Been thinking about…Tall grass forest

The lightning bugs played around the edges of forest and the barbed wire edge of my world that strange June night some 30 years ago. Out in the distance, I could hear kids talking, laughing, playing and I wanted to be a part. The fescue and the wild carrot grew in abandon after all the rain that cold springtime and the wild strawberries were slow to ripen. Wild strawberries are tiny compared to their domesticated cousins, tiny and easily squashed and commercially useless and I miss them terribly. Tiny bright lights of strawberry sweet hiding in the tall grass where you hope the bull snakes aren’t, especially if you walk barefoot, which I almost always did.

My homeschooled adolescence was, in hindsight, an odd thing. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad I was homeschooled. From the study time to the freedom, to the cross-country travel, homeschool was formative in making me, well, me. To be sure, there were plenty of family members horrified by my mom’s choice to keep me home beginning in third grade. “I’m sure ‘Mommy and Daddy’ will be fine to teach you reading, writing and ‘rithmetic,” my well-educated grandfather wrote to me, “but after eighth grade, you will need to go to public school.” The patronizing tone was unmistakable. Another family member simply told my mom that she was too dumb to teach me. Beginning in that third grade of my life, my academic career turned into a long-game challenge. “You gotta understand,” my mom would tell me, “if you get lazy and don’t succeed, we’re both getting blamed.” I argued and watched cartoons for a couple of years until her lessons of accountability and hard work finally kicked in. My mom breathed a sigh of relief. I re-organized the school year’s filing cabinets.

The spring moon was enormous that adolescent year some 30 years ago and made the plum thickets’ blossoms into ghostly clouds of white. I walked through those thickets and beneath the tall pine trees on the hillside behind the barn, and tried to contemplate what my life would look like in adulthood. There wasn’t much to contemplate, which was frustrating, as I simply didn’t have enough information. Still, the lights from the kitchen far down in the holler were bright and I knew there was crumb cake baking in the oven. In the intervening years since third grade, I had grown tall and skinny. My voice had deepened early and I was a model young citizen, a good student and a lonely boy. To be fair, I was terrible at being a teenager. The only demographic I didn’t like was my own, which just added fuel to the “he will never be socialized” argument. Truth was, I considered teenagers to be heathens and, truth be told, I wasn’t exactly wrong. It would take another decade to become rowdy and jocular enough to deal with teenagers. What I had really missed was just playing in the yard with boys who liked to the same things I did — mostly history and barnyard critters — and who also knew how to work hard.

Enter our new neighbors from Arkansas who had moved in beyond the Osage orange tree line and beyond the five strands of barbed wire which kept the rest of the world out. After first introductions, I finally had context for the strange need that boys have for other boys, to roughhouse and goof off and generally try to kill each other in fun and inventive ways. When I heard them a few nights later talking and laughing far up in their yard, my sense of loneliness became overwhelming. I needn’t have worried. For the next several years the four of us were nearly inseparable. They were also home schooled, they also corralled a barn load of critters, and our families’ shared values which were surprisingly identical. That first summer was filled with hours of them trying to drown me in the pond, playing violent games of tag to the point we were jumping out of the hay mow to escape each other, and packing white bread sandwiches and wandering off into the forest to pretend we were both pioneers and Indians. In short, it was heaven.

Even then, I got the side eye from family members as I was slightly older than the boys and still “not in my peer group.” It did no good to try to explain that jumping out of the hay mow was definitely more fun than summer homework and I still didn’t like teenagers. For a summer moment, time stood still while we perfected howling like coyotes (the perfect way to signal each other) and ran ourselves into exhaustion with a made-up game we called something like “pelota de calcetines” (since we were supposed to be learning Spanish). Short rules: One kid stands in the barnyard and counts down from 20 to 0 in Spanish, which gives everyone else a chance to hide. Then, he has to find everyone else and hit one of us three times with a rolled up sock. Half hide-and-seek, half tag, I still can’t believe how hard we pushed ourselves just for the fun of it. “Sock Ball” was a summation of a number of complex summertime ideas, the likes of which I just now may be beginning to understand.

What I remember best about those days, however, was the absolute lack of a plan before the day rolled around. There were no calendars, no schedules and no supervision. I watch kids’ schedules today and their requirements are as demanding as mine are as an adult. I realize we’re all in a competitive race to the top but our minds need fallow time, time to unwind. Mammals play and that is how our complex minds make sense of the world. Cram too much adult schedule in too early and it may look good on paper but the end result? We really have no sense of who we are as people, as adults, or even as men. Instead, just one task after another until all of life is spent. The lucky ones break in existential crisis at some point. The unlucky ones turn to meds or alcohol or abusive cycles of peers, or worse, use up their entire lives becoming someone else for someone else.

I pray for more summers again, summers filled with great full moons and lightning bugs and scary bull snakes, wild strawberries, coyote howls and crumb cake out of the oven, where a timeless sense of eternity really does exist, forever, and we aren’t just counting down the days in frenetic pace, never really knowing who we could have been, or really should have been, even perhaps standing barefoot in the tall grass forest.