Hi readers: Just for fun, I’ve scratched out this little piece. Not sure if it’s the intro to a current Work-in-Progress or the beginning of a story in its own right. Hope you enjoy it.
PS. This photo–like all photos and art on this site–is one of mine.
I often think the best days of my life were spent in the woods. Tromping soft detritus-littered trails by the run—run, yes, for it was too small to be a creek. Turning over rocks on a still summer day to find salamanders or crayfish in slow water. Listening to the rattle of browning leaves already past the fiery tones of autumn, waiting for the first crisp wind to cast them down in a cascade. Plucking cicada husks from birch bark. The blue of shale poking out from striated dirt. Chewing honeysuckle or sassafras. Petrichor and rotting stumps. Searching for the feathers behind whistles and twits with my hereditarily bad eyesight.
It was heaven, even when we had to leave it for chores or homework.
But the woods are sacred on an archetypal level, that space where we grew, explored, adventured, and discovered a world larger than our father’s crumbling farmhouse. Shadows moved in the dark of the woods at night, and hoots and howls evoked more from the imagination than owls and wolves. Baba Yaga, the Erlking, the Gingerbread Witch. The woods—our woods—could be where they waited.
Of course not. That’s silly.
The county history book tells of a woman who was slaughtered by the indigenous tribes in the mid-1700s, perhaps right there in the woods behind our house. I have wondered if more than once we played in her shadow—the natives left her hanging in the trees. Despite my love of the woods, the story reinforced a simple fact: woods are dangerous. That knowledge, and the details of the old tale, and my tendency to believe in the things we can’t explain, made me sometimes reluctant to look up.
Nicanor Abbott 
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