Endless Lawn XXXII

Art from Matt Smith!

Here’s one from Ennis.

The Woods on Weaver Street

My family’s first house
the first one I remember
had a yard on the edge of the woods.
It went from mowed lawn & tended garden
blackberry bushes & house-cats-sunning
to vines & trees
ferns & thickets
I remember the sturdier vines were fun
for swinging.
Picturing those woods
I remember there was a pond
with water lilies.
But that seems too magical to be true
- a tiny hidden pond -

I make a note to ask my parents.

Down, where the street ended
our neighbor, Betty, kept a rhubarb patch
part of her plentiful vegetable garden.
Beyond that
footpaths wove through the woods.
We walked them often
always covered in pine needles
a fragrant, gold-orange layer
framed by moss.

You could take those paths
all the way to the school
but it was thick with growth in some places
barely passable.

I didn’t know then, but
that little stand of trees connected
to another
and another.
The woods flowed through valleys
over ridges
touching the edges of other towns
the margins between farms
and other kids’ backyards.

My neighborhood woods
was part of a forest
with tendrils that fanned out
into parks
and butted up against
the edges of lakes
of mines
of quarries.

In West Virginia
we’re all on the edges
of the same big woods
12 million acres across the state
nearly 80% of all the land.

In the places where
the mountains get taller
the valleys get deeper,
the vastness of our forests is on display
rolling into the sky.
Seeing miles and miles of canopy at once
I struggle to take it in
trying to process the textures
and imagine the creatures
contained in every square inch of green.

Back to the tiny part of the grand woods
that I know slightly better,
behind our old house.

My mom writes back.
My dad remembers the pond too.
He made it, in fact
damming up a little stream
so the water would pool.

He’s not sure about the water lilies
but he remembers the crawdads.

E. Barbery-Smith, August 2023