The Valley
The little boy peers out the car window, his chin just above the door frame. He blows a film of condensation onto the glass so he can draw circles and stick figures on the misty canvas. Sometimes he traces lines of the valleys in the background, carefully casting his focus on them, then returning it to the glass to observe the recreated undulations. Two of his siblings sit beside him, each of them younger, each of them absorbed in their own little worlds. His Mother sings in the front as his Father steers them safely through the Valley.
The day on a friend's property had been an adventurous one, even if it did leave him feeling a little confused. A group of them with axes had decided to climb down a slope and bring death to a tiny tree at the bottom. He remembered the bravado of them, his own turn with the axe, and how he was quickly replaced because his heart wasn't in it. It wasn't just about chopping the tree down, it was the heroics of then dragging it back up the hill to a group of parents that they'd hoped would be proud, or at least amused. They were neither, and this just affirmed the feelings he'd had of this senseless act. "We burn old trees around here, not the new ones," he remembered hearing someone say. But they were boys after all, although he wasn't really sure that he fit in... as a boy.
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Some forty years later an adult drives alone through the valleys of his childhood. He's traveled along this road a few times since then but never really looked at the surroundings like the way he does today. Suddenly something makes his eyes well up and his breath becomes short. He exclaims out loud, "oh God!" and feels an urge to pull over so he can record these feelings, somehow try to make sense of them. He decides to continue driving and to trust his memory of this current moment, all the while keeping a look out for more sensations of the past. He drives through an old town that tingles something; that corner; that crest, and the nineteenth-century-built wineries that bring back memories of a not so pleasant alcoholic youth. There is the old hotel, the one they would drive out to on Sundays because it was the only place where one could get a drink back then. He passes a lonely post office and remembers that a woman was murdered there many years ago; something that scared him as a child; something he'd never given much thought to... until today.
He is meeting a friend at a café about fifteen minutes away. When he arrives, she calls to tell him that she will be late. This doesn't surprise him and his mild exasperation turns into gratitude as he realises he will be given time to journal some thoughts. He reflects on the emotions he felt while driving and asks questions from where they came. He discovers as he writes that he was reminiscing that little boy, the one that daydreamed and imagined and saw the world through the eyes of innocence which he'd somehow lost through the lurks of life. He's been telling himself a lot lately to find those eyes, to recover that way of seeing which he also sees so clearly in his daughter. Bless her, he thinks; bless this journey down memory lane.
His friend appears, he hasn't seen her in over a year. They hug and then he has to hug her again. They sit down and begin talking.
Short story by Eli
Read 574 times
Written on 2009-05-16 at 16:46
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