The Land Where Children Play

 
Big Rock. Little Rock. The Valley. The Secret Passage Way.

The names flashed through my head as I read Clare Cooper Marcus’ book, House as Mirror of Self. She wrote, in part, about the unique and magical relationships children form with their environments, both in their larger surroundings as well as within the walls of their homes. They stake out territories, marked with signs on their bedroom doors or sometimes a mysteriously bent twig on a woodland path. They build forts out of wood, or sometimes just pillows and blankets when forced to stay indoors. If they have a bit of land to explore, they draw out carefully detailed maps, sometimes marking where they have stored their treasures. They give their landmarks and favorite haunts names as all the children in my neighborhood certainly did. They, we, are compelled to stake claim.

And if they are wild children, like I was, still with some land to roam, they get to know the locals. Sometimes they name them, too. To a growing child, relationships are natural, inevitable and assumed.

“Would you like the see the tiniest flower?” My little friend, Ragan, led me to an expansive plot of vinca underneath the large climbing tree where she told me she “basically hangs out.” Even in its virgin “looks like just another tree” state, this specimen was dubbed her “Clubhouse.”  To the insensitive eye, a broad swath of vinca looks fairly homogenous. Deep, nearly evergreen leaves intermingling with simple lavender-hued blossoms. It is ground cover, meant to function as filler under trees and in shady nooks where not much else will grow. But to Ragan, the blossoms were endlessly varied.

We stepped carefully through the plants to see what did, in fact, appear to be the tiniest of the vinca blossoms.

“And this is the loneliest one,” Ragan knelt down near a blossom set apart from the rest. “Here,” she said, placing a plucked blossom on an adjoining leaf. I realized then she had stopped talking to me for the moment and had shifted her attention to comforting the little flower.

I was the same kind of child. Growing up along a river, I took my small bucket of duck food with me to find every nest I could in the Spring so the mother ducks could have breakfast without having to leave the eggs they guarded. How those ducks consented to eat from my hand is still a mystery to the adult in me, but as a child there was no question that we were anything but in partnership when it came to raising those ducklings. The hens seemed to agree.

I held makeshift funerals for the fish that sometimes died along the shore. My eyes scoured the branches of the tall cottonwood in the evenings to see if the night heron would return. And in the morning, in between the plaintive sounds of the trains in the distance, the mourning doves answered with their own plaintive call.

I sat on my father’s deck, now covering the shoreline path I used to travel the river as a child and listened to the mourning doves again. The large cottonwood is dead now, but still stands tall, marking the entrance to the beaver dam beneath. Herons, mostly great blues, still frequent it every evening as the muskrats work their way through the lily pads below.

The mourning doves called again, breaking my reverie and I could feel how deeply interwoven their cry was with this landscape, even with the beach-scented air itself. It was as though there was simply “Mourning Dove” not single birds, generations of which have come and gone in the forty-five years since I have known this land, but something far more archetypal and eternal.

 

They say in some spiritual traditions that we really aren’t separate at all. That we are like the waves on a great body of water, each cresting, and feeling itself to be individual, but then falling back into the larger water, each wave of us, endlessly emerging only to fall back into the unity from which we had sprung.

The mourning doves are that way. Individual birds have come and gone, of course, but their presence here, in the calls that arrive like clockwork after every rising sun, are part of the Life Force of this entire landscape, the same Life Force that permeated me as a child when I, too, was a part of this landscape.

It was then that I understood the difference between ownership and kinship.

My father owned this home. It was the only one he ever owned and the only one I knew as a child. Now my task is to sell it. I hadn’t been able to conceive of this not being ours anymore. Not being mine.

Not until Mourning Dove cried, that is. Not the forty-fifth generation of mourning doves, but Mourning Dove, the one that had always been here. The one that always will be.

Grabbing my towel, I headed past Big Rock, Little Rock and The Valley and sat down on the shore of Lake Michigan to watch the waves.

 

Comments

[Kate]

wonderful story; especially for me, a child who grew up indoors within the pages of books.
Thanks, Laura.

[Laura]

Well, it's not too late for you, seeing how you are going to buy Dad's house and all...