Fields of Home

A Little Background

A few steps and a few crosswalks from my office is a quaint coffee shop. It reminds me of something that could be in the ​​Gilmore Girls. 

    One day, with Fall in the air and on the leaves of the few trees growing from within the concrete jungle, I found difficulty staying anchored to this world. A barista propped the front door open, allowing the steady and cleansing breeze into the shop and into my lungs. And that’s all it took and I was in The Shaws.

    Filled with hope and a peaceful lack of intention, I opened a recently gifted notebook and began penning this story. The best of my words come without forethought, only through exploration. And what came out was another example of that.

    As always, the natural storyteller in me, wove this back to answering an accepted assumption with a key character. 

Fields of Home

“Why do you come here?” This was one of the rare occasions when she wasn’t being impatient nor provoking.

    I shrugged and continued staring straight ahead. I expected shuffling feet, perhaps the fidgeting of her cloak. Those were go-to moves to get me moving. Like a heathe and its antsy movements and energy if its master was so much as a crack of a twig late with its meal.

    No such noise nor movements came.

    “Sit with me,” I said. I’m sure the distinct lack of authority in my voice coupled with the softness of the nostalgia of the heart were the reason for her giddy gasp.

    The quick rasp of shoes against grass was all I heard before she gracefully landed next to me. I felt the grass and ground reach up to cushion her landing. Only a quick shimmer of her emerald aura interrupted the vision in my right eye. But I didn’t care to scold the sloppiness. Not in this moment. I only had eyes for the golds, yellows, and light browns being kissed by the setting sun.

    The breeze snuck out of the bordering forest like a welcome, almost forgotten friend of the past. It moved the stalks and their cylindrical flower tips. Light brown legs rising from the ground to show the gold and yellow hair. The wind split the field as it ran, seemingly away from the sun rays shooting over the top of the forest. Weaving here and there, abruptly stopping as if catching its breath, the wind bolted to one side and escaped to the safety and the shadows of the other side of the bordering forest.

    Surprisingly, Annie remained silent through it all. As a reward, I spoke up. “It seems like it was just a few days ago when I was tall enough to only see the golden flowers.” I smiled at the memory, the feeling of the world being so big and all for discovering. “I would get on my tip toes and, only when the wind was like today, could I see beyond the field to the trees beyond. It was a dream. A dream that my people, our people, could not understand. It was then I imagined growing up in a land like this with only glimpses of great trees belonging to the mountains they supported.”

    The wind ran the edge of the new home amongst the trees to the west of this field of flowers and memories. I watched it race along the edge as the flower tips shifted slightly before snapping back to straight and calm. An ocean on land is all my childlike mind could see.

    ​“Brim,” Annie’s voice was with me, in my mind almost, a memory with a visitor who wants only to hear and understand the story – not judge. As such I knew she wasn’t using my name.

    I nodded in agreement.

    “It wasn’t just because people annoy you?” she asked.

    I laughed and finally took my eyes off the field of another life. To my surprise, she didn’t turn to face me. She too was caught in another time. Which was fine with me. It afforded me a brief glimpse, a second to admire what the gods had made. The same way I admire a sunset and its intentional spilling of buckets of colors on an already rich world. The angular jawline, the deep green eyes, the nose and chin that were petite like her entire body yet added the balance to make her something to be adored. Until she opened her mouth.

    I snagged this moment to be locked away just for me, protected from anything that life would bring. The beautiful creature next to me, always smelling like she’d spent the morning walking among berry bushes. The glow of the sunset’s bucket of colors giving rise to the subtle glow that the field of flowers already woke with. And the last touch, the dark green trees in the distance. Towering yet caring as they shielded life below while giving grace to the clear blue skies. 

    Before Annie could ruin it with talking or making me laugh, I put the moment away then looked away from her.

    “Yeah. Even when I was a youngling, people bothered me.”

    Annie replied, “The humor being that the younglings are the annoying ones.”

    I shrugged. “I see what is there, for better or worse.”

    She bumped her shoulder gently into mine. “Well, you don’t always see.” The playful flirt came out a bit in her voice. 

    I smiled and didn’t try to force back the blood rushing to my cheeks. “I see it all, Annie. That doesn’t mean I accept it.”

It was her turn to laugh. 

    And as she did, the wind redirected to her, as it always seems to. It’s a welcoming laugh, a songbird’s melody. And nature recognized it as such, wanting to carry it across the land the way the sky wants to gently push, pull, and stretch the clouds. 

Leaning away from me, but not so much that her elbow wasn’t touching mine, she muttered, “Uh huh.”

    I continued listening to the wind carry her songbird laugh up above the trees and into the blue skies. 

