, and when they did it was not the same. One of the other boys would try to kill himself. He would fail—thank God—and, in the aftermath, he would get better. Then worse. Then better again. Epiphanies are not clean. Transformations are always incomplete.

One of them would go to Rutgers. This was New Jersey, after all. It was inevitable that one of them would go to Rutgers.

The last of them, the boy who drove, would not change. Or at least not much. He would continue to search for stories to tell. Not to live one—no. Not even to have lived one. Just to be able to tell of it.

***

Everyone doesn’t want to be someone. What they want is to have been someone. To look back and say, yes, that night, those woods, those boys—that was us. That was me.

That night, looking for Lake Oswego, for whatever was or was not there, four boys pushed out. They came as close to the darkness as they could before turning back. They would only visit the lake once more, the next summer, the summer before their first years away, and the boy would not drive. They would spend an hour on the edge of an ordinary body of water—weedy, fetid—and wonder what they had ever feared. Hell—they could swim to the other side if they wanted to. They did not.

Colin Lubner

Sarah D. Meiklejohn

Creative Nonfiction Contributor

Sarah D. Meiklejohn is a freelance content writer living in South Philadelphia with her husband Joe and their three rescued cats. When she is not writing, Sarah spends her time daydreaming about flying, watching horror movies, and taking long walks in the woods.

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Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

A New England Folk Tale

Maria S. Picone

Creative Nonfiction Contributor

Maria S. Picone (she/her/hers) writes, paints, and teaches from her home in South Carolina. Her writing has been published in Kissing Dynamite, Ligeia, and Q/A Poetry, among others. A Korean adoptee, Maria often explores themes of identity, exile, and social issues facing
Asian Americans. She received an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and holds degrees in philosophy and political science. You
can find more on her website, mariaspicone.com, or Twitter @mspicone.

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Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

Nature Sketches

A New England Folk Tale

Sarah D. Meiklejohn

Once upon a time, in a forest not so far away, I traveled to worlds most wondrous where my sisters and I slayed dragons and worked magic spells. I moved through old, gnarled grapevines to alternate dimensions where we prevented the end of the world by outsmarting an evil witch with a puddle. And though no one ever knew of our heroism, we celebrated together by dancing recklessly within the circles of faerie rings.

In the woods behind my childhood home, we four were always the heroes. We had all the answers. We were an unstoppable force for good.

But these woods are not always forgiving.

Adams, Massachusetts is a small town nestled beside lush mountains. In the autumn—particularly late September into early October—the trees sparkle like jewels along the rolling hills. The fall foliage reminds me, always, of the fantasy stories I was raised on. The vibrant colors recall dwarven treasure pilfered by a greedy, fire-breathing monster—beautiful and much-coveted.

I grew up in many different houses, but the place that always meant the most was the Farm. The Farm is an 1800s residence that began its life as an inn along an old stagecoach road up on the mountain. In the early 1900s, one of my ancestors decided to disassemble the inn and move it—painstakingly—by horse and carriage to the place where it now sits on a hill. I have often wondered why anyone would do such a thing; surely building a new house would have been easier. But whatever my great-great-grand-something’s motivations, the Farm has been my family’s homestead for several generations, and it is the place I most associate with the word home.

I never knew the Farm as an actual farm,; it stopped working around the time my grandfather joined the Navy and moved away. The moniker is only a remnant of a lost story where the parcel was larger and grander than it is now. The Farm’s six remaining acres lie along a winding back road, butted up against the Mount Greylock State Reservation. Mount Greylock’s impressive landscape includes part of the Appalachian Trail, and at 3,489 feet, its peak is the tallest point in Massachusetts. The woods of the mountain—and those between its base and the Farm—have always been an important part of my family’s story.

My uncle Tim is quite the outdoorsman. He has spent his life in the woods, as a forest ranger in New York and now as a logger felling trees in his home state. Once upon a time when I was a teenager, I asked Tim if we could hike Mount Greylock together and he agreed.

But I was—and am still—much slower than Tim, and so he miscalculated how far we could travel before the setting of the summer sun. Even the well-marked trails of Mount Greylock become very, very dark at dusk.

You cannot truly know darkness until you stand in the forest as the new moon ascends a clouded sky. There is a primal fear that stirs in your belly when the dense canopy overhead closes against the stars, enveloping you in the deep, inky blanket of evening. I have never known a person as at home in the woods as Tim, and I could still sense this creeping terror in him that night.

