childhood: green

I lived in a city of no fences, where the trees curtained each house from the next, drowning out the sound of pens that scraped against divorce papers, and the cries of the nanny whose swelling stomach ruined the neighbor's marriage. But I was with their children, whose rough hands and winded cheeks matched mine.  And our adventures were all that mattered.

Evergreens were the only thing dividing our property from the next.  We buried ourselves in the firs, weaving in and out of backyards for a place to exaggerate and hide three-leaf clovers that we were convinced had a stroke of luck in them.

And in the South, where I'm from, property belongs to God and God belongs to everyone. The land you signed for was all of ours.

We made ourselves a Narnia out of a house with weathering brick and the paint of the crooked balcony peeling off in layers, where the windows were caked with storm, but there were never lights behind them.  Nobody lived there.

There was a set of chimes hanging from a dead flower box beneath the porch, painted with rust but determined to make noise. The rain pushed a grassy creek through, the creek that we sent our magic weeds down with a funeral.  We wove crowns out of ferns, standing on the man-made concrete that stretched over the creek bed and drained the dirt from the fresh sky water.

And the chimes sang through every warm summer storm, behind pillars of evergreens.  Our calloused feet and chalky hands smelled of nothing but trees every day.  Mom would pull the pine needles from my long hair, and brush the green stains from my clothes to no avail.

My world was green. And I like that color, but it's the color of everything.

But in our world, it wasn't just green. It was the 24-pack of greens.  Every half-shade and in-between, the shades that nearly scraped blue.

And it took me years to see it.

And it will take me years to see the colors I swim in today. But as soon as I get my crayons back, as soon as I can name every shade and every piece of the color wheel, then I'll tell you.