Growth
Thursday, August 28th, 2008I need to start writing again, and this is as good a time as any. Head full of ideas but “no time” to spit them out (as always seems to be the case). So I’m writing this on the fly. No premeditation. No first draft. No editing. No guarantee that it’s going to be in any way coherent. Straight from my mind to the hive mind. That was terrible.
I’m visiting “home” for the first time in three years. Everything seems smaller, which is natural I guess, even though I’m the same size I was when I left. Probably because of all the memories that come flooding back. (”flooding”? Seriously? That’s way too cliche) …cascading back. My tree house seems tiny, but that’s because I haven’t been in it since 8th grade. Cabinets, doorways, the fridge, drawers, scissors, bowls… everything has shrunk.
Except for the trees. The silver maples in the front yard have doubled or tripled in size in the nearly-ten years I’ve been gone. I used to be able to easily reach the lowest branches (which are now the same size that the trunks used to be) and I had to sprint, jump, and kick off the trunk just to grab on now. It was never a climbing tree before, and now it can easily bear my weight.
There’s something so relaxing about climbing a tree… seeing over houses, completely invisible to the people on the ground (no one ever looks up!). The noise of the world below fades and all that is left is the wind rustling the leaves and rattling the branches, the chirp of the birds, and the sound of the clouds moving slowly by above. I try to imagine what someone would think if they saw a twenty-seven year-old up a tree… Funny how it seemed so normal at seven, despite being twenty, thirty, (forty?) feet up. Funny since it seems like these days the overprotective lawyerparents would never let their kids climb a tree. What came naturally back then… still does, but it seems much more conscious. Always step nearest to the trunk. Don’t commit your weight until you know the branch can hold it. Keep your eyes open (but don’t get stuck in the eye). Try not to crush the young shoots.
Metaphor…? Probably not.
But why is it different now, why are these things more apparent? A sense of mortality? Kids don’t think they’re invincible. They don’t think they’re anything. They’ve never been anything but alive, so why would they consider otherwise? How could they? Is it Causality? Endless what-ifs? “What if I can’t get down?” “What if I slip?” “What if the branch breaks?” “What if I die?” I thought kids were supposed to be the ones with the over-active imaginations. Maybe the difference is that adults focus all their imagination on negativity. (What could go wrong?) Kids apply it, unconstrained by practical notions, to the space of possibilities that most of us have blocked off in our heads. “What if I was a squirrel?” “What if I could fly?” What could possibly be?
Holy shit! Thunderstorm! I haven’t seen one of these in years!
