Memory, Week 1

The sweet, almost nutty smell of decaying earth hits me, and I am in the woods in Earl Cook Recreation Area again, where the leaves have fled their perches above and been laid to rest beneath my brother’s and my shuffling feet. I was as clumsy then as I am now on Monteluco, finding rocks under the deadfall with startling laughable efficiency. Compared to our slogging Nikes, my Dad’s Redwings are almost soundless. He walks gracefully for a man who spends ten hours a day treading the concrete in steel-toes.

He casts one eye over his shoulder, crows’ feet and receding hairline the only testament to his being 43. The gray in his reddish goatee will not show for another five years or so. The recent rain wets my pants up to the knee, and yellow spotted leaves cling to my shoes. I know around the corner is a park bench decrepit with moss and damp. On the left corner of the seat, the soft wood bears the scars of our initials carved by my father’s pocket knife: RSR, MDR, JCR. In five years, he will add my stepmother’s.

He wants to show us the limited wildlife of the nature trail, but our street sweeping shoes make it almost impossible. I have many memories like this one. Sometimes, he grows bored of the precut trail and forges into the briar-threaded woods. Sometimes, the dogs gambol beside us.

This time, he opens his pocket knife with the jade green hilt and throws it at the trunk of an oak. IT sticks in the bark, vibrating, and he places it in my hand and curls my fingers around it, pulls back my arm like a trebuchet.

“Never point it at someone,” he says in his low, carrying voice. A black spider with yellow-banded legs hangs in the middle of a web to the right. My aim goes wide, just misses it and the tree as well.

“Try again.”

This is not the time the wild turkeys stray across our path with confusion in their opaque eyes, but it might be.