breaking sticks

I could tell last night when I started examining the ceiling structure of my parents’ home, daydreaming about how much pressure it would take to blow the roof off of the house as my grandparents were talking about one of their friends, that it was time for me to get out for awhile. I have been home for nine days in a row now, minus a night that I spent at my sister's apartment in New Philadelphia. That is a lot. Now, don't get me wrong: I love my family and love spending time with them, and it has been an absolutely wonderful homecoming for me. But four days of sitting and chatting and eating (and yet more chatting) in small rooms with the same people; sleeping half the night on one couch and half on another; and waking up in the middle of the night- twice- in panic that my father's newly mounted deer head (graciously covered with a sheet for my benefit) was going to come alive and reclaim its body, I was staring to get a bit squirmy, to say the least.

I feel guilty when I'm angry and anxious, and I've been angry and anxious for several days now, maybe weeks. I haven't exactly figured out why. But there has taken root in me a strain of bitterness that wasn't there before. This disturbs me a great deal, especially during the Christmas holiday.

So this afternoon when all other forms of distraction- checking e-mail, reading, cleaning, leaving voice mails on cell phones of my friends, had failed to improve my mood, I finally decided that I should go out for a walk. The sun was shining, so there was no excuse, I told myself aloud. So I slipped on shoes without socks, a coat without gloves, and a hat without a top and headed out to the woods behind our house.

It was a good time of day for a walk, the time when the sunlight is just right to make everything softer and easier to take in, sort of like what a candle does to someone's face in an already lighted room. As I started walking through the tufts of brown grass in the Christmas tree field to get to the opening of the path, I thought about how odd it is that we refuse what we know to be good for us. Well, at least I do. Walking, being with friends, sitting still, saying hello to God, why is it that I avoid the very things that I know will help to make me feel somewhat better?

To be honest, I had come out for this walk with the intention to break sticks. (Not exactly the sort of serenity you expected, hey?) Along with visions of blowing off the roof, I had been daydreaming about whacking homeruns in a championship softball game, then jousting, and then chopping wood. I'm not even going to try to begin to analyze the symbolism in all that; all I knew is that I was agitated and felt like breaking sticks.

I passed up some fairly good-sized branches at the mouth of the path, where the wild turkeys always scratch around in the summer and the fall, figuring that I should save up my energy for something nearer a woodpile (so at least this might be a semi-productive venture). Then I walked by the maple tree with the large grapevine and brought my hand to my mouth to stifle a giggle or a groan, I'm not sure which, remembering how I had bloodied my gums after an attempted Tarzan swing on a vine some summer when I was younger. In the process, I spooked about four deer, their white tails flaring up in false flags of surrender as they bounded over the hill. Luckily for them, I had had no delusions of grandeur in spearing deer and so continued peacefully down the path.


Entering a clearing, I remembered my purpose and half-heartedly picked up a nice, semi-rotten branch and smacked it against the nearest sapling. Neither the sapling, nor the branch made out very well, and I felt so sorry for the tree that I gave it a little pat in an attempt to cheer (and straighten) it back up. The next branch I picked up, on the principle of my purpose, was a much sturdier piece of poplar. Bracing myself in the proper branch-bashing position, I pulled my arms back and - whack!- the other half of the branch promptly punched my right shoulder in return as I cracked the branch in two piece. Sucker! I could imagine the tree taunting. Rubbing my shoulder, I mumbled some choice words to the trees and kicked up a few leaves, deciding that I was over the whole branch-breaking thing and wanted to go back to the house.

Without the distraction of looking for good branches to break on my way back, I began to notice how green the moss still was at this time of year. I had missed fall, so the brown emptiness of the woods felt too rushed. Sniffing the air, I tried to see if I could still smell fall, in the leaves on the ground, but could only detect a faint odor of cold. A few steps beyond, I bent down to peel a patch of moss off a small rock and sniffed gently, satisfied. Yep still smells like moss, wet and sharply earthy. Beside the rock, I roughed up a few leaves with my hand, but still couldn't smell anything, so I put both hands on the ground and stuck my nose right down on the forest floor. Smiling and wiping my nose, I decided, simply, that the ground smelled only like wet, rotting leaves, fall, or winter.

After a few minutes more, I reached the woodpile in the clearing in front of the back porch, empty-handed. The wooden bench where family and friends sat on to roast marshmallows or hotdogs, (or veggie dogs), had lost both of the armrests; the charcoal ring from earlier fires was barely visible with all the leaves. A few feet beyond that was the tree house my father had built for my sister and me, now missing at least half of the roof and piled full of rubbish and wood. Our initials, scratched with charcoal, were still visible by the stairs: RCL, Rachel Cook Leah, depending on how you read it. Looking once more to the condition of the tree house, I thought about how soon it would need to be taken down, broken, stripped, and maybe even thrown into the fire as fuel for some other gathering.

But not now, I decided. Now I will go inside, light candles, write thank you cards to my family, and ask my friends what they think of camp fires in December.