Into The Woods

The weekend started out energetically with a long walk in the woods with the puppers. Mr. Pom refused to let me bow out and sit with my coffee in the warm Starbucks. He insisted I come with them, so we took our coffees with us and I'm so glad we did.

 

The leaves are just turning here,  mainly yellow with occasional flashes of red. The air is spicy and smells like pistachios. We had a mild freeze last night but deep in the woods, the ground is warm and all the  bushes  hold the heat, so the effect of the freeze were minimal.

After we walk for 5 minutes, we leave behind the sound of cars and the softball game at the field up the street. All we hear are the birds, the occasional cracking branch, and our own footsteps scuffling through leaves.  Sounds echo and a dog's bark from inside the dog park carries through the clear air. 

 

The dogs are both frisky and focused in pursuit of smells that only they can discern, snouts close to the ground, running in tandem as they pause from path to brush and back again. Suddenly, they stop, tails pointed, paws raised, and  and we look around to try to prepare for whatever they have seen or heard or smell.  With  our inadequate human senses, we  are relieved when they relax and go back to running ahead and turning to make certain that we are only steps behind. We have no desire to see a deer or a skunk come ambling down the path and the subsequent panic when the dogs take off after them.

Today we went on the back trails, over the small wooden bridges built to portage streams. We've had so listen rain that the bridges are covered with dust and Brewster's favorite mudding area is gone. I am wearing clogs, which is hardly the footwear for hilly, root-furrowed, rocky terrain. Mr. Pom holds my hand as we go down rutted paths and the dogs run up the side of the huge granite outcroppings, looking back at us plodding humans with pity. 

 

 

 

Mr. Pom takes me up a cliff and down again. He has a secret to show me. A shelter built out of stick sticks deep in the woods.

 

 

 

We don't know how long its been there. Or who built it. 

 

 

It's rather eerie, camouflaged in a little dale behind a huge granite outcropping that we climbed up slowly as the dogs ran up the side and made fun of us. 

But we made it up and down without incident and reached this crudely constructure shelter. 

The construction is not elaborate, but it has stood up to the elements long enough for vines to grow over it. 

 

 

 

When I was a kid, I was not much for playing outdoors unless it involved taking my Barbies and letting them fly down our slide (a REAL slide: the kind made with aluminum that heats up and burns your butt off in the summer.) But, when I could be coaxed to put down my book and GO OUTSIDE, I was charmed by small places to hide and play house - and read my book.

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite places to hide was under the forsythia that grew between our house and the house next door. Or at  the end of the front yard at a little  little point where a cluster of trees grew with small boulders between them.  We played boat on them preNext to that was a huge azalea with a big rock in front of it, and it was the perfect place to spy on older sisters when they came home from school.  I liked nesting outdoors and making hidden places where I drank dew out of the azalea blossoms and  pretended I was Laura Ingalls Wilder in my little house on the prairie (i.e. the hydrangeas between my neighbor's driveway and my front yard). 

 

 

 So in other words, I liked being outside by creating nesting places that replicated being indoors. 

 

Trust me, this shelter was not that. 

 

 

I was a little timid to walk in, not sure what -or whom - I would find.

 

 

Brewster, however, had no fear. He plunged right in, which is surprising because he really is a scaredy cat dog. Sarah hung back behind my legs. There was nothing untoward in it, no evidence of human occupation, a fire, trash, or much of anything but some flat rocks. 

But there was something about it that was not inviting. It did not welcome me. There was an abandoned feeling to it and I just poked my head in. 

 

 

 

 

The woods are full of mystery. There are secret shelters, bridges to nowhere, and fields covered with vines that hide all manners of creatures, big and small. When we walk in the woods we drop our thoughts of work and money and chores behind us like Hansel and Gretel making a trail of crumbs.

Nature suspends our worries. We live in the moment of kicking at decaying logs, marveling at weird funghi decorating tree trunks, search for chestnuts or wild apples under the fallen leaves, and throw sticks at the dogs to release the nervous energy that has become the third partner in our marriage.

I wonder these days about this new chapter of life. We are both afraid to enter this temporary shelter, knowing full well it is exactly that: temporary.  I have no answers for you but I can tell you that  Mr. Pom and I are gathering our sticks and propping them up around us while we sit in what feels like a rather abandoned place.

 We are piling up sticks carved with our imagined visions of the future, totems against fate,  and hoping when our pile is big enough, it will enclose us, shelter us, protect the heart of our marriage  from the elements. We are trying to embroider curtains to keep out the cold empty space we often find ourselves in and cushion it   with plans  to be  bold and adventurous together.  The farther into this empty nesting we burrow, the more we find ourselves stripping back to that original "twoness" on which all our lives together was built.