Tag: flowers

Tempted to the Realm of Woodland Sprites

I finally went for that walk I wanted to take around the back side of the stream. It felt good being in my flip-flops and tank top, even with the nettle plants and thick overgrowth. I needed it more than I realized, far more than I gave it credit – even if I coughed raucously as I walked, death rattles of this persistent sinus infection.

It was beautiful. The tufts of flowers sprayed poofs of pollen on my black top and pants as my feet stepped on dark earth, stepped over and around tall, green stalks of small purple and pink flowers that bees fancied so much, I talking to my flying friends in warning so as not to startle them into stinging me. I felt like Alice, wandering through giant gardens….

It was curious, too: here and there were large patches of growth that something – some animal or erratic person – had smashed down to the ground and trampled more in some places, less in others. I kept wondering if it was a deer or a fox… But it couldn’t have been a deer, for the patches would have been deeper; and I would think that foxes would be more spindly than to make such messes of the flowers. It hardly makes sense, too, for any human to have knocked down the growth along the sides of the path, as opposed to on the path. As a matter of fact, nothing showed that anyone human had been on that part of the footpath in a while, the overgrowth was so tall and thick throughout.

And the stream rushed by, no further than ten feet to my left, the only live body of water in my regular vicinity since I left Greece and the Aegean Sea a few months ago….

…I still miss the sea, the ancient beaches of stones smoothed by millennia of gentle waves caressing the rough edges away, beaches where it was easy to bask in a warm sun’s rays and cool my tanned skin in cold, crystal-clear salt water, where the luxury of nature made it so easy to understand how volumes of art, wisdom, beauty once came of the inhabitants there.

But I had left the sea to return here to England, where my heart had left loves, where I was not nearly finished exploring my own country’s motherland….

Of course I was mad – not because I wasn’t at the sea, but because… well, because I didn’t feel free. And my mind kept going back to all of the reasons I was mad; but the tall, flowering greens kept my attention, and I needed my wits to avoid the nettles and other spiny plants growing on the path. Even so, my bare ankle brushed one nettle plant and my forearm brushed another – I was only caught the two times, and the red welts are now already tiny marks on my skin that sting but a little, reminding me in an oddly-pleasant way of both the anger and the beauty of my forage along this infrequently-trodden path.

…And then it started to rain in light, sparse sprinkles (though no one here calls it “sprinkling,” and I’ve infused the term into my Englishman’s language as something lovely and akin to colored sugar sprinkles falling from the sky). The rain cooled my skin, warmed from the heavy walk; and I wanted to sit somewhere in the falling water to watch the greater, speeding waters flow past, burbling to no one in particular about its journey and days….

And then the path cleared, went on, over an unexpected concrete bridge where the stream was wider and flowing quite fast and deep. Perhaps I’d take off my beach shoes, damp with dew and yesterday’s rains, and sit for a bit….

It was a fleeting thought, though; the movement of my feet and body through so much green was closer to what I needed, and so much the stronger urge.

The path followed closer to farmlands, edged with old trees and tall grasses that showed this part wasn’t used very often, either.  I couldn’t tell if I would wind up walking all the way into town or to the gates I had seen before, on the other side of the stream….

I didn’t really want to go ‘home’, and my mind raced with reasons why I should:  what if the door was locked when I returned? What if I got caught in a heavier rain? The legs of my cotton pants were already swinging heavily with the dampness they had picked up in the thick, and I was still recovering from this illness….

It didn’t work so well as I would have wanted to erase the pain of the evening’s madness, and my mind rang with the article about wisdom of that Greek ancient, Hippocrates, of walking until one’s mood has improved — and if, by the time one has ended one’s walk, it has not improved, to walk some more.

I could have walked all day before my heart found peace, I think.

And, even as I reached the long, granite-graveled lane, even as I stepped into the hot shower, I knew my heart needed me to walk some more.

For, as terrifying as it was to risk being stung by plants and insects, as cold as I am sure I would have become had I been caught in a storm, it was safe, too, to be amidst other natural things that grow strong and tenderly, that brushed my body in gentle-if-sometimes-painful caresses as I wandered down an unknown path in a foreign land that feels yet not unknown; and some part of me wanted, with each patch of pressed-down foliage, to sit and stay and watch the bees and dragonflies and butterflies and wasps and other flying things, to see snails carrying curling shells up spindly stems, to wonder at the huge, black slugs and other crawling things beneath my feet… to lose myself deep in the green, as quiet and unbroken as a woodland faerie, lost from any who would not be as natural and free with themselves, who would query and misunderstand my eager return to my own nature and freedom… who won’t let themselves be, and cannot, therefore, truly let anyone be.

 

Sketches of the South

It’s on days like today that I understand my laziness, my hesitance to move, to do anything but bask and take in this hot Georgia sun, to await cool breezes petting my skin and dancing through my hair and through the shimmering leaves, carrying the sweetness of roses and gardenias and dying lilies and fresh-mowed grass, of simmering pine and leafy trees of deepening green, soaking up the sun as I do….

On days like this, I don’t even wish to speak, to disturb this lovely prelude to summer.  I sit and watch glistening leaves and pale petals, and listen to nothing:  tinkling wind chimes and calling birds, and the soft percussion of leaf clapping upon leaf.  Every moment of this is a vacation – with the dilettante-like luxury of never needing to go anywhere, of never wishing for escape, of never tiring of the same things:  blue skies and billowing clouds and fluffy roses.

It’s a cultural thing, I’m sure:  this laziness arising with drawled speech and meandering stories and long supper tables laden with food at small white churches and old family reunions. The Old South is alive and well in me, and in this land; and, returning to this lazy world after half my life spent no farther south than Southern Ontario, the scents and sensations and simplicity of this land are irresistible.

The trees beckon, waving full boughs to those inside, whispering songs to which no words can reply.

So I return, realizing that I always return, always wished to return to this place that breeds laziness in the most beautiful of ways.

For Sarah M.