    “The sun seems to set slower here,” she said.

    “It has as long as I can remember.” The child looked out through my eyes again. Yet I narrated the way I was now that I could look back and understand what was.

    “I would come home with scrapes on my arms from running too fast and too careless. I stayed so long here, waiting until the last slash from the sun’s sword cutting the flower tips, that it’d be absolutely black when I got back. Even the heathes were already out, their auras still a warning to strangers and younglings alike.

    “Yet it never stopped me from returning. I’d finish the duties, reject all play with my fellow, but annoying younglings, and come straight here. This was always home. I think that’s really why the name stuck. The desire to be away from people was just a raindrop. It’s really that being in The Serenities was the brim of where I wanted to be, of where home was.”

    I leaned forward, reaching just beyond my crossed legs, and plucked one of the flowers. It was purple, like the moon sometimes crossing over our night sky. The petals were perfectly round and seemed to breathe as I breathed. The center tendril, delicate to the touch, pulsed along with my heartbeat. 

    “I’d climb up here. I’d eat until sunset and these flowers would bloom.” I held out the flower, giving her part of the stem to grab. And when she did, I didn’t let go. 

    “That’s when time seemed to slow. Just as it is now. By some magic…” I let my voice fade.

    Her gasp sent chills up my arm, down my back, and into the ground. The purple flower in her hand and all those covering the mound we were sitting on started sharing her rapid heartbeat. The flutter of their petals was the only sound carrying across the field of golden flowers. Everything else had ceased moving.

    The sun’s bright gold-orange rays hung perfectly through the parting in the field the wind had cut. The flowers hadn’t sprung back because the wind was on hold. 

    “How?” Annie finally spoke in a rare moment of reverence.

    “Take it.” I let go of the flower we held. “Kiss it.”

    She looked at me, eyebrows raised with that look of “I will hurt you if you say that.”

    I nodded assuringly. “Younglings. We don’t think about clean and dirty. Just do it.” Her look shifted to a glare until I looked away. I didn’t need to see the kiss. In fact, I wanted to witness what would happen when she did it.

    In her typical attention-seeking way, she made an audible kissing sound. And I’m sure she had a snarky comment waiting up her sleeve, but it never came. Only a gasp like before followed by the slapping of her hand as it gripped my arm. 

    I didn’t feel a thing. I barely heard her response. I was swept up and into the arms of the feeling of home. Yes, the flowers responded as they had always done for me. The purple ones covering this mound opened their petals completely, and began pulsing to a steady rhythm, a heartbeat of their own. The mound to my left, long and slender like a stack of a dozen canoes had been layered with dirt, grass, then flowers, also responded. Like ours, the flowers bloomed and beat in unison. Those flowers, however, were white as snow. A color normally a spice to a stronger flavor now took all the attention.

    Annie, slightly delayed, noticed the white glow covering part of my hands. She threw her arm across my chest and pushed me back so she could admire the response.

    I just laughed like a youngling being tickled by a loving grandparent. That’s what always came, it’s part of what made it home: the ease in which laughter finds your belly and the imperfect smile laughter brings.

    It didn’t take long before Annie joined. Not in response to my laugh, but to the air being filled with the vibrations from the flowers beneath and around us. Her laugh triggered her nature magic, taking over the magic that stopped time. The wind spun in a circle, bending the golden flower tips and tan stalks so quickly that they sounded like an old man’s wheezing laugh.

    This field, settled into this valley, a hidden gem, was now the home for someone else. 

    My laughter faded into a smile then admiration as Annie loose a full-belly laugh. Head back, big smile, her laugh brought forth her emerald aura, pulsing out to meet and greet, instead of overpowering, the glowing white from the flowers. Then it moved outward, taking the melody of her laugh to greet the falling sun’s colors, intertwining and embracing as the gods stirred the bowls of colors with an invisible label.

    Eventually, the sun set. Its glow still reached up to the sky long after its rays were cut off from land. The flowers’ pulsing and glowing faded with the sun. They tried, like the sun, to stay and play for the audience as long as they could. Annie, bound by and binding nature, kept her aura and the songbird laugh swirling and twirling to close out the day. Always being the last to take the final bow before leaving those around the night fires in the center of our village. 

    And I didn’t move nor look away from her until the stars were shining down. She turned to me in that starlight, the nature she couldn’t control yet it was still drawn to her. The stars filled her eyes the way they would fill her aura. I stared longer than I should, but I couldn’t look away. 

    She reached down, grabbed my hand, interlaced her fingers in mine then smiled. It was all lips and all love. Then she looked back onto the field.

    I continued looking at her. 

    “Home,” she said softly.

    ​I squeezed her hand. “Home.”