Entanglement

I’m a feral child of cut off shorts, skinned knees and barefoot summers, of afternoons wading knee deep in icy cold creeks winding through backyard suburban forests, of doing backflips on the trampoline until my head hurt and then sunning myself like a reptile on the warmth of that black nylon, staring up through a canopy of gently swaying trees, dreaming of a boy, and what his lips might feel like pressed against mine.  That feral girl still lives under my skin. She stands with me on Ostara watching winter’s last breath blow mighty, gusty winds through the trees. She feels every buffet and tendril of white hair that whips around my aging crown. I feel her childlike wonder of the world around me. We feel One with all that is. This is our happy place, where we feel seen, and free, and loved beyond all comprehension. Where lifelong traumas and wounds no longer exist. There is only our feet on the ground and the wind against our skin. In these moments, we mend what is broken.  I ...

Coyotes yip and howl just beyond the tree line beside the house. They are close. We all pause to listen—the dog's ears attentively perked. The sound is haunting, primal and oddly comforting somehow. Is it a territorial display, a role call or are they simply bonding in the waning light of the most recent full moon? They've been there the last two nights, so probably not celebrating downed prey—at least I hope not, there are a lot of cats around here.  We're in a new house, surrounded on two sides by woods filled with pine trees, Leland Cyprus, redbuds, thorny locusts, Chinese privet, two huge Bradford pear trees in the back yard and a horse pasture that can be seen through the trees in the back. It is literally a little slice of heaven on earth, well, for me anyway. All this nature is a serotonin goldmine.  A possum living in an abandoned squirrel's nest in a tree right on the fence line, peers its little face over the edge, and watches me quizzically one morning just b...