There’s a park that’s a fifteen, twenty minute drive (or there abouts) from where we live. It’s also a wild life sanctuary, so you follow along the board walks they’ve constructed to stay off nature as much as possible while still enjoying it.
Along the boardwalks, most of which have turned weather beaten brown/gray, are little messages. Some of them are to lovers, grandparents, parents, teachers and classes. Even a few of them were for beloved cats and pets.
I like going there because of the hardwood hammocks. A little spot of forest that smells different than the usual collection of Florida palm trees and ferns. There, oaks and pines grow. I can smell traces of my childhood in between the hot sunshine that warms everything it touches. I can almost remember spending hours dancing in between trunks my little arms and hands could never circle, the feel of bark crumbling beneath my hands and pine sap under my finger nails.
Along the board walks are sturdy benches built within the railings themselves, or monstrous sized creations of metal and super-hard plastic for park goers to settle in and watch nature.
Near the Turkey Creek there was a little sheltered spot that overlooked the creek and bank. They’d built a roof over it to shade you from the sun, but its wide open so that the wind (surprisingly a rare thing in Florida where it gets so hot and still you can hear a roach fart) comes right through you and over you.
It was a windy day last weekend. The breeze was enthusiastic and rushed through all the green leaves to make them shake together. Branches creaked and
rubbed against one another until the forest was filled with the rattling laughter of pine, oak, and palm. I can’t really describe the sort of sound a good wind hop-scotching through a forest makes, and that’s maybe a failing on my part as a so-called writer. It hisses, but it isn’t a foreboding sound, especially when the sun is out and reflecting off clean green foliage. It hisses like hair on satin pillows or maybe the rough of an adult’s thumb across the softest of baby’s cheek.
It made me miss the wind through the trees in my grandmother’s back yard. It made me miss summer in Nova Scotia (it’s a dry heat) but stranger still, it made me happy.
Shawn and I sat on the bench and we listened to the wind through the trees. I kept taking these deep gulps of air, smelling the air which didn’t smell like cars or restaurants or some girl who bathed in cheap perfume—it smelled like…Outside. Like green things. Like my grandmothers backyard and a time when I thought I’d live forever and laughter would follow me to the end of it all.
Some times I forget how easy it is to remember things of a much simpler nature.
