Red Ball

Imagine her walking towards the woods behind the lodge. She'd been warned. There would be danger there. But imagine it anyway, though she wouldn't really do it because of the fear. One could venture only just so far away from home before the drop off where land disappeared as it did in dreams and in what they called imagination. Land didn't actually drop off like that, but she wasn't sure. So imagine it. Pretend she did step through the ferns into the tall grass and past the first tree, the territory of porcupines, skunks, snakes, weasels and wolves. What if she hadn't stayed in sight of the ice house and the garage, the lodge, the cabins, and Johnny Shellum's little shack papered inside with bathing beauties. What if she had been like Eve and disobeyed the order of the gods? What would she be like today?

I wondered this on a day in the early 1980's when Pat Kelly (my husband then) visited what was left of the old Klimek's Lodge. Not much. The lodge itself had been torn apart, sections of it moved and turned into cabins, much of it just tossed out as trash. (Maybe these thoughts should be saved for the ending of this Lorelands blog, but I'm thinking of it now. What can I do? I'm only the writer.) Pat and I wandered an unfamiliar landscape. "I think this is where the ice-house used to be..." and "there once were beautiful rocks along the shore. One was crystalline and Mary Jane would pretend to be inside it, following the fissures like roads to the interior."

We walked towards the woods where Grandma Klimek's daisies used to grow. The big tree where Mary Jane's swing hung--gone. Where was the spot she buried the baby chick? Where did she dance around the grave of Sparky the dog? The earth had reconfigured itself.

Is this also what becomes of us, the individuals who occupied a place? Are we as ephemeral as the land we once thought to be secure? So stable and so steady that even if everything else changed, the land would remain. And then it doesn't.

There is something more here than the once stunning notion that we can't go home again. Better is the poet's insight that we can go home again but only after long explorations, and then in the keen sight of a life intensely lived,  we can finally know the place, the essence of the soul, for the first time.

We walked the forest's edge. Maybe it was the wrong time of year for wildflowers. Leaf-green and the deep red of sumac curtained the interior. Pat was pointing: Look! A spot of red almost hidden in the long grass. Too round to be a sumac leaf. What? I went towards it.

Whether it had survived or returned there every time a spirit of innocence ran laughing at the forest's edge really didn't matter. Whether it had belonged to Mary Jane, a true archaeological find, or to a succession of individual children over the years, these details rarely matter to the heart. I laughed, feeling I'd found a bit of her, a round of color in a shaft of summer sun.

A child's red ball.

(Images copied from Google Images)