We found things in the woods during nature walks in Sally’s American Lit class in high school. Things that meant something to us and things people left behind that came to mean something to us—once a rusty tireless bicycle rim. We brought it back to our classroom and hung it up on the blackboard as a reminder of how Sally took us outside. How she let us go.
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Our neighbor, George, likes to ride bikes in the woods in front of our house. A few years ago, a message came through from Bunny saying, George left something in the woods for you. They were always leaving things in their woods: a metal goat and a colorful rooster. Tiny gnomes peeked out of the folds of trees and were tucked into rocks. They left gnomes for our family to hide, too. We set out into the woods, eyes open, on our daily pilgrimage. When we reached the dripping rock where we always count slugs, we discovered a sign hung up on a pine tree. Painted green with wood burned letters in white, it read “Slug Wall” and matched the other trail signs in the woods. We giggled and turned to the crag to search for slugs. The day was damp; it had rained the night before. The prospects were good. The girls called out in delight as they counted. One, two, three, all the way to twelve that day.
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One night at bedtime Pip asked me: Am I good at science? I laid next to her, wrapping the day and her little body in warm blankets. I am stunned at this need for validity from me. She already knows what she likes. But this is the way we move—as children, as adults—seeking affirmation from another. How do you know you are good at something, she is asking. What’s the sign of it? We are project people and so are you, I say. We talk then about science, about what it is, what it means, how people think, how she thinks. We talk about engineering and putting pieces together and pulling them apart and seeing, always seeing, how things work. You are a tinkerer, I tell her. Like both your grandfathers, like your great grandfathers.
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One bleak winter day Pip sets up a bird research station next to the window that looks out on the bird feeder. She has placed seed on the deck railing, propped an iPad on the piano for recording, and is holding binoculars and her own intensity for inquiry. She tries to read the bird signals, what they are doing and why. How they move, what they want. My friend Quinten, whom she has only met once three years ago in Colorado, gave her a pocket-sized encyclopedia of birds. She was four years old then and maybe it was because of how the size of the book fit into her small hands, or the images of so many birds, or that she could read this book of pictures like she saw us read books—but she has never lost that book. We look up the birds we see in the backyard and those we think we see.
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After a grueling bike ride up the mountain in front of our house, past Slug Wall and the rooster we named Black Bottomed Bob, past the hidey gnomes, all the way up to the Turn Around Tree and back down to the house, Arynne and I return, exhausted and hot. I make iced coffee and she gasps, a bluebird! and points to a bird and its mate on the railing on the back deck. She freezes, taking it in. I am confused, thinking of blue jays but this is not a blue jay with that red belly and where is the white streak? When the birds take flight, Arynne is drawn through the sliding screen door onto the back deck and I follow though I am no birder. Outside, she takes in the activity of my backyard—no, that one is a blue jay, she says, and there are the chickadees, and of course, the gaggle of ducks that visit the neighbor’s pond every day. I don’t really get birds, I say. Except those chickadees in Ferdinand. We remember that morning how our families, nine of us together, spread out in the snowy woods, our arms outstretched, waiting for the chickadees to land on us—on hands, on heads. The kids suppressing gleeful squeals. Those chickadees, social little things, were the first time I thought birds were cool, I say. Arynne tells me about the time when she saw a cardinal, so arrested by its beauty and unlikely presence she could not get the words out to tell her husband. I think about how people sometimes see birds as people who have passed away and I decide watching birds is okay so long as you are with someone who likes bird watching more than you do.
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The cardinal makes me think of when my friend Adam’s cousin died. At the funeral, Adam told a story of how his cousin loved cardinals and no, it was not just because he loved baseball, but he loved the bird, and right after his cousin passed, Adam tells everyone, he saw one. In its redness, that tuft of feathers, a red unicorn horn upon its head, Adam felt he had seen his cousin one last time, come to say goodbye. Adam was mad at this unexpected death. His cousin had a heart attack and died when at 45. He told me his cousin was unhealthy and liked Twinkies and Slim Jims and he did not like to walk or take the stairs. He did not like to ride bikes except maybe with his little girl who was the same age as Pip.
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Pip is seven and she is always the youngest, which is frustrating for her. I was the youngest too so I feel what she feels. She is so often the smallest one, too, and when we rode bikes at Crickett Hill last year she refused to try the hardest trail there, Bermie Sanders, because it started with a long climb and on the way down it had burms big and tight, sometimes laced with roots and she always said no even though it was not that hard and we knew she could do it if she wanted. This summer, she did not say no. She wanted to go where her sister, her cousins, her friends went but she did not want to just follow, she wanted to lead. She positioned herself at the front of the bike pack and pushed hard to make it to the top first and she did. We always say to our kids we want them to know what grit is and to not be afraid when something is hard, that it is okay to fail so long as you push and push. That grit, a sign of intention and commitment, will serve them well, will lead them where they want to go.
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I think again of the tireless bicycle wheel we found on the winter walk that day in Sally’s American Lit class. Its bent rim and missing spokes, hung on the wooden trim of the blackboard Sally never used because she was not that kind of teacher, a reminder that this class was not like the other ones. Sally took us on walks in the woods and called it class. She made us read writers who should be read but were not. She made us pen pals to the students of her Mississippi friend and they visited us in the springtime. We took them on a hike up Elmore Mountain—the woods where the gnomes are now, where Slug Wall is—and we almost got them lost, sort of did but didn’t too much, and we learned the depth of our own fortitude that day. Sally showed us that we were not like all the others—did not have to be like what was always done before just because it was always done before. That wheel on the blackboard, with its broken spokes and tireless rim said, “Go on, then. Go.”
Darcie Abbene is an adjunct instructor at Northern Vermont University and the Managing and Nonfiction Editor at the Green Mountains Review. She has work in A Portrait of New England and forthcoming in Capsule Stories and Parhelion Literary Magazine. Darcie is working on a novel and a collection of essays on teaching and is a candidate in the Stonecoast MFA program.