In fond remembrance of the summers that are behind us and in anticipation of the one that we are all currently waiting and watching impatiently for.
On wet summer mornings, when it’s warm and humid, and the trees are dripping and drops are plopping loudly onto the wet leaves, Norah always comes to me, with her purple pail and a gleam in her eyes. We drag our rubber boots onto our bare feet, pull wide-brimmed hats down over our tangled hair and walk like zombies along the edges of our driveway, in our pajamas, our eyes on the ground, peering keenly in between blades of grass and under brown leaf mounds.
“I found one!” one of us will cry out, and the other will rush over to assist.
I am usually the finder, and Norah is the grabber and the pail carrier. After all, this is her show. I am good at noticing even the smallest flash of orange among the foliage, and on good days, we can fill the pail with thirty or forty salamanders in fifteen minutes. Norah isn’t squeamish about grasping their soft little bodies, damp with dew. She usually catches them by the tail as they try to scurry away, and dangles them slowly down into the pail with its mates, where they crawl all over each other in gentle confusion.
As we walk, it is often silent, just the patter of thick drops hitting the foliage, and the occasional flutter of wildlife scurrying amongst the branches that arc over our long, winding, dirt driveway. It is a meditative walk, eyes cast downward and feet shuffling. But sometimes, as we drift back and forth in the wet and the warmth, Norah tells me about her dreams from the night before. Once, she described, in great detail, a journey she took and the characters that she encountered in her sleep. Unlike my own mother, who always expressed impatience with our dream-tellings, I like to sink into her dream worlds, ask her questions, express surprise and solemnity at all the right places, to enter a world of hers that is so private. I know that she will someday reach an age where I am no longer privy to her dreams, when we will not go hunting together anymore. I squirrel away these moments with her, file them in a place where I can call them up vividly in times of need.
When the shoulders and knees of our pajamas were soaked through, and we had hunted both sides of the drive, up and down, we’d bring our quarry back to the house, where Norah would beg me to let her keep her new pets for just a little while longer. A massive glass jar with a handful of wet leaves and a few “boulders” to climb on would do for a few hours, and Norah would watch them intently, her small face distorted by the curved glass, as she stood on her tiptoes to peer into the “salamander city.” Thirty-seven squirming orange bodies, clinging to the sides of the jar in futility. I felt sorry for them, and allowed only a brief captivity before they were unceremoniously dumped out in the vegetable garden, between the zucchini and the corn. We would stay hunkered in the wet grass and watch them go, off into their own directions, off to their own private lives of struggle and survival, off to their own dreams.
Once, as we were crouched beneath the low-hanging Hemlocks and Birch branches heavy with rain, Norah shared with me her dreams and then a stunning revelation, turning to me with her serious eyes, wise and innocent all at the same time, and said with simple conviction, “when I was little, all of my dreams were in black and white. But now they are in color.”
On hotter, drier days, the sun would turn our shoulders brown as we squatted in the sand around her swing set, pulling “baby trees” out by their roots. It was a never-ending job, keeping her sandbox weeded, and we’d fill buckets and buckets of weeds, which I’d lug to the edge of the yard and heave into the woods. Norah took particular interest in pulling up the small leafy twigs that grew from acorns which dropped from the huge oak nearby. They slid out of the soft sand easily, and Norah liked to examine the exposed acorn, now cracked open and revealing its white-green intestines, a newly-formed shoot snaking out and up.
I’d work my way around the edge of the playground, sweating and pulling up fistfuls of harsh grass as quickly as I could, giving each clump a violent shake to loosen the sand before tossing it aside. Norah would alternate between playing with her toys, swinging and sliding, and sitting on her haunches turning an acorn around and around in front of her inquisitive face. It was as if she was trying to figure out the meaning of life from a sand encrusted acorn. Or maybe she already knew the meaning of life and was just examining her latest find with frank appreciation and some sort of exquisite understanding.
Once, she asked me what happened to the baby trees once we had thrown them in the woods. I answered with honesty, “Most of them probably die. Some of them might grow if they land somewhere where they can take root again.”
Norah went back to her toys and I to my bent-backed labor, considering the conversation to be over. It wasn’t until weeks later that I started to find oak shoots growing in my perennial beds, and then in my vegetable garden. Oddly placed, random and buried deeply, the tips of the leaves touching the mounded and firmly tamped soil. I pulled them and tossed them into the woods with the rest of my cuttings and weeds. But they continued to show up, and it perplexed me; there were no oak trees near my gardens.
Then, one morning, it dawned on me. I was in the outdoor shower, surrounded by raised vegetable beds and rinsing the shampoo from my hair, when I spied yet another small oak shoot nestled under the protective branches of my tomato plants. The dark loam around it was clearly imprinted with two small hand prints. I crouched, naked and wet in the early morning sun, in front of the bed, and gently touched the leaves of the baby tree. Tender pride rose in my throat and I smiled. I would let this one alone.
Norah often picked flowers from the fields in front of the house and then tried to transplant them into the garden with no success. She didn’t yet understand the transplanting process. She would also often pick me a bouquet as we walked, and then proudly hand over a clump of wildflowers, some only the bud, others a six-inch stem, and yet others with a three foot length that ended in a muddy clump of roots. I always accepted these treasures with grace, and then quietly trimmed them before arranging them into a mason jar of water, where they would only die a day later.
In the late summer, when the bees were lazy and the sun stayed up long after bedtime, the grass and wildflowers in the fields would reach shoulder height. The deer would bed in the fields at night, and the next morning we would be able to point out the large flattened areas where their bodies had pressed into the grass, hidden from predators. Danger lurked in this beauty, however, in the form of ticks, snakes, and poison ivy. One night, lying in bed together, with the moon shining brightly through the open windows, David and I hatched a plan.
David’s zero-turn riding mower was more than powerful enough to cut a four-foot wide swath in the sea of grass, but from the road, I could barely see the top of his head as he slowly worked his way around the field, making random twists and turns. The pollen and chaff flew up in a cloud behind him in the golden sunlight, and the motor roared and strained as he worked his way through the thick field grass. Norah and I laughed and cheered and took pictures as he passed. When he finished, we had a labyrinth of clean-cut trails criss-crossing one another, hidden in the shoulder-high wildflowers and sweet grass.
“Daddy, turn it up!” Norah screamed from underneath her helmet, as my husband adjusted the throttle on her four-wheeler with a small wrench.
“No honey, this is plenty fast, believe me,” he chuckled, dusting off his pants as he stood. “Don’t forget to slow down on the corners. And watch that rock down near the shed!”
Norah swung one leg over the small, rumbling machine and tore off into the maze. Her bright orange helmet wasn’t even visible; the field swallowed her. I jumped up and down in vicarious glee, trying to hold my phone up high enough to get a shot of her riding through the grass, and then gave up and took off barefoot down the nearest trail, trying to find her by listening to the sound of her four-wheeler. We rode and ran those trails until dark that night, and many nights after that, staying out there until the fireflies were starting to blink and we couldn’t see the trail walls anymore. I like to think that the deer enjoyed those trails, too, and walked them with some kind of animalistic wonder in the moonlight while we slept in our beds just a few feet away.
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