Under the Ferns

We dropped to our knees, then our elbows, bowed our heads and crawled on our bellies into our fern patch. Careful not to disturb the fronds we rolled ever so gently onto our backs and peered up through the bracken to woven poplar branches pinned to blue sky. We breathed in the damp and musty soil beneath our backs – rich in worms, beetles, and rabbit pellets. Soon our ears tuned in to the random rustling and scuttling of birds and squirrels in the decay. The bubbling of shallow water running over stones was a constant. It always took us a moment to settle in and adjust our eyes to the miniature world swaying mere inches above our noses. Ladybugs, caterpillars, and slugs clinging to the underside of the feathery green stems.

Wedged in a corner of the meadow between Bradley’s Brook and the embankment of the railway bed, this neglected grove was our favourite spot in what was called “the scrub”. Untouched, wild, I can still see blossoms springing up from fallen tress now rotting back to soil. I was four years of age when I began leaving the house in the morning to play in the scrub with my very first friend, Jimmy, who was five. We weren’t expected to return until the noon siren wailed and the whole town turned their attention to lunch. That gave us long hours to roam around catching tadpoles in the swampy ditches, climbing our old willow, or balancing on slippery steel railway ties. There was never even a tinge of hesitation when I heard the knock at the door, can Joanne come out to play? Jimmy and I would spring off the back stoop and run to our back acre as fast as our canvas runners would allow leaping seamlessly along the way into our all-absorbing make-believe. No, I don’t recall that it was ever difficult to leave the house; it was re-entering from the brush and bramble that made my feet drag. Empty your pockets in the shed, wash your hands, finish your soup.

Settled beneath the ferns, our improvisation proceeded. Our play had a pattern. One of us would start a story riff that would be met with a rejoinder and then we eased into the flow taking turns as rhythmic as a teeter-totter. The idea was not to narrate a story about the churning landscape surrounding us but to be in it. Not a matter of telling as much as it was an acting out. Sometimes we would explore a tangent and get lost – sometimes we hit a dead end. Today we were snakes slithering around, flicking our sticky tongues at mosquitoes, and shedding skins. This was a reoccurring theme ever since we had found a discarded snake casing in the field grass – fragile but mostly intact.

Shedding skins. The new springing from the old. The adult outgrowing the tight skin of childhood. Did we have to grow up? Couldn’t we just stay us? (Joanne)