The Farm

When I was young, my mother would pack us all into our old red Jeep and take us to The Farm. That's all we ever called it, this oasis of bamboo forests, and flower gardens, and hippie college students slopping mud from rusted pig pens. But it wasn't the campus that brought us; it was the river trail. Since she was 16, my mother had run that winding trail almost religiously. When she had children, she gave us those woods. In spring, we would bring woven baskets and collect sweet wineberries and golden raspberries from the outskirts of rolling fields, whispering conspiracies of my uncle getting banned from the farm for collecting Native American artifacts from those very clearings. For little girls, the image of a rebellious 20-something with long dreads and pockets filled with 1000-year-old arrowheads was enough to kickstart our own dreams of adventure. When August brought us to her depths, and the air grew as thick as oil, we'd change into thrifted water clothes and run to the pond, where a wooden dock sat as a perfect launching pad into the murky green water. We'd sprint across the fraying planks, dogs at our heels: Daisy, a feisty golden mut with a white stripe at her brow, and Koby, some sort of Rot mix, who looked as if he could tear you to pieces but was as gentle as early spring rain.

Those summers encompassed everything I have always loved about my hometown: the rugged mess of dirt and pine that clung to your skin long into the night, the way the river held you with the firm comfort of assurance, washed away any modern-world incoherence. The smell of honeysuckles and fresh cut grass, which I came to associate with my mother, with the past, the present. With the constant flux that ties together the ebb and flow of each passing year.

Those acres were a million worlds in one. When I think of childhood, they paint the backdrop in sage and marine, they bring me back to the bottom of the pond, looking up from little blue eyes to the line where the water met the sky, thinking how strange and wonderful it was that I, for a split minute, was floating between the air that gave me life and the water from which I came. And my lips broke the surface, and musings fell away. I was back in a land of play pretend. We were cats, and princesses, and orphaned peasants. We hid behind oak trees, and ran barefoot across stone bridges, and begged to stay as the sun faded and we were called home.

Now I sit in a dorm room, and mold catches in my throat as I lie in bed each night. I am moving from one world to another, but my arms reach behind me in my dreams, back to the woods, to magic. The hardest part of leaving your childhood behind is to have the strength to look forward, to see the beauty held in the future. To know that she, too, is made of a million worlds.