As we careened downhill through the bramble, forgoing the impossible-to-follow trail, the sound of coyotes further up the mountain awakened a sense of dread that made the flesh of my nape feel cool, even against the oppressive humidity of August. I imagined glowing eyes and gleaming teeth, poised in the shadows and waiting to devour us whole.

Tim was wearing a white shirt that reflected what little ambient light remained, but even still, I often lost sight of him against the increasing static of the trees. We cursed because neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight. At first, I had clutched the back of Tim’s shirt in my hands, so I wouldn’t lose him. “Don’t hold onto me,” he said, “If I fall into a trench or twist my ankle, I don’t want to take you with me.”

So I relied on my ears, honing in on the crunching of leaves beneath his feet as I followed behind him, sandwiched between Tim and the coydogs, fervently hoping he was as surefooted in the void of night as he had been in the daytime. Each tentative step seemed to stretch the corresponding moment into an hour. That night, I realized time has no meaning in the darkness; all that matters is whether your boots find solid ground.

We eventually made it off the mountain, landing on a road we knew could take us home if we wandered a little farther. The following day, Tim returned to the slope, retracing our course from the outlook we had hiked to. I did not accompany him, but he told me our path was easy to follow—a cacophony of man-made destruction through the brush and dead leaves.

He discovered that we had come mere inches from a steep cliff face and had very nearly plummeted a hundred feet into a gully where no one but the coyotes would have found us.

My reverence for the sacred space of evening is too great a deterrent for me to hike at night anymore. But when I think of that experience, there is something mystical about our path, pitched perfectly to the left of the gorge. Almost as though we were guided by a light we could not see.

There are probably many versions of this story where I am the villain; a wayward child stomping through the natural splendor around me with no regard for the sanctity of landscape. A rogue blazing a destructive path with little care for the snap of saplings or the trample of wildflowers.

But in my mind, I was an adventurer and a scientist, stripping fungi from the bark of rotting trees to keep in my strange collection under the porch. Storing samples so I could measure how quickly they grew and how different types fared under comparable circumstances. Sometimes I would put them in the sun to see how long before they shriveled into nothingness against the heat.

The puffballs were always my favorite; smooth, strange totems ten times the power of a dandelion. Good for wishes, but better suited for alchemy.

Once upon a time, I found giant puffballs in my grandmother’s garden. The largest of them was bigger than a gallon milk jug, and I stared in wonder at the cluster of massive fungi, wondering how such an incredible thing could exist anywhere, especially in my own yard where I could reach out and touch it.

But I wasn’t allowed to touch them, yet, because everyone had to see them first.

The cluster consisted of five or six giant puffballs, and as I stood watch over them—waiting for my father to return with my sisters and a camera—I nudged one of the smaller mushrooms gently with my toe. I watched, transfixed and elated, as smoke poured forth from the ball; tiny spores drifting away on the air like twisting fog. I imagined each microscopic spec had wings of its own as it fluttered beyond the trees, disappearing into the woods to begin a new life.

“Sarah!”

I jumped, startled and ashamed of being caught, and pleaded, “It was an accident!”

“It was not.”

My father was right, of course; it hadn’t been an accident, but then I never thought demolishing one of the puffballs on my own would make my sisters cry so hard. I hadn’t realized it was as important to them as it had been to me to watch it explode into magical seeds destined to float away like a thousand newly hatched spiders.

Sometimes, in our wonder to observe things, we think we can control the outcome, but that is seldom the case.

The problem with hurting someone’s feelings is, no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to repair the small piece of your relationship torn away by the injury. And sisterhood is by nature often laden with a thousand tiny slashes in the fabric of the bond.

I cannot count the number of skinned knees and mosquito bites, but I can tell you the rush of jumping into the frigid water of early October, even though my mother told me not to. I can recount the epic cattail swamp sword battles of my youth, or recall the time my sister’s shoe was ripped off by a torrent of water and we raced to catch it before it was swallowed by the black hole where the stream disappeared beneath the road.

I used to imagine gnomes hidden in the roots of trees, and winged trolls lurking in the shadows of the highest branches. My sisters and I would invent mythologies and share them with one another, whispering in hushed voices so the mysterious creatures surrounding us wouldn’t catch us telling their secrets.

Tucked away in the woods of the Farm, there is a brook. It runs powerfully after the rain, but is more often a gentle drip against the scurry of squirrels and the chirping of crickets. To get to the brook, you must follow a narrow and overgrown path mostly hidden by old grapevines that produce useless fruit. At the end of the small trail, there is an enormous rock precariously perched over a shallow pool where the brook rests for a moment on its journey down the mountain.

