“Play was our job, our work as children. Our office was that inner world of make-believe, of curiosity, wonder, and enchantment. In years to follow we find there memories and treasures priceless in value – a piece of colored twine, grandfather’s old pocket watch, three marbles, the nubbin of a favorite Crayola, an Indian Head penny, a skate key. Would that we had not retired so long ago…”

            ~ With thanks to Harper Lee and Steve Frankfurt…

There was this place I went to as a child. It wasn’t very far, and it took little effort to get there. It was a place of wonderful silences, mystery, and intrigue. It was a place in part lonely for its solitude, but mostly it gave me times rich in ways that comforted and provided sanctuary. It opened vistas otherwise unknown to a young farm boy from a working-class family in the 1950s San Joaquin Valley.

I worked on the family farm from a young age, often after school and sometimes after dinner, and during the triple-digit dry heat of the summer harvest. In addition to learning a strong work ethic, I experienced the cycle of seasons, and our interdependent relationship to the food chain. I worked in the spring just as the blossoms magically appeared, and saw through them a part of the cycle of birth, life and death, and rebirth. On crisp fall days, I worked to irrigate our orchards, and came to know a little of our place in the scheme of life.

Much of farm life is solitary, spent “chasing water,” my Mom’s description of irrigation, and driving the tractor pulling a disc to turn the earth. There isn’t much social about irrigating the orchards in long days of spring, or driving a tractor in the wee hours of the morning – hours spent working by myself with only my thoughts for company. During those times I found solace in this inner world: in the imagery that flooded my mind as the waters flooded our orchards; that turned over in my mind as the soil was turned over in long rows behind the tractor. There was comfort there, a place warm and familiar and secure.

This is a place I still visit often, where I experience the pull of gravity lessen, where I am able to lift off the earth and take flight. Here, in my mind’s eye, the mysteries of nature are opened before me in all their splendor, much as they were when first I experienced the cycles of life and death and renewal back on the farm. Here, I experience an inner nature in common with all of life, and I find it at once affirming, vital, and authentic. Describing these experiences comes readily to me as word-images form and fill my mind.

I have always loved words for their power to excite, for their ability to evoke images that give life to ideas, and form to answers in the face of a child’s curiosity. In the absence of something concrete, one relies on images summoned from within to clothe words spoken by or to another. This is a uniquely human facility, and one that carries rich rewards for any who would journey to that remarkable realm within.

To a child, this is a land of make-believe, beautiful and charming – a world wild and wonderful and enchanted. To an adult – to me – it is a place ever as real and necessary in the living of life, as vital to the nurturing of the soul as food and water are to the body. This is a realm most of us retired from when we “grew out of childhood” – a place to which we now at times return in dreams, both night and waking, in periods of reverie, priceless and fleeting, or when we venture into that place from whence valor originates.

I consider myself one of the fortunate ones, who instead never really left this world behind – who carried it forward just inside my vest as I grew into adulthood. It has been a source of comfort and strength when circumstance has called me to stretch beyond my reach, and has been cause for joy when I have encountered a kindred soul who slipped me the sacred handshake as a sign from within their vest.

As an adult, I still spend extended periods in this wonderland. I have always had a rich inner life, and as occasion would have it I am flooded now and again with the excitement I experienced as I witnessed the processes of creation in our orchards and vineyards. The delicate image of a flower, the sweep and grandeur of a landscape, or the flight of a granddaughter across an expanse of grass pursuing a butterfly, these transport me and magically their power loosens the hold of my mind and allows passage to that realm where the heart dwells. It draws back the veil that dims my view, and opens me to the possibility of defying gravity. In revisiting the memory traces of those precious moments, in exploring those fields today, I find I am once again chasing water.

My hope is that these short stories serve to drop a pebble into the still quiet waters of your mind, and touch some aesthetic sensibility; that it open portals to that inner world of yesteryear, calling you back to the wonder-filled days of childhood, thus bringing you out of retirement…