I spent a while walking in circles around the fallen apple tree.

[snarp]

The deer feel that this is an adequate exchange for the apples. I agree. I loved finding wild animal droppings in the yard as a kid. It made it a more real and important sort of place, that deer and rabbits were there sometimes when we couldn't see them. (I didn't like finding their bones, though.)



When I was little, there were places I felt were more likely than others to contain secret doors to other worlds; a fallen tree seemed especially likely. It gives an illusion of depth, and it's a familiar and dull things shifted on its axis to form something excitingly unfamiliar, and inside it's closed off from the sky, and cool and green. You can reach things you couldn't reach before, like old birds nests and new bugs. The leaves rustle all around you in the breeze.



Culverts full of high weeds like this one also seemed reasonable entrances to Narnia or ancient China. I could potentially have climbed into them every day, but I was very resistant to getting dirty, and afraid of snakes. This gave them the sense of something forbidding at the core. But they're surrounded by tall flowers and wild grains and frogs, and bugs you can't find in other parts of the park, like mantids and dragonflies. There might be a litter of kittens inside, or a hidden treasure.



I don't feel the same exhilaration when I look at a fallen tree or culvert now. The most exciting part of the walk today was the peach tree. It gives me no particular sense of wonder, but I want to eat some peaches.

Growing up, to me, means trading a feeling of possibility for one of understanding. A lot of the things I've seen since hitting adulthood, I wish I could sort of exchange with my younger self, to give them more to do inside of me. "Little me, I'll trade you my trip to Koishikawa Kourakuen for one of the opaque conversations with our great-aunt R you didn't understand. You can make up a story about the thing that lives behind a door in the moon bridge, and I'll try to figure out what she was trying to say."