Grandma's Woods

Another memory! From when I was a young girl visiting Grandma in northern New York.

I stepped out of the wooden house, danced a drumbeat down the steps to the driveway and hesitantly dipped a foot into the sunshine that sprawled over the gravel. Slowly, I wound my way around the back of the porch to the grassy pathway into Grandma’s woods and began to collect pinecones. With a bright-orange bag in my right hand, I stooped to pick them up one at a time as I followed the cut and trampled grass. Over a log, past the raspberries (with a few tugs yielding a sweet afternoon snack) and up the hill I wandered, not really sure what I watched for, though always I gathered the occasional pinecone.

 

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye there was a flash of red. I whipped my head around to see a British soldier from the Revolutionary War! He stumbled wearily out of the trees, thrown from time and place by magic. Quickly I saw to his seeping wound, bravely removing a lodged musket ball from his side with my bare fingers. He thanked me profusely and soon we were dancing in formal gown and suit, laughing as we avoided the other couples in a beautiful ballroom laced in gold and crystal.

 

And then the moment faded and my suitor vanished, his smiling face naught but a breezy raspberry bush again, and the couples we’d danced with were towering trees once more—with soft moss their only decoration. Grandma was calling for her pinecones in the distance, and I trotted down the hill to the other side of my fancy…

 

Is that a pirate in the rigging above me?