It has been many years since I've stepped into the forest I once called home. Growing up in a small New England town, with mostly cows for neighbors, I had to use my imagination to keep occupied since there weren't other children to play with. I spent my childhood with my dog, and plenty of good books, in the lush old pine forests surrounding our old farmhouse.
The call of birds nested in the evergreen canopies greeted me in the morning. Pine needles crunched softly under my feet, and I could smell the fresh air heavy with relaxing pine and the musk of wet leaves. Each day, I would bring an apple and a hard boiled egg and sit on the same mossy log for an afternoon snack. I took my time eating and enjoying a new book as the sunshine filtered through the ancient trees; my old black lab would lay down on the soft forest floor and keep watch. She was a good girl.
The natural silence was welcome to me as a child, I found it comforting, not scary. As a grown man I still crave that simplicity.
I want to live somewhere with more trees than people, once again.
Photo by Dennis Buchner on Unsplash
That sounds lovely ... I still get up in the morning and think about breakfast in Golden Gate Park in largely this way ... and occasionally I just make it happen. To me, the California redwoods of my childhood vacations are the stuff of dreams ... a cabin there, with more trees than people ... these were also Beethoven's dreams, as it happened, but the Austrian wild was wilder then, and he could walk to where he wanted, and canceled his reservations at a resort that cut down its trees: "For I love a tree better than I love a man." I always felt that he had a point...
My youth was similar in many regards. The dog was a Siberian Husky mix, but the neighbors were far to find a playmate. I still prefer the woods to town. I'm low on vote strength so I reblogged.