Recognizing time lines in scenery

I'm very lucky.  I live a 1/2 mile from one of the biggest urban forests in the country in the State of South Carolina.  I walk in those mysterious, beautiful and winding woods almost every day.  This morning, as I took a detour from my regular early (before the sun is up) route, I came into an open area that had a creek on one side and thick woods on the other.  In between these two areas was a road created by wagon ruts and between the ruts was a brilliant green grass of some type.  Today is the first day of Autumn, but I didn't know that officially until I got back home.  There was something about being in that area and beholding that particular scene that sparked a memory in my brain.

I remembered walking to first grade in what would have been September of 1960.  The setting was quite different though. I went to the first half of first grade wearing a dress, short white fancy socks and something other than tennis shoes.  The short walk across the elements that made up the high desert, vacant lot between the ticky-tacky subdivision in which I lived with my parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico and my elementary school was filled with sand, tumbleweeds and cactus.  I could look up to see the Sandia Mountains that towered over my little 50s hacienda-type school.  And I did wander from home to school mesmerized by all those natural wonders.  I remember chasing lizards; rescuing kittens; pulling stickers out of my socks; wiping the blood off of my bare legs that were stabbed by the points of the hard yucca leaves; watching the sun illuminate the yellow leaves of the aspens on the mountain.

Then my father took a job.  In December.  In Charleston, West Virginia.  We moved into the snow, with the house we were staying in temporary clinging to the side of a mountain.  I don't think I walked to school until the Spring.  But when I did, it was a fairyland of flowers and ferns.  The landscape was as radically different to me as it could possibly have been.  I meandered once again.  The jackrabbits now took the form of baby bunnies that looked like expensive stuffed animals I only seen in fancy toy stores. The lizards weren't bumpy and dry here, but smooth and moist. Purple hyacinths burst out with tiny lavender trumpets blowing out the first scents of Spring. And everything was green - green like the brilliant grasses this morning.

All of a sudden I realized that it had been a half of a century ago, on this Autumn Equinox, when I began attending school.  I took into consideration, for probably the first time in my life, how much my concept of who I was in the world changed then.  And how hard I've struggled to return to that 6-year old who integrated what she witnessed and "read"in nature back into her current life.  And how much walking in the woods in a place far away from both West Virginia and New Mexico helps me to visually take hold of those elements and set them into my day like a beautiful stone into a ring.