Pretending

aww ~ 01/25/12
non-subject: pretending

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"Aye, aye Captain!" My nine-year old voice exclaims as I stand upon the side-bar on the swing set frame. With my head just slightly higher than the top of the frame, I look out across the pasture behind me, the pasture that is the ocean. I am a princess hero on the pirate ship. I'm not a prissy princess, but strong and brave.

The pirate ship is the old partly-rusted swing set frame that holds the green-painted wooden porch swing.

In front of the swing is the cement covered well, an active well that supplies water to our house. Sometimes the pump doesn't work and we have to call on the neighbors to get water from their spigot; our neighbors have city water. Sometimes Dad adds chlorine to our well water. I know when he's added the purifying germ-killing liquid because I smell the strong, sanitary odor when I run the tap and then drink from the cup.

Rising above the swing is the huge pin oak tree. The tree which provides entry to my bedroom via the tree's branches which access the whitish-gray tiled flat part of our roof, the roof that is outside my upstairs bedroom window. Sometimes when I am trying to go to sleep, I imagine a murderer climbing the tree to gain access to my little sleeping body, but my stuffed animals that surround me provide protection. And I pray to a God that must exist because life is so very full of amazing animals and nature to discover. Surely He'll protect me.

I often wonder why God hates the devil. There must be good in the devil somewhere? I wonder how I learned about the devil? I seldom ever go to church, except on Easter and Christmas. Maybe I heard about the devil at the Methodist camp ground where church meetings are held outside under the big shelter.

Behind the swing lies a small portion of soil where Dad plants a garden. Behind the garden is a fence that surrounds the large pasture which at the moment has become the ocean; the pasture wherein abides the horses that I ride and the creek in which I play when I become the Indian girl making bowls from creek bank clay and painting them with purple juice from polk berries; the fenced-in pasture that contains the woods wherein I later engage my first French kiss at age 11; the pasture from which I later harvest jimson weed pods containing deadly seeds that take me to the netherworld at age 15.

Pretending. The neighborhood world of childhood and adolescence. Mine was rich.

In the 1960s and '70s when we didn't lock the doors and without much parental guidance, I was free to roam. It was good and bad, a mixture of freedom and of neglect without many boundaries. Yet, I always had the boundaries of the walls of my home. There was always food to eat. Mom would leave supper on the stove and in the oven, food she had made that morning for me and my siblings to ingest as we ate at our T.V. trays in the evening.

I walked home from school most all the time, or rode my bike to and from school. That is until high school, when I graduated to riding in my boyfriend's car or driving my car once I got my driver's license. The school bus didn't provide transportation for our neighborhood; we were only two to five miles from the schools, close enough to get there on our own.

I don't pretend much anymore; as an adult I fantasize instead of pretend. I think the last time I pretended was in African drumming class about 8 years ago. A bunch of adults high on drumming, we pretended to be different animals taking turns acting out the animals and drumming our djembes.

Then again, I probably pretended while in The Way; I pretended to believe when sometimes, deep down, I didn't.

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