Autobio...Toddling into the Woods

The phoenix is born in isolation, one of a kind. The phoenix simply is.

Early morning, just after feeding my oatmeal to Patsy, our dog, I wandered out through the French doors. It was summer, and a breeze blew in the trees, so I headed to the pine woods next to our driveway. I didn’t know I was a phoenix yet. I was just a little girl. An old sepia photograph shows a two year old girl with very curly, golden hair sitting on the lap of a woman who is looking into the distance, not holding the toddler. My mother was a beautiful woman. Photographs and paintings of her frequently show this same faraway look.

The trees sighed and whistled. The smell of pine needles mixed with the smell of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans growing on the edge of the drive. I toddled into the woods, barefoot. The trees were planted in even rows so they could grow straight enough to be used for telephone poles. It was easy to kneel on the soft bed, and make long piles of needles into walls of my house. I concentrated. Once I’d made a large rectangle, I pushed some needles aside to open a doorway. I could hear Brad and Patsy coming down the drive. I hoped they’d go somewhere else. This was my private space, just right for a three-year old.

A white cat with large black spots crept toward me. “Domino,” I whispered, “Do you want to play with me?”

The cat sat on its haunches and looked at my house outline, then looked at its left front paw and licked it. “Susie,” Brad called. He hadn’t spotted me yet, which was good. As Patsy came trotting to me, Domino stood up, and wound himself against the dog, who sniffed once at the cat’s rear, just checking it really was Domino. Brad appeared. He would be seven in the fall, and he knew his way around the whole area. “Susie, I’m going down to the pond to work on my raft. Mom said I was to look after you. You want to come?”

Brad tolerated me, just three that January. Sometimes he included me in his adventures, which were usually fun. Some boys would have kicked my house walls out, and spoiled everything, but not Brad, at least, not usually. He just looked, didn’t say anything, and headed out of the woods, down the hill to our pond. Patsy followed, but Domino decided to go his own way, further into the woods. It didn’t matter to Brad whether or not I followed, so I decided I might as well go too. We both liked to climb in the willow trees lining the pond, and pretend we were pirates.

Brad was very proud of his raft. He’d been nailing boards together for the past few days, and now he wanted to put a mast on. We didn’t swim in the pond because it had leeches, and frogs and other things we didn’t like, but we paddled around the banks, and built little port-villages out of mud. Patsy, our Kerry-blue terrier, usually helped us startle frogs or chase dragonflies.I knew Brad didn’t want me to get in the way of his project, so I climbed into the willow tree that reached out over the pond. At nursery school someone had showed me how to braid three things together, so I practiced with willow leaves. Sunlight flickered through the leaves, and I felt happy, so I made up a little humming-song, a sort of Winnie the Pooh song. Brad looked up at me, but he was used to my strange little songs. He was more interested in figuring out how to put the mast onto the raft so it would stand up straight.

A few days later, probably after some advice from Dad, he got it right. He was so proud, standing on his raft with this strange, slightly crooked branch sticking up from the raft as he pushed himself away from the pond’s shore. Mom took a snapshot. And then the raft started to lean. Brad began to slip into the water. I laughed and laughed from my grandstand seat in the willow, very glad I wasn’t the one testing out the raft.Nothing happened, except that when Brad waded out of the water, he had a few leeches clinging to his arms and legs. “They don’t hurt,” he told me.

“Yuck,” I said. “Get them away.” Dad took Brad inside, and put salt on the leeches. Only one let go, so he used his lighter to discourage the others. They slid off Brad’s skin, leaving little trails of blood that didn’t clot. Brad wanted to collect the leeches and take them to school for show and tell. Disgusting!

One day, probably that same summer, I vaguely remember another adventure, one that didn’t end so easily. Brad and I took walks together, exploring our neighborhood in the countryside. Not far from us a farmer kept a few sheep in a field. I thought they were cute, and wanted to pet them. So, one day I walked by myself to the field. “Here, sheepie, sheepie,” I called. They weren’t very smart, so I held out some deliciously fresh grass. Next thing I knew one of the sheep butted me from behind.

I fell, scraped my knees on some rocks, and began bawling. No one was around, so it didn’t take me long to stop crying, get up, careful to watch where the sheep were, and run back down the field to my home. When I came in the house Mom was very angry at me.“Where have you been?” she asked. “And look at you. Your overalls are ripped and muddy.” I ran away from her before she could spank me where the sheep had butted me, and hid in my closet under the eaves.

That was an okay place to be during the day, even though there wasn’t any light in it. But at night it was really scary. Lots of nights I knew something lived in that closet – I could hear it make sort of a “whoo” moan over and over. One night it seemed as if it was about to come right out and attack me, so I ran into Mom and Dad’s room, crying.

“It’s just an owl, Susie,” Dad said. “Go back to bed.”

Another time I knew I was going to be killed by the train because it was going off its tracks. Every few nights I could hear the train go by several miles away, but this night was different. The wind was totally still. The train whistle seemed to go on and on, and I could see the headlight of the train coming closer and closer, and it couldn’t if it stayed on the tracks, but nothing was stopping it, and it was about to get me.

I knew Mom and Dad would be very angry if I came into their room and cried like a baby, so I rocked myself back and forth, sitting up in my bed holding onto my knees, and trying to tell myself the train was on its tracks. Yes, I was very young when I first learned how to cope with becoming a phoenix.

My fourth birthday was an extraordinary event, in a Florida hotel. Grandad, Mom, Brad and I had come to Florida by train. Grandad collected sea-shells, so he came down to Sanibel nearly every winter. We visited Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers winter circus area, and watched the clowns practice their acts. And saw the trapeze artists practicing, as well as the tightrope walkers.

What I remember most, though, was my birthday party in the hotel dining room. The waiters brought out an enormous birthday cake for me, and the entire dining room sang me “Happy Birthday!” I was a star, and I loved it. A few days later Mom let me play a slot machine, and I won $5. “What do you want to buy with the money?” Mom asked me.“Some pretty flowers for the hotel manager because she was so nice to me.” Perhaps I had been prompted to be generous, for that was certainly one of the many rules in our family.

While we were there Brad made friends with someone who had an enormous black snake. There’s a photo of him standing in the man’s shack with the snake draped all over him. I wasn’t ready to play with snakes, and thought it was a strange thing to do. Later in our childhood, though, Brad and I caught snakes and tried to keep them as pets, without too much success.