Return of Memoryfest - Day 30/31

[bironic]

OMG, the comment backlog. I’m all caught up on Untouchable; now to tackle your stories for Memoryfest. Guess I’ve got my work cut out for me tomorrow.

30. Elementary School

One day when my grandparents were watching my sister and me, we were watching a non-Disney cartoon version of H. C. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” on TV in the family room. It was strange to us: you could see the mermaid’s breasts, and things were much darker and sadder than the movie with Ariel and the singing crab. The doorbell rang and I went up to get it; maybe I knew it would be my friend A. (of “sto-MOSH” fame). She probably wanted to come in or to invite me out, but we were watching that movie, so I just talked with her with the front door open, her on the porch and me on the landing inside. She had a bag of Tropical Skittles--the green package--and even though I knew I shouldn’t, because we were going to eat dinner soon, I had a few. And didn’t tell my grandparents when I went back downstairs to watch the rest of the movie.

Comments

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

"[Japanese Honeysuckle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonicera_japonica)] has done severe damage to eastern American woodlands, often forming vast colonies on forest floors that displace virtually all native ground plants, and climbing into trees and shrubs and severely weakening and even killing them by cutting off sap flow and shading their leaves," says Wikipedia. I think I was about 11 or 12 when I was puttering around in the woods behind my house one day and I discovered something like this. About a half a mile back from the road and maybe a mile and a half to the south, there's a rock quarry that I liked to play in. Apparently some rocks had been taken out since the last time I was there because I found myself in a part of it that I hadn't been able to get to before. There was a small cliff, maybe 25 feet high or so, and there were honeysuckle vines growing over the top edge and all the way down to the ground, totally covering the cliff side. I sat at the bottom of the cliff all afternoon, pulling the honeysuckle off the vines and eating the bits that Daddy had taught me had nectar in them.

[roga.livejournal.com]

Mmm, honeysuckle... Whenever I got locked out of the house when I was a kid, I used to sit by our honeysuckle bush and drink the nectar until someone with a key came come. There were one or two other plants I knew how to drink the nectar from, but this was my favorite.

I miss knowing nature like that. I used to pick chubezas from wayward bushes and eat them like candy; pick the grains from a stem of wheat to much on trips, chew the clean, white rooty part of grass stems when I was bored, make necklaces from pine needles.

It's all laptops and DVDs and smog now. Where has all the nature gone?

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

I used to eat grass roots, too. :D And we had blackberry bushes near the shed in the yard. I'd sit against the shed, as far into the bushes as the thorns would let me be, and pick all the berries within reach. There was a mulberry tree, too, that I'd climb into and eat mulberries until my fingers were stained with the juice. I also used to love to sneak into my father's garden and steal his snap peas. XD Man, food is the best when it goes directly to your mouth from the source. ♥

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

At my father's friend's place in the Poconos, there were lots of huckleberry bushes (sort of a wild version of blueberries) on the edges of the swamp. We'd often go to pick the berries for my Mom to make pies with later (yum). Of course, as many went into our mouths as into our pails. (Of course, while picking one had to keep an eye out for the black bears, which also loved the berries!)

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

Oh! We had those, too, near Daddy's cousin's house! Whenever she wanted to make pies with them, she made me go pick them because everyone else ate more than they picked, but I didn't like them so my bucket filled up fast. XD

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I miss knowing nature like that.

I never really "knew" nature, but I used to be much closer to it. We used to play outside in kindergarten, had "outdoor recess" every good-weather day during elementary school, went to a couple of summer camps that naturally revolved around outdoor activities, and did lots of outside sports and games in gym all through school. In elementary school, which is what I remember best, we used to play in the grass and blow on dandelions and sample honeysuckle on the fields and look for four-leaf clovers and tie little daisy-weeds together and pick these other weeds with tiny, spongy, conical, yellowish "flowers" that gave off a pungent, fruity smell if you sliced them open with a fingernail.

*sigh* And now, yeah, it's all traffic and cubicles. The benefit of such indoor seclusion is that it makes you appreciate nature all the more when you manage to escape into it.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

The beginning of the story, with you wandering around in the woods near a rock quarry, reminds me of Matilda in the movie A Simple Twist of Fate -- with Steve Martin and Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, based on George Eliot's short story, "Silas Marner" -- have you seen it? Well, anyway, that sounds like nice, wholesome, natural (nature-al?) fun.

I'd forgotten until you mentioned this that groups of us used to pick honeysuckle, or what we thought was honeysuckle, from the trees and shrubs along the edges of the field in elementary school at outdoor recess.

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen that, but I've just added it to my Netflix queue so ... one day I will. XD