[From the Archive] The Four Little Corners of the World
This post was originally published on May 15, 2024. I’m sharing it again today because I need a small, good story in the midst of so much disruption and conflict—and I bet you do too.
From the house I grew up in, there were four directions, like every other place, and four unique starting points for adventures, each with its own particular stories.
West
At the end of the driveway, across the street to Mr. Sheehan’s land. He mowed a path for the neighborhood to walk, even though it was not yet officially conservation land. Much of the parcel had once been an orchard, and one pear tree still produced edible fruit.
It stood tall in a hot and brambly field away from the path. The pears would drop off onto the ground and spoil, attracting wasps. I picked my way through the minefield of rotting fruit and buzzing insects to pull a pear from the tree and eat it. Or, at least take a few bites before chucking it into the tall grass. Sometimes they were sweet, and sometimes they were mealy and dull. The brown skin scraped the top of my mouth a little, and I’d spit it out.
There was a distinct hill in there too, as if some giant had dumped out one huge bucket of dirt. When I was little, and walked with my parents, that hill was off-limits. Too much poison ivy, too much high grass and brush.
Later, while alone, I fought my way through, and to the top, to see what I could find. Not much, as it turns out.
East
Downslope towards the edge of my family’s land, towards the two-lane state high way that bordered it. A culvert ran below the road and gave me safe and secret access to more woods. How big was that culvert? I know I didn’t crawl through it. I also know it would look small to me today.
Like the proverbial chicken, I needed to cross the road and see what was on the other side. And then I needed to return and see it again, to find out if anything had changed since the last visit.
Sometimes I’d make the trip with friends, and true to my family’s obsessions, we searched for treasure; bottles chucked in the woods, or sparkly rocks.
I remember light on fall foliage, and tall trees, catching the wind on the ridges. If you kept going, you’d come to another orchard way back, on a hill. In the fall, I think you could see a long way from the top of that hill. But I may be remembering a different orchard, in another part of town.
North
Out through the back yard, through a grassy bit that we called the “play area.” A huge rock marked the boundary for a neighbor’s land. They also parked old cars out there, and my brothers had long ago pulled out all the spare change in the seats. Sometimes that rock became a pirate ship, or a castle. Sometimes I just climbed over the top and kept on going into a pleasant stretch of forest. In the winter I would put on my Sears cross-country skis and hack through the snow and underbrush, eventually following icy Skidoo tracks up to yet another old overgrown orchard.
If the snow conditions were right, I might get a few gliding runs down some small slopes. Mostly I remember being sweaty yet cold, in my cotton long johns under cotton jeans, topped off with an oversized wool sweater and an old windbreaker. The skis were heavy and awkward, and made flap-flap sounds as I thrashed across the landscape.
Once, with my parents, we found the body of a fox. He or she appeared to have laid down under one of the biggest old apple trees, curled up, and passed on.
South
The shortest trip of all. On the other side of a swath of enormous ferns, a small brook ran between our land and the road. Next to a big slab of rock that had garnets in it, I built constructions of sticks and thought of myself as a scout or frontiersman, building a cabin on the perimeter of an unexplored realm.
Until some neighboring women told my mom she shouldn’t let me play there, because someone in a van could snatch me from the side of the road. I wasn’t too far from home; I was too visible to strangers passing through on the state road.
That stayed with me. Even now, I’m not afraid of hiking and exploring by myself. But I prefer to remain unseen.
Would I let my children do this? If I had children. This question is near-impossible to answer in the abstract. Some people say the world has changed since I was young. I think it’s exactly the same, only we know too much about all the scary things, because this is forced upon us, and not enough about the good.
I still dream of those places and those wanderings, finding myself in vast and mysterious landscapes, familiar and unrecognizable at the same time.
All four directions seem to lead to the same thing: peace, freedom, and perhaps an orchard.