Post #5

Reading Response

I thought I would write a poem this week, but the words were not coming to me. I wanted to write something pretty about nature, but poems about the beauty of nature have been done to death, and I think in my cynicism, I had a hard time writing anything worthwhile to read. It was either far too sappy sweet or completely incoherent. 

So instead I'll talk about a place back home that is beautiful and in nature. My sister and I used to call it The Place. We gave it a vague name because we didn't want our brothers to figure out where we meant. In the woods surrounding the house we grew up in, my siblings and I would name certain places, I suppose to keep things orderly. There was Clay Falls, which was a dip in the creek where the water cascaded into a deep ditch of white clay. There was the Airplane Tree, which was a fallen tree that, although looked nothing like an airplane, would be used as an airplane in make believe. And there was Fern Valley, the Civil War Fire Pit, the Upper Field, the Lower Field, the Junkyard and so on and so forth. 

The Place, however, was special, because nothing about it's physical location or characteristics influenced its name. It was also special because it was were my sister and I would hang out most of the time. The Place was hidden in the woods near the Upper Field, across the creek with water and down the old, dry creek bed. After passing a tree with rusty barbed wire sticking out of it as if it had consumed a fence long ago that no longer existed, you would get to a large root that stretched across the entire expanse of the deep creek bed. This root was easily eight inches in diameter and was perfect for sitting. Katherine, my older sister, was naturally taller, and only needed to jump a little to sit on the root. I, on the other hand, was always the runt of the family, and so I needed to climb out of the creek bed and get onto the root from above. As if expecting a small child to need to do something like that, another tree was growing right next to it, which three large roots that extended into the creek bed, one on top of the other, each getting further back as they went up, creating a perfect staircase. This was The Place, and it was such a mystical and wonderful arrangement of nature, my sister and I thought it must be fate that we find it and play there. So we did, nearly every day. We would wake up before the sun, finish our homework as quickly as possible, and run outside to find leave that had frozen over in the night, and collect the prettiest ones before the morning sun melted them. Then we'd go the the place with our sticks and practice fighting each other in the clearing nearby, or we'd practice jumping over the creek, or master balance on the fallen log over the ditch. Sometimes we would venture deeper down the creek bed to the Mystic Pool, just to see if the water was still milky blue, and speculate at what sort of fairy magic it was that made it that way. 

We were weird kids, but it was fun, and it's nostalgic to think about it now. I miss it sometimes, but I admit to wearing rose tinted glasses. The heat of summer was miserable, and the bugs were always the worst. But some of the natural phenomena still amazes me.

Inspiration

Bombard's Body Language (A Youtube channel dedicated to analyzing peoples' body language. Really interesting stuff)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03208840

https://vimeo.com/81039224

Work