Trespassing

Today I have been a trespasser.  I, recklessly, have crossed the boundaries of my land to move onto my neighbor's woodland acres. I'm hoping that the kindness of Jim allows him to forgive me.  This is how it happened. 


I take medicine in the morning that prescribes me to wait one hour before eating. It was finally not too cold out so I put on my hooded sweatshirt, draped binoculars and a camera around my neck, put another camera in my pocket and my phone in another pocket.  My plan was to go into my garden then spend some time re-learning how to identify some common birds. I would find a place to sit quietly and search for birds.

Then I decided to just go out the gate to walk along the edge of the field where a pair of Towhees scratch. A White-throated sparrow led me along the wood's edge to where I had to make a decision.  I chose to turn left away from my home.  For a moment I quietly paused to look past the tree house through a small strip of trees into the hay field beyond.


Birds kept calling me onward until I was walking on the gas line and deciding to go check if there were any frogs in a wet spot I remembered from last year. Next thing I know, I can see the neighbor's gravel road off in the distance.  I had not been on the road since the gas company had graveled it so that they could get their equipment through the woods in an effort to cap some old wells. Naturally I wanted to check out the road. I followed 
it and sure 'nuf, it lead to one of the capped wells. The hills around here are covered with old gas wells from the early twentieth century. The gas companies abandoned them once they no longer produced gas. Our government - with our tax dollars - is now finding the wells and capping them.
One step led to another as I found myself being pulled toward the old home site that I described about a year ago. I think of it every spring. You may click HERE to read it for yourself.
For reasons you can read about at the link above I haven't been out there in awhile but perhaps it was time.  Even though the road has changed as has the vegetation I knew just where it was.  At that spot I turned deeper into the woods. At one time cedars lined the drive leading up to the house that has been gone over a hundred years. Today briars protect the site.  Like the prince in the old Rose Red and Sleeping Beauty fairy tails, I tried to force my way through an army  of briars.  Multiflora rose branches pulled at my pants and caught my sweatshirt.  This wasn't working.  My new strategy was to go around the bushes and approach the site from a different angle.  Still too hard. While crawling on the ground in an attempt to go under the bushes, I heard a sound behind me. . .eeek!  Slowly I slid backward and stood up. There was the sound again.  It was too slow for a deer who would have snorted and run by now. What was it? Then, coming right toward me was a turkey.  
I saw several more behind it.  While I slowly pulled my camera up to my eye, the turkey finally noticed me and did an "about-face" before I could take its picture.

Once it turned, so did all the rest.  They ran then flew away.

I turned back to the task of crawling under the multiflora rose bushes. Finally through, I then maneuvered through a maze of grape vines until there I was.  I was standing on a forest floor covered in periwinkle. This periwinkle had been planted more than a century ago when none of the surrounding trees were standing. Some of it still bloomed blue though buried beneath a mulch of debris.

I kept searching through the vines until I saw what made my heart race and my eyes water. There they were, her daffodils, still blooming though the woman who planted them has long returned to dust.

It was just one clump that I found at first.  From a bulb planted by that long gone ancestor of my friend.  She had gently placed  the bulb in the ground, covered it with dirt and waited. It is an act most of us have done, an act that connects us to women through time. We plant, nurture and enjoy the beauty of what we have started.

As I wandered on I came into a clearing with more bulbs growing.

I've never understood why brush doesn't grow in this ancient front yard.

Was it because it was trampled by children, dogs and horses or is it because the ground is sacred. A family of our pioneer settlers sat in this yard, enjoying the daffodils, the yucca,

and the view.  What a view it must have been . . . looking down the river with no buildings in sight.

I enjoyed thinking about what had passed before me then decided I needed to get home.  My detour had left me very hungry.  I didn't look forward to fighting my way out of the surrounding briar bushes.  I didn't have to.  One of those roads built to cap off wells had been built right in close to the home site.  I stepped out of the past and onto a gravel path homeward.

Oh well, my way was more exciting.

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Forever?

Immortality is defined as endurance, everlasting life or perpetuity.  Deathlessness is listed as a synonym. I disagree.  Immortality is enduring in spite of death. 

It makes me wonder how I will leave my mark. 

I've compared my garden to my life.  If I stopped all care today how much would be left in five years.  Would there be any sign of the paths or beds? I figure the fence will last a while, but not forever, branches would fall, breaking sections that would remain fallen with no one to repair them. Stone paths would soon disappear under a growth of moss, then weeds followed by layers of new topsoil. In ten years would anyone be able to tell there was ever a garden here? The stone wall would stand as a curiosity, alone in the woods until it, too was broken apart by new growth and fallen debris. At what point does the memory of my work become so slight as to be nonexistant?

If not my garden, then what do I leave?

How will the world to come know I've been here?

I've seen old home sites where very little remains - the indentention of a cistern, a rusted well pump.

No, there is nothing we can build that will last forever against the forces of nature.  There must be something else.

I go back to my garden. Up here, on our hill there have been many lives lived out.  A home once stood where our own now stands, dozed into its own basement and covered with dirt. We find marbles or old rustedd tools almost everytime we dig a hole. A spring across the hill shows the work of the human hand that dug into the rock a basin in which to collect water.

My favorite old place, though, is a spot that comes alive in spring.  The house has been gone for over one hundred years but remnants of the home still prosper.  The work of some gardener brightens the dark woods for a couple weeks every year as hundreds of daffodils bloom from bulbs reborn out of the earth in which they were planted so many years ago.  Baby's breath spirea blooms on untrimmed bushes, daughters of some original plant, placed in the ground before the invention of automobiles. Cold blue periwinkle blooms cover the ground creating beds for deer and a protective canopy for mice scrambling beneath its vines.

Some of the bulbs and periwinkle have made their way into my own garden with the help of my hands and a trowel. A spirea shoot transferred by my daughter drops its white blossoms like snow in May.  Here they bloom again every spring, reminding me of that earlier settler who changed her landscape with color.

Perhaps in fifty years, there will be no garden here, no remnant of the design I so lovingly dug into the earth. In a couple hundred years, our home may be gone, this hill returned to woods or covered by a futuristic apartment complex. But also, perhaps, a seed will have escaped, growing where unexpected, an offspring from a parent planted generations before it, a bush blooming white in the middle of a forest, or a purple aster pushing up through a crack of some future sidewalk announcing to whomever sees it that I was here, that I was real.

We each strive for immortality in different ways. Some of us do it through our careers, the people we have changed, the lessons taught, actions we have guided. Others have turned hobbies into vocations where interactions with people may bring a bit of immortality. A painting or a story can change the way a whole society thinks. Still others change the world merely by the way they have chosen to live, treating people kindly, causing a chain reaction of small changes that continue on through the ages. Of course, the reverse is also true. There are some that leave the world a worse place and gain their immortality through spreading evil.

Again, I ask myself what will I leave? What will be my mark. I like to imagine some unborn person being kind to a stranger or loving a child because of something I have done sometime in my life; that future kindness blooming liked a yellow daffodill from a bulb I planted when I smiled at a stranger I passed on the street.