Whenever I was overwhelmed by the shouting of my sisters or the fighting of my parents, I would sit on that rock and daydream or write. There is something otherworldly about spending time in the woods alone. Each crack of a branch prompts a rush of adrenaline; every persistent buzz of an unseen insect pierces your eardrums like a missile.

In the woods, I could be anything—a famous author penning my masterwork or an audacious explorer seeking treasure, a mystical wizard casting spells and communing with the fae. It was a place of unlimited peace tucked within the chaos of my world, and even though the branches above sometimes reminded me of witches’ fingers, I trusted their embrace would never be as cruel.

I live in Philadelphia, now. While there are many things I enjoy about the city, I find myself more than ever drawn to the inimitable tranquility of the woods. I spend hours each weekend traversing the paths of Wissahickon Valley Park, desperately chasing that feeling of wonder in nature from my childhood.

But there are always too many people on the trails, and so there is no peace to be found; you can even hear the cars racing down the highway just over the ridge. I have never found harmony the way I did on that rock by the brook, and the older I become, the more I think I never will.

When I was growing up, my grandmother used to tell me stories about the Quakers who first settled the area that would become the town of Adams. She would tell me that once upon a time, the Quakers refused to live too low in the valley because they believed evil spirits lurked in the mists that rose from the Hoosic River. I will never know whether those stories were true, but they hovered in my mind each time I watched the fog from the basin roll up the hill, creeping over the front fields and encroaching on the Farm in a menacing haze.

The section of the Hoosic River that runs through Adams is encased in an ugly concrete casket to prevent it from rising up and swallowing the town whole. The dull grey tomb of the snaking waterway is the only way I have ever known it, and I wonder what its majesty must have been like before it was tamed, when it flooded the earliest settlers out of their farms.

Adams was originally a mill town, pressing paper from the pulp of large trees harvested and floated downriver. Now the Mill is mostly empty apartments, and the trees are instead cut down so a Pfizer subsidiary called Specialty Minerals can mine lime from the mountain. When I was young, the hole in the forest was so small you could hardly see it, but now it is a gaping maw of too-bright white against the dense green conifers and brilliant maples.

Like those mythical winged beasts stealing gold and rubies, we humans have always been too greedy. Despite all the dragon-slaying practiced in my youth, I find it impossible to conquer the true beasts of this world. There are no defenses against the passage of time, not even magical ones.

My sisters and I spent much of our adolescence outdoors, racing through tall milkweed and catching lightning bugs in glass jars. Each summer, we would run barefoot through the forest and play in the brook, draping ourselves languidly over the smooth river stones.

The woods surrounding the Farm carry the scars of the sprawling homestead that once ran through them; rusted barbed wire poised for a sneak attack and low, crumbled stone walls that no longer keep animals in their proper place. If you walk far enough into the true and wild forest, you will find abandoned wells and empty foundations; the ghosts of dwellings long abandoned.

Through generations, pieces of the original property have been sold off in dull, square chunks when income was scarce. Slowly, as my family lost interest in the arduous work of cultivation, the Farm dwindled until it nearly died. I think sometimes the specters of this other life can still be found in the tree line, dancing through the dappled sunlight, just out of reach.

The Farm is no longer the same place I grew up in. The wonder I felt as a child has diminished to an invisible rustle in the clipped grass of fallow fields. The faeries have abandoned their rings to rot and the brook is smaller and less impressive than I remember it. My sisters and I are all adults, and the time for magic and adventure has long since waned.

The foundation and the front steps of the Farm are disintegrating. The shed behind the main house collapsed a decade ago and the original barn now appears to be charting the same course. When I look at the crumbling house on the hill, I cannot help envisioning those witch finger branches slowly closing around it, pulling the Farm into their clutches like a first-born baby promised to an enchantress in exchange for a spell.

Once upon a time, there was a farmhouse on a hill surrounded by mystical woods where my sisters and I slayed perilous beasts and defeated wicked sorcerers. I wonder if we had known the Farm would eventually fall into disrepair, whether we would have been more cautious with it. Children can be hard on a house, and we four were raucous in our abuse of its aged plaster walls and antique wooden staircases. If we had been more delicate, could we have saved it?

Maybe the Farm was always destined to fade back into the landscape, swallowed by the trees as if returning home to the warm embrace of the mountain.

Sarah D. Meiklejohn