Tradey Track

I have witnessed the erosion of my remembered landscape with every trip back home from my journeys here and there across the country. My old bedroom is occupied by paying tenants now and the sacred trees that enveloped our home have been removed by one ambition followed by another. First it was the Southern lot that our backdoor neighbors wanted clear for RV parking and a fence obstructing what was once one of the main thoroughfares of my childhood. I cried watching the slaughter of trees and memories that these strangers had no knowledge of or regard for. Would they have ceased if they had known the magnificent tricycle races that had sped down that tree lined lane? Or maybe if they had experienced the miracle of climbing the impossibly thin branches to the heights of the lone Holly Tree. Did they even notice its beauty as it fell in graceful death to their blades?

The final vestige was lost by the time I came home to call it home again. The Eastern trail – our beloved Tradey Track – was lost to the brambles of neglect some time ago, but the forest remained until this year when a neighbor who should have known better decided to clear the place for his second house (across the street from his perfectly good first house). My first memories were formed running this trail with my two best friends as we transformed from frolicking squirrels to flying unicorns and saw mythical monsters and beasts in the fantasy world that was our woods. As we grew, the place retained its magic, even as all else suffered from the disillusionment of age. Playing pretend was lost to us, but the amber light filtering through the leaves held us all the same.

There was an ancient tower of a tree in the exact center of this world. Its heart was rotting but the outer wood clung with vicious tenacity to the strength of its youth. It wrought its mutilation into beauty as it provided shelter in its cavernous trunk to the small creatures of the woods and an escalier of winding scarred bark steps to reach its hammock of barren branches. How many afternoons did I spend dreaming in the cradle of its arms listening to the creak of its rheumatic sighing in the wind. Somehow, I never feared this friend collapsing with me on its branches and somehow it never did. I believed in forever those golden afternoons in the trees even as I slipped into the isolation that became my adolescence.

I wonder if this man will be haunted as I am by the forgotten voices of children held in the soil and roots of the land he has taken for his own. Or are those memories lost in the charred remains of the forest that sheltered and cherished the wonderment of children who still knew how to recognize mystery?