In Trees They Be

My mother told me the stories when I was still just a little girl. She feared for my safety as all mothers do when their children are out of sight. I think she wanted to scare me a little so I’d stay closer to home. I would go off into the mountains around our house and stay gone for a few hours, or all day, coming home tired and dirty just after the point that she had started to panic.

Who could keep track of time in these mountains? There is no “time” in the woods. Only the quality and changing angle of the sunlight slanting through the dense canopy of leaves can give any indication of time. I didn’t care about time. I was busy twirling, spinning through the dappled light of the woods. The thin, brown arms of the trees reached for me, welcomed me as one of their own. I was carefree and in my element.

The rasp of leaf against bark, the delicate snapping of dry twigs, and the crunching of leaves underfoot as I trekked through the mountains, inhaling deeply of that mountain air . . . a sweet undertone, decay but in a good way: the smell of moss and bark that has lain on the moist dark soil for a long time. Rotting wood turning back into soil to be used by the tiny things that scrabble about in shadow. These were the things I loved, and I spent every available moment exploring my mountains. Of course they weren’t really mine but they were home to generations of my ancestors: the ones who had no concept of ownership.

I would return home from these adventures with aching hands, palms reddened and blistered, sometimes with minute particles of splinters im-bedded in my palms from the wild grape vines that dangled throughout the woods. I would have bits of soil and other debris clinging to my clothing and tangled hair. In this mountainous terrain that was mostly uphill, these vines were perfect for swinging wildly out over the valleys, feet flailing and hair flying. At times I would let go mid-air, sailing upward and outward into a large nest of piled leaves and moss from the dry creek beds. Sometimes I overshot my target and took home bruised hindquarters for this failure in calculation. Sometimes I would take a plastic bucket with a peach or two (stolen from the neighbor’s tree) and a cold biscuit containing a piece of fried bologna for a lone picnic lunch beneath the mountain laurels that grew near winding natural brooks. When I grew thirsty I simply lay on my stomach and sipped straight out of the clear, cool streams, face to face with only myself. After my meal, I would use the empty bucket as a creature habitat, hunting in these streams for lizards, crawfish, minnows, tadpoles, or anything else I could find beneath the mossy stones. If creatures of the water proved in short supply, I would return home with a pail of smooth colorful stones, fluffy tufts of dried moss, snail shells, acorns, or any other small item that caught my interest. Often I’d take a book or two and when I grew tired of walking the steep terrain I would stop and read for a while. Whether I was sprawled in a chair or on a mountainside in a pile of leaves, I relished any chance to curl up and read about wonderful adventures in faraway places. In my little corner of the universe, on a mountainside in rural western North Carolina, a half-breed Cherokee child could escape into the fantasy of Mark Twain or Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens or even Louisa May Alcott. Any book I snatched up on my way out the door was beloved by me and bore tattered dog-eared pages to prove it.

My mother had brought a mysterious cardboard box in one day and placed it before our small wobbly book case. I peered in at the blue hardback volumes with gold-colored lettering on the spines of each one. They were pretty, a...