The Things We Collected

A year and a half each separates the five of us. The youngest being six, and the oldest twelve; our ages stack together like a Russian Doll. We play with no concept of what is appropriate for our gender or maturity.

We slip into the dark, our babe-like fingers cradling stolen cigarettes. The parents are in a different cluster of trees, smoking weed--neither group aware of what the other is hiding. We spy a glimmer in the brambles as our flashlights catch a fleck of polish. It’s a horseshoe, abandoned in a tangle of green; its metal sheen has been worn down by the sun and weather.

One of our mothers nails the horseshoe over the doorway of the treehouse, to invite in good, and ward off evil.

It doesn’t work.

The youngest of us sets fire to the top step of the treehouse while assassinating ants with a magnifying glass. A tiny blaze erupts into a seduction of chaos. We watch, in amazement, ignorant of the danger. One of the fathers ran to us, moving at an unimaginable speed. None of us burn that day.

The residue of the fire extinguisher clings to the structure, a reminder of our naivety. The smell of charred wood fills the space, and our senses, for weeks. The last of the horseshoe’s shine is licked off by the flames and we move it to our makeshift graveyard.

Because we also tend to the dead. Our child hands scoop up dragonflies, birds, a frog, half-rotted fish, all lost to the heartbeat of time. We fold them into the earth at the edge of the water, the ground soft enough to scoop up. At each funeral, we stand in a circle. Sing. Say a prayer. On top of the graves, we place flowers with roots dancing and dirt clinging. We fashion crosses with twine and twigs.

As we bury a flying squirrel the parents failed to save, our fingers dig deep at the edge of the engorged bog that pretends to be a pond. We find an arrowhead when the tip punctures the skin of one of us. We fight over who will tuck this artifact of the past into our tattered, wet pants. In the end, two of us walk hand in hand, the arrowhead between our soft palms and scabby digits. The rest of us follow, enviously. It is tied to a broken shoestring and hung above the single, screenless window of the treehouse.

Deep in an unexplored part of the woods, we discover a large, rusty, metal box. It is a forgotten tool, designed for cultivating items beyond our knowledge. One of us grabs a lever on one side, and its door opens on the other. Inside, a heavy mechanism shifts backward. Three of us kneel down and peer in. The oldest of the three gingerly places a hand through the opening, searching for buried treasure.

Nearly six feet away from this strange corroded container, is a small wooden unicorn; its mane is a mess of thick, black, tattered threads. One of the rear hind legs is broken off, and its eyes are small divots in the grain.

The two of us on the side with the lever see the toy--one with free hands and the other securing the handle on the box. The grip on the lever releases in an attempt to grasp the totem.

The blunt, heavy object held back by the handle swings inward and connects with skin and muscle. We scream as blood erupts. There is a small piece of protruding bone. When the cries settle, we tie up the gash with a length of torn shirt and reluctantly make our way back to the adults. The arm is properly mended, and when it healed, a thick scar outlined our carelessness. The wound should have served as a warning, but instead, the rest of us only grew jealous.

The toy unicorn remained, untouched. Perhaps it lives there still, yet another marker for our interwoven memories.

We gather misshapen branches. Fallen leaves. And rocks. Shiny ones. Black ones. Ones with gold flecks, and hues of red. We arrange these pieces of the forest at the base of the poplar, the one that holds up the partially blackened treehouse. The same one we still gather in. The space we build empires from our imaginations--silver castles, with mermaids swimming in the moat and pterodactyls circling the sky.

We understand without knowing this is our innocence and gobble it up like toddlers with a hidden bag of chocolate. Every day there is a new scratch, or cut, or torn clothes. We play, and fight, and discover the world; never a moment lost to regret.

The trinkets we find become a roadmap of our youth, but we are not the horseshoe. Or the smell of smoke. Not a graveyard of creatures, or an arrowhead. Nor a forgotten toy, or jagged scar. We are not our mistakes.

We are tiny bodies in the mud. Splashing in creeks. Crawling through culverts and climbing rope swings. We name the boulders on the cliffs of the mountains. We name ourselves.