By IG: @occurrence1312
These woods stole me from my crib when I was 18. I am an only child, then and now.
I remember one night, I took off my shoes and ran through the leaves, caking my corduroy pants with mud, drunk on cheap scotch. I screeched with joy, like something old and altogether new, later learning that I had concerned distant neighbors. The woods said, “Let him have his fun. Tomorrow he will be inert, and no one will have him-not even me.” Those woods were correct.
Over time, I learned what my new parent liked. In exchange for contact dermatitis and over-extended tendons, they sent me bleached bones and turtle shells, outcrops of cretaceous ocean floors, and friends-aloof and busy like me-in owls, salamanders, snakes, and armadillos. Every exchange over these past twenty-three years has been worth it.
Men dress my parent in artificial boundaries, and they permit these boys to watch the fences rot into permeability to facilitate my free movement throughout their foggy drainages, where snow’s passport is not stamped at the same rate as the snow in the uplands—the uplands that erode rapidly due to the whims of these men.
They are a mean, steadfast, and consistent parent-the best that has ever been. They are the rare, trustworthy authority that can’t be replaced. They’re the only parent I’ll allow to find me when I leave, and they will. They always have. They’ll find me, and we’ll resume reciprocating They’ll use a greenbrier to take some blood (just a bit) to paint the woodpecker’s head before it hammers into the dead oak to my left.
I remember one night, I took off my shoes and ran through the leaves, caking my corduroy pants with mud, drunk on cheap scotch. I screeched with joy, like something old and altogether new, later learning that I had concerned distant neighbors. The woods said, “Let him have his fun. Tomorrow he will be inert, and no one will have him-not even me.” Those woods were correct.
Over time, I learned what my new parent liked. In exchange for contact dermatitis and over-extended tendons, they sent me bleached bones and turtle shells, outcrops of cretaceous ocean floors, and friends-aloof and busy like me-in owls, salamanders, snakes, and armadillos. Every exchange over these past twenty-three years has been worth it.
Men dress my parent in artificial boundaries, and they permit these boys to watch the fences rot into permeability to facilitate my free movement throughout their foggy drainages, where snow’s passport is not stamped at the same rate as the snow in the uplands—the uplands that erode rapidly due to the whims of these men.
They are a mean, steadfast, and consistent parent-the best that has ever been. They are the rare, trustworthy authority that can’t be replaced. They’re the only parent I’ll allow to find me when I leave, and they will. They always have. They’ll find me, and we’ll resume reciprocating They’ll use a greenbrier to take some blood (just a bit) to paint the woodpecker’s head before it hammers into the dead oak to my left.
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