purple, trees

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

The best thing about homeschooling is the freedom. Along comes one of those rare, summer-warm days of early spring and I can’t focus any better than the girls, so why try? Like today. The morning was absorbed by chiropractor appointments and a library visit, and by the time we got home I just couldn’t bear to be stuck at the table staring out the window at the glorious day and hoping the girls finish in time to catch some sun. So we left the books on the shelf, packed a picnic and our water bottles, and we drove to a nature preserve across town. Rena, my oldest, who is prone to flights of fancy, is sometimes struck by bolts of practicality as well, and she remembered our sun hats (I never think we’ll get sunburned on these early warm days, and we always do). Younger Lee, who likes to be prepared, carefully packed her backpack with a snack, her water bottle, a sweater (which she didn’t need), and a notebook and markers (“in case I get bored”). I packed sandwiches and tick spray, leaving plenty of room for when, inevitably, Lee’s backpack got too heavy and ended up riding in mine. We wore boots, tee shirts, and long pants. Rena tied her sweater around her waist and used it’s big inside pocket to carry her water bottle. She had discovered that the pocket fit her water bottle on our last walk, and brought the sweater for this purpose. We took to the trails like livestock loosed from a barn, sucking the gentle air with hungry lungs. I never seem to breath this deeply inside.

We saw turtles, squirrels, birds, a surprising variety of insects, and about a million tadpoles in the big pond. We passed a pair of teenage girls with the furtive eyes of kids playing hooky. Rena split from us and flexed her independence by taking a different path up into the woods at the top of the hill, a path long enough for her to just start getting worried before we converged again. The girls balance-beamed across every fallen tree along the trail, jumped from rock to rock, and Rena danced with every tree within reach that she could get her hands around. We waded in the stream and got wet, and both girls went barefoot for a time. At one point Rena found a tree that had fallen across the creek and wanted to walk across on it. I hesitated, it was a good five feet above the creek, but looked large and solid. I reminded myself about the dozens of trees I had crossed our creeks on when I was a kid, many of them much higher than that, and told her to go ahead. Her smile when she made it to the other side was so proud. Who wouldn’t ditch a day of school for lessons like these?

There’s nothing like sunshine and exercise to get me out of my head. Walking is bilateral stimulation after all, very calming to the brain. The pull of my muscles, the warmth on my face, the feel of the trail under my feet, the presence of the trees…and my spinning thoughts evaporate like mist. I can watch my girls and just enjoy their company and their pleasure in challenging themselves. I can appreciate the strength in my legs and shoulders and the sureness with which I move in the woods. It is natural to notice, and to point out what I have noticed: an unusually shaped rock or tree; a very old, dead branch or trunk that had completely crumbled, returning to the earth; the fuzzy vine of poison ivy climbing a tree, still innocuously brown; the first Spring Beauty. Life is a classroom and I never tire of it. Last year, whenever I came to the woods I was constantly reaching out, as though my soul were an empty basket waiting to be filled. Now I simply walk.

We passed a church sign on our way to the nature preserve that said: “The best thing you can save for your future is your soul.” It’s been up for a month and I’ve passed it many times already, but it still makes me feel indescribably sad. I think of something precious wilting behind glass, taken out and polished once a week for church and twice more for Christmas and Easter. I think of Anne (not Cordelia), one of my childhood heroines, calling her reflection “Katie” because she had no friends. I always think the same thing: I don’t want to save my soul for anything, I want to use it, now. I want to wear it out like a good pair of boots until you can see every mile we’ve walked together in the creases of the leather and the smoothness of the sole. I don’t know exactly what it means to “use” my soul, but I know it sounds a hell of a lot better than “saving it for my future,” as though it’s a limited resource. If God is infinite, then, surely, so are we; in the spiritual sense, at any rate. I don’t think my soul needs to be locked away so it won’t get corrupted, holding myself apart from this world and the life and death it represents is what nearly killed me, spiritually speaking. I have decided to wrap my arms around my own mortality and hang on for dear life.

It started with trees.

When I walk in the woods now I think about The Color Purple. It’s the literary incarnation of a a heavy, wet blanket—the one you used to try to get warm again after the ice-water shock of The Bluest Eye—but only for the first half. The second half of the book gets lighter and lighter as Celie, the main character, learns how to throw off the wet blanket of the life she’s been given and chooses her own. The book is written as a series of letters, first to God, then to Celie’s sister, Nettie. This is the letter I think about when I’m around trees: