Do you remember that summer, the time we found the abandoned cellar hole in the woods overgrown with maple saplings where a colony of milk snakes whipped like angry questions marks across the damp undergrowth and black earth at our intrusion?
At first we stood and watched them writher and roil in clumps, but then we climbed down to pick them up between two sticks, like tongs, and fling them up over the confining walls towards what we believed they might considered freedom.
I don’t suppose that you thought the chipmunk’s incessant chatter was really a warning because neither did I. There were so many of them; snakes, I mean, and chipmunks too.
We also climbed the trail in bare feet. The warmth of the hard-packed soil felt right on our soles, the dry dust puffed in tiny powdery clouds up between our toes like a flour sifter. Hikers would pass, pausing just beyond us, to stare back wondering why we had no day packs or shoes with us. And why we ran. We covered a lot of ground this way, pretending to train ourselves in the art of escaping an angry mother bear. We never did see any bears.
There was a dead range of forest that ran along the western ridge. Perhaps you recall this too? A stretch of scrub pines stood dark, twisted and needleless, as if ravaged by fire. Perhaps disease had sapped the life out of the plants leaving their trunks, like dry-boned skeletons, to stand sentry beside the trail. We wandered through there but only so far, brushing the cobwebs from our faces, snapping the twigs and branches off, and listening for birds or chipmunks but hearing neither. We named it “the Fairy Woods”, and left quickly since goose bumps started infecting our limbs.
We found a patch of blueberries on a ridge where we sat and greedily chewed on the small tart fruit, pulling out tiny leaves and twigs that we harvested in our handfuls of warm berries. We ate until a hawk appeared riding a thermal close by, and the red ants started crawling up our pant legs and pinching us with their bites of fire. Our mouths and hands were stained a purple-blue, and we felt so spirited and danced out of our pants to the music of our own shrieks of laughter and fits of giggles.
We thought then, why not? So we took off our shirts too and walked with our clothes tied in bundles to our midriffs. The trail still pulled us upward toward the crest of the mountain, and we walked this way with the smell of pine and the hum of bees and dragonflies wrapping around us in fragrant and vibrant drafts, the afternoon sun making our bare skin glow golden, and we lived. Oh, how we felt so alive!
We walked like this for a long time; your developing nipples were large and brown, I noticed, while mine were small and coral pink, and our thighs with our small swatches of soft pubic hair just growing in, and our bare backsides were exposed and it was so invigorating. Your dark brown hair swung and caught the sun in strands that made it glow auburn red, and when I looked down at my own, I saw a prism of colors reflect off my own nearly transparent strands. The sun did that; we were so beautiful and it seemed as if the path kept unraveling just then. Just for us.
Again, hikers passed us and we said; “Hello,” to them in such casual tones that it was as if our climbing a mountain in the nude was a perfectly natural thing. We stopped at a grove of birch and, unraveling long straps of its black and white bark, we braided and wove headbands and wrist and anklet jewelry. You found a blue jay feather and put this in your hair too, and we sat for a while choosing Indian names.
“I am, ‘She Who Walks In Shadows’, you said. “Walk with me, sister.”
Did you know something I didn’t, even back then?
This all comes back to me now, you see, because the iron is growing hot. It reminds me how extremely hot and uncomfortable hard granite can get in full exposure to the sun on a summer’s day; too hot to sit on, especially if you’re bare bottomed. So we sat on our shirts and folded pants and watched the distant hang-gliders join the falcons on the updrafts, dangling our dirty bare feet off the edge of a fifteen-hundred foot sheer drop off cliff. We had no fear. Not then.
Fear is something that eventually replaces hope. I press the wrinkles form your cotton shirts; the shirts that you need with the buttons up the front. They are the ones you can still manage to put on, after they cut through your chest muscles, the ones that still need time to heal and regenerate. It’s about all you will allow me to do for you if I ask. But do you recollect, at first, how hard it was to even manage to feed yourself afterwards?
But you were strong then, and full of options and suggestions. At one point the mosquitoes and ‘no-see-ems’ and deerflies became so annoying and we grew tired from trying to keep them away. You suggested we roll in the dirt, like you had read African elephants do in a National Geographic magazine once, and we found a shallow rank puddle that we sat around scooping handfuls of mud from it’s bottom to coat our bodies with. I drew the solar system on your back, you painted a cove of trees on mine, your finger trailing wet and gritty lines that tickled across my spine and made me shiver.
When they took your lymph nodes too, I knew that this was because of metastization. So they probe you for more tumors; everything became suspect. The pills make you sleepy and the radiation makes you vomit up bile, and, eventually, just air. You simply dry heave. So you throw up nothing and lose your hair, your eyebrows fade to simple naked brow, your eyelash fall out when I wipe your face. They lay like discarded commas on the facecloth. Your body eats its own stored fat in its attempt to cling to life.
We came back down the mountain. We had to. Partway down we put our clothes back on. Mostly because we were expected to, but also on account of the sun going down and the earth was losing its warmth. Even our toes grew cool and the crickets sang loud; bats flitted low but we were not afraid. We would have stopped to toss small pebbles up to confuse their blind hunts, had it not been for the cold and our hunger and thirst and our weariness and from being covered and itchy from dried mud beneath our clothes.
In Science Journal Today, while waiting at the oncologist’s office for you, I read how hope is actually a uniquely human genome detrimental to the evolution and survival of the human race. I remember this now, and think about how we felt that nothing could touch us and how we challenged that by just being. I remember all this now because I just can’t bring myself to think forward.
The iron is hot and I press it to the cloth of the third shirt in the pile and I wonder, perhaps, if you’ll live long enough for me to help you into it.
Lorrie Lee (Hammond) O’Neill lives and works in Manchester, NH. With a BFA in Creative Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College in Boston, MA, Lorrie’s writing history includes poetry, magazine articles, journalism, radio and television scripts, business writing, press releases and short story fiction. Lorrie can be reached at jonesllj@yahoo.com.
That is wonderful Lorrie!