Essay+Of+Place+Final+Copy

Selena Mayer P3 Ackerman __**Seasons Past**__

There are often mourning doves I hear calling. It is beautiful and soft, echoing on the deserted black streets. In the spring we moved in. The previous owners leave behind assorted bits of their past, leaving our family to find uses for them. For the first few days we would stumble across them, and put them in our own box of past. There were two old tennis balls found in the mint in the garden. The garden was small, and only held mint and light green leaves with white splotches. The mint is dark green and tall. I would often pick the leaves to make tea. Delicious. While it was cooking, the smell of mint would waft through the kitchen, although the smell would often float to the top of the stairwell, alerting anybody descending the stairs to the presence of mint tea. There are also indigo bluebells that look like minuscule grapes. Some have long stems and lots of flowers, others are just short and sweet. On the other side of the garden is a small path, consisting of three brick stones. I remember walking on it, the path stones cool and scratchy on my tender bare feet. There were simple wooden birdhouses on a window ledge above the garden. I would never see any birds using it, and I thought it was to low for the bird. One day I started to take down the birdhouse to move it to a higher place, when a bird flew out. Its soft wing brushed my face as it flew over my left shoulder and I was so startled I almost dropped the birdhouse. Luckily I had enough composure to gently set it back on the ledge. On the other side of the porch, there was a snowball bush, with small sweet white flowers clustered together in clumps that looked like snowballs. They wilted quickly, so while they bloomed my little brothers and I would pick the largest bunches and throw them at each other like snowballs in spring. On the grass near the end of the porch, were soft delicate violets. Sometimes one flower would have a yellow petal or center, with the rest of the flower deep purple. They were especially delicate and pretty, so we would have to take special care to not step on them when went out into the yard. The summer was the best time to climb trees. Some past that is not from the previous owners, but perhaps from the first owners, is a mysterious piece of rope, so old the tree bark has grown around it, making it a part of the tree forever. The rope is old and dirty, and I can tell that it used to be white. It is tied in a tight knot around a low thick branch of the maple tree. Its bark is sharp and scratches me when I climb up, and often pieces of bark will fall off when I ascend into the tree. Around the rope the bark looks like it just flowed over the rope, even though I know it must have taken several years to create the thick layer around the rope. It is so completely encased in the tree the rope is only visible on one side of the branch, where the long knot it's in will prevent the tree from completely absorbing the rope for many years yet. Another piece of past jammed into the tree is an old rusty nail, probably used for hanging a swing. The nail is about as old as the rope, and just as difficult to remove. What was once a foreign object roughly forced into the branch is now a serene part of the plant. It will continue to grow until it becomes invisible, an unseen event in the life of the tree until it get cut down, just like its rings. They have become bits of past for the knew owners of the house. I would love to climb to the top of the tree, where I could see over the houses in every direction. The branches at the top are smaller, and since they are so high up it's also very windy. I would stand at the top, clinging to the branch like a squirrel, swaying back and forth dangerously. I was always scared that the wind and my weight would make the branch break, but I also loved the exhilarating thrill I got from being up so high in a dangerous place. The summer makes the bushes by the fence grow thick, verdant and green. This is the best time for me to crawl under them and just observe, without being seen by anything else. Underneath the bushes smell of dirt and earth. I would often see daddy longlegs and worms scuttling and squirming around. It is a nice refuge in the summer, because the rocks are always be cool, and the thick leaves shelter me from the sun. For a couple of years we had three trees to gather leaves from. The wide maple, the tall cottonwood, and a beech tree. This resulted in a huge pile of leaves my family would often spend hours jumping in and clearing away. My brothers and I would get covered in crumbly little leaf crumbs from the leaf pile, and have to be thoroughly brushed off before we were allowed inside. We would use the rakes to hit the branches of the birch tree to make it rain leaves. Once when we were raking, we saw an eagle hunting above. It swooped and attacked a raven, which landed with a solid, meaty thump on our roof. The eagle circled above for a while, trying to find its kill. Since the raven landed in the shadow of our roof, it left without its lunch. I hope it found more food. The raven was still twitching a little when it landed on our roof, and through its struggles to get upright and recover, it rolled into our gutter and stopped moving. It was a hot day and I imagined its corpse roasting in the hot metal gutter. Disturbing. Our parents removed the body and disposed of it later. It was also in the fall when I found a pheasant corpse nestled in the roots of the maple. Its body was squished, like it had been stepped on, and it looked like a pile of feathers. I couldn't imagine how it had managed to land itself so perfectly in that spot and end up so crushed. Perhaps it was another eagle's missed meal. Fall seems to be season of death in my place. The cottonwood tree was cut down in fall. It started to decay that summer, and I remembered the light fluffy seeds floating away into the blue tissue paper sky. Mushrooms began to grow around the base of the tree, and its bark grew brown streaks. It was slowly rotting from the inside. Winter is a cleansing time, especially when it snows hard. The snow almost reaches the top of the fence. However, the large spreading branches of the maple prevent the snow from reaching the ground, so there is only a foot of snow on the ground. The branches are heavy and droop with the weight of the snow, and many fall off. If I managed to walk under the branches without knocking any snow off, then they form a snow house, just like the bushes. Even if slightly touched, the branches spring up, flinging snow everywhere. This causes a chain reaction, snow knocks of snow on other branches, which then launch their burdens of snow into the air, which results in a large rain of snow. On the other side of the yard, where the snow leaves only a foot of fence to separate my place from my neighbor's place, I feel like I can climb over and be in a different world. Near the maple, the bushes are solidly covered in snow, which creates the illusion that I can climb on them to my other neighbor's place. However, the more I climb, the more snow falls and the thinner the illusion seems. Eventually I give up and crawl under the bushes like I do in summer. The rocks underneath are relatively free of snow and I can peer out and watch my siblings play in the snow. Standing near the bushes at the base of hill under the maple, creates the odd feeling that I am standing in a bowl, because the large difference between the snow level at the top of the hill and where the tree's branches halt the snow's journey to the ground at the base of the hill where I am standing. There are some spots in the yard where the three feet of snow are solid enough for me to stand on top of them instead of wading through them. I stand on the snow and survey my place, feeling impressively tall. The cycle of the seasons and the life and death that happens in them reminds me that while time keeps going into the past, life itself will endure. It will take different forms, like the hawk killing to survive or the mushrooms and brown rot devouring my beloved cottonwood tree, but it will keep going. Long after I die, the maple may still be standing, with its own secret past and memories I will never know. The new owners of the house may see the bare spot where the cottonwood stood and wonder, but they will never truly know the history of the plant that stood there. The mourning dove calls in the spring, its beautiful voice dissolving into memory, but in winter it calls elsewhere, creating beautiful memories for another child.