What I miss most about children's summers are the evenings--at the point when afternoon just starts heading into night, and you know (if you are a child) that there are still roomy hours left to undertake adventures. I miss lounging, alone, at the neighbors' pool while they are away on vacation; reading poetry, coming back in the rain through the mossy path between our houses. The woods at that point always contained a few shadows beneath their shallow mossy banks, so they always offered the promise of another world beginning and ending within those few feet. One day I was heading back from the pool to my room and wanted to stay in the rain; I wanted to dance naked in the rain, but wearing only a swimsuit was close enough. So I did, briefly, in the shadows there. And came back in to my stringy hair and cool house. I was twelve. My first sexual sensatons began in the evening after such a day. But that happened later, after more playing, some ice cream, and the provocation of a shameless Australian movie. Some evenings, in the twilight, the whole family would be outdoors. I captured hapless frogs and snails and caterpillars, then played the white upright piano on loan from an aunt whose house was destroyed by a tornado for having been too close to Alabama. I played "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" for my dog, who'd sit next to me. The entire world was summed up in that hollow in the hills. And anything I needed to learn about humanity, clearly could be learned from the earth. The trees sang heavy with cicadas, crickets and frogs; and the morning offered more fertility than any human could dream of accomplishing alone.
Pools are gone, beach vacations are gone, obligatory visits to the dentist gone. And so is the sense of grounding that comes being drawn into a limited, earth-bound world. It would be a few years yet before I knew there were things that could not be learnt in the woods. Among them, human sympathy. Among them, the countless adjustments of one's goals and wishes as the world broadens--and as it continues to pulse and fluctuate in one's mind even after its content is complete.
The desire for some things passes over into the desire for other things. When I have felt the foundation of my life unstable, I started thinking of dating and marriage; but those were just substitutions, controllable variables. (I think this is probably common; it's why we go shopping when we don't know what to do.) One learns to be content in tiny moments, then those moments spread out. And when I feel secure, I think (as I am now) of escape, of conquering.
But being tied to the earth and traveling on it, free, are connected. It's the shadow play of human horizons that distracts us. When my French professor saw my woven backpack (the one that decomposed on the quad one day as Sarah Peterson warned that my books were jumping ship), she said "C'est un sac d'une voyageuse, Cyrille." It was. You travel light if you know where your feet are planted; if you can walk the tightrope through the shadows of planted societies and still manage to see them, to plant yourself within them--even in passing.
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