Day 3 Blog Challenge
Assignment: Unsafe containers-joy, pity, envy, rage, or something else- what do you find to be the hardest to contain?
I chose to write about contentment for day 3. I wanted to go back to my most profound positive moments before the turning points where the world of negative or frightening emotions was introduced. The negative emotions are a story for another time. This is not the door I want to explore. There comes a time when a child learns that exuberance and joy has to be controlled. Staying in the memoir genre.
A little girl looks out her second floor bedroom window at the three poplar trees. She’s smitten with love for the beloved trees and calls them her friends. They stand together, like a line of people waiting to greet her each day, waving and calling. Her heart is full upon the sight of their beckoning arms and steadfastness. She names them The Three Bears. At night her window is open and sometimes she presses her face to the screen to try and see the world outside. The flat paper-doll leaves of the poplar trees sound sweet and crinkly. She imagines elves talking in a secret language only she and the little people recognize together. When a stronger wind blows their talking increases and becomes louder, more serious, and then the wind dies down and the messages soften after the crescendo. The night air is soothing, like lilacs. The world is momentarily safe.
Every day she awakens before everyone else. It is her world completely. The morning air is cool and clear. She greets her faithful bears and later after breakfast runs outside to the back field to meet her other treasure, the twisty-turny tree. The earth around the tree is now soft from children playing underneath. Nobody else is at the tree and it is all hers. The limbs are set just right for climbing. Each gray-blue branch against the trunk of the tree creates a perfect sitting perch. She tries out each one, deciding to go higher. She climbs up and up to the very top, and sits in command, in full love of an eternity of freedom and day-dreaming….until she is called down to come inside.
She is so excited that Mom has invited some classmates from kindergarten to come for a play date. She plans a marching game out in the field where they will play fox and geese, chasing each other and running and jumping in the full grass before her father will mow. Marching, jumping, climbing, running. Falling. All the world is a delightful fantasy. But soon her life takes a turn when the shadows come to visit.
Copyright © 2014 Susan E Rowland
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