More Rambling About Rambles

This will be a very brief ramble indeed, since it is quite late . . . I visited two, count 'em, two brooks today, and walked along the Delaware and Raritan Canal to boot.

The entrance to the woods with one of the brooks is overgrown and mostly impenetrable, but just past a pair of drooping shrubs cloaked  in five leaf akebia, with turquoise blue berries everywhere, is an entrance point.  The shrub is enticing.  I peered under its canopy and imagined sitting there, hidden from the world, shaded by is finely-cut leaves and cerulean berries.  The second stream, too, was well-protected by bramble sentinels guarding the way, but the merest shadow on the shrubs indicated a secret entrance which made my heart beat faster.

I thought then, that when I was a child and set off on a quest to the woods, I was always hoping to find the enchanted portal into the other world I knew existed, and which I occasionally glimpsed as it flickered into view and then flickered out. Sometimes by luck all unknowing I wandered through that hidden door and found myself in that other, mysterious world.  Then I would have soul-stirring adventures until I inadvertently stepped back through the door into the ordinary world.  

I realized, as I headed for the obscured passage into the woods this afternoon, that I am still hoping to find that portal, and that every now and then, the blinders fall from my eyes and I see that hidden world for a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes, before my vision is obscured again.  And somewhere in the woods, smiling and nodding at me, my child self lingers, sheltered in the embrace of  the drooping branches of a shrub mantled in vines and berries.