Enchantment

Written for my three little girls in remembrance.

Enchantment

Not far from home a dry creek bed washed to bedrock and terraced by crumbly earth offered a place for my children to play. Some days it became a fairyland of butterflies and toadstools where after a gentle rain elves peered from caves carved by time, and ships of green leaves rode calm waters in hollowed stone.

Other days a great stone castle loomed above stone terraces towering to the sky with moats and pennants flying in wild spring winds. Where daring knights dueled with ocotillo spears, and bleeding from imaginary wounds fell quivering to die laughing, falling to soft sand to lay exhausted.

Sometimes in the winter on fine warm days in the sun they simply lay upon the terraced stone; one with the earth and the silence of the nothingness of distance, and the beating of their own hearts.

Running and jumping, leaping from stone to stone they ran like deer and gamboled in the complete abandon of the young. And when living deer walked the canyon they sat quietly and watched as they walked with light steps and raised heads, alert and listening, and bolting at the slightest noise. Gracefully leaping barbed wire fencing, fleeing imaginary danger they disappeared over yonder hill to safety and greener pastures while my children watched, mesmerized.

At times they packed a picnic and spreading a cloth on their favorite terrace they poured tea in imaginary cups and crooked their little fingers, speaking in voices of refinement that verged on the ridiculous, toasting the day and the fact that they were alive. Being children from the country their imagination sustained them and the lunch of ambrosia and mead, food of the gods, was in reality peanut butter and saltine crackers, an apple from the orchard near the house and pure cold water from an artesian well.

And when the rains came, it ran in runnels down rocky mountains and picking up speed and rushing together, it ripped through dry arroyos with tumbling debris and muddy water that smelled peculiarly as flood waters always do. Then combining to flow in raging torrents into the Felix where it grew to heights of several feet, sweeping boulders with it as it moved swiftly and inevitably to the low country and into the Pecos River.

My children watched the spectacle several times a year and as the waters receded their new terraces appeared. Scrubbed clean, the raw stone beckoned to find another story written after the storm. And in the pools of water left behind, the croak of breeding frogs filled the night and tadpoles soon wriggled, to acquaint them with the cycle of life.

The innocence of the very young was left behind as school buses carried them to a rural school where they learned other things of life. And all too soon my girls used the terraces as a lovely place to sunbathe and giggling, talk of boys and hairdos.

Now grown and gone from me they sometimes talk of their early life, of living miles from our nearest neighbor and never lonely, having one another and parents who loved them, and the enchantment of the dry creek bed and the denizens they peopled it with and left there.

Sometimes my mind returns to those days and I wonder if the tadpoles as yet struggle in stagnant water without my girls to rescue them to bigger puddles and life.