October 21- A Park Called Nature

                          It is Friday and I'm joining my FMF friends, but I'm also continuing with 31 Days of Writing- Island Stories. Today my granddaughter Maggie is writing as a guest blogger.                          

This Is Home

By Maggie

 When a place is your home, then your heart is completely given to it. Doesn’t matter if the people there are on your side. Doesn’t matter if there are no people at all. You love the place. You love the land and the sky and the scents and even the bad things, like pounding rains and cloudy days.

 This is my home. I remember how fully my heart belongs. It is not a single event or a single place or a single memory to make a home. It takes years. Years of hope and joy and sadness and care.

                      

 

I remember times I did fun things as a child. I remember hunting through a strawberry patch for sticks to use as swords in our mock fight. I remember changing behind a towel wall at the beach, and thinking that I was in a desert. It was hot that year. I remember building forts and being in wolf packs and howling just for the joy of it. We played a lot in the woods. We played tag and hide-and-seek and baseball, and when we went to the playground we played mouse-on-ground and pretended to be dragons and vampires and witches and animals. At the park we went on “expoditions” through the “horrible swamps,” and played pretend as fairies and dryads. There was a big Maple tree in one of our backyards. We would climb it and laugh and pretend we could fly. We made blanket houses from the bunk beds when the power went out and we’d pretend we were deep underground, exploring the tunnels of earth. We had flashlights and a glass tea set and dolls and wooden guns. We were adventurers.  

 I remember sad things, too. The time the swing broke and my brother hit his head. When it rained so much the roof leaked. When we played “Rat” in the dark and someone got hurt every time. When my two-year old brother wandered away and was picked up by the police. We spent all afternoon and evening looking for him. When I saw a mouse for the first time and realized I was terrified of them. When I had nightmares of spiders that wouldn’t go away, and I’d wake up night after night in the dark, unable to move, unable to cry, still feeling the creepy scrape of long arachnid legs all over my skin. When I was sick for a week with the flu. When strep throat got me two summers in a row. When Mom almost bled to death. When she was sick, horribly sick for years and I couldn’t do anything.

 But it doesn’t matter. Because this place is home. Where I can go outside and feel rain and cold air in the winter, and melt in the summer. Even when life gets hard, because, let’s face it, it was designed that way, I can connect with this place. Because it’s home.

Maggie is a high school student and gifted in writing, music, and theater, and she is my beloved granddaughter.

I am writing for 31 days this October about Island Life. Click here to see the other days of writing.