The first part's fuzzy. A dream. A white glow. A hush sound. Blinking in the darkness.
I'm sort of glad it's like that because I'm a terrible liar and it's easier to keep you from making my mistakes this way.
The first part's fuzzy, but what happened at the tree the next morning—I've never forgotten that. (I mean, I forgot bits and pieces of it, but that's not unusual for me.)
It could have been a child's curiosity that drew me to the tree, but wandering away from Grandpa Pete's well-trimmed garden and to the pond beyond the pasture felt more purposeful than a passing fancy. Or maybe I’ve just have thought it about it so much that it seems like that. Most of my childhood’s adventures seem tinged with a sort of Secret Garden-ish romantic mystery. Perhaps, I thought, a tragic, beautiful, forgotten secret was waiting for me at Grandma and Grandpa's house that only I cared to find, that I alone was destined to find; a secret like a pressed rose clasped between the pages of history. In any case, I found something.
The weeping willow leaned down toward the pond it sat alongside and trailed its leaves into the water. It was quiet there. A quiet that breathed so slowly you weren’t sure it had. An ancient silence that mingled and dispersed and swirled together again; a Van Gogh of all the unseen.
I parted the veil with a mittened hand and walked under the thick canopy. Morning light filtered through the gently swaying curtain of green, gilding thousands of dust motes trembling on a breeze into embers flashing and dying in the cool shade. The water was much closer to the tree than the drooping, wispy ropes had led me to expect.
Some writing was etched onto the trunk of the tree, near the place the earth dropped sharply off into exposed roots and a drowned reflection of the shivering leaves above. I was stunned by this development. There hadn’t been anything written on the tree a few days ago, when my mother and I had a picnic, having managed a daring escape from the hoard of cheek-pinchers at the reunion.
A smooth, neat square on the trunk of the tree had apparently been stripped of its bark. Though the tree looked old, the script was in its own way quite legible:
If thov, Nomad, wand'rer of tyme & place,
fhovld make qverie of love'f fvlle grace—
Vnfvrl thine Memorief of Kindneffe, both late and foone:
Tend thee thy Hope garden til eek thee bloome.
A normally quiet part of me was begging, screaming for me to get out, to run because something was off. Curious and half-delirious with excitement, I told the voice to shut up.
Instead, I did what all children do with old, strange things. Spellbound, I tugged off my right mitten. The moment my index finger touched the tree, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that that quiet part of me had not been wrong.
My head breaks the surface and I sputter, almost as confused as I was at eight years old, when I'd fallen through the reflection into the past. It's disorienting, time travel. Messes with your memories. I still can't remember where I'd gone the first time. I'd rather fly on that one airline than time travel.
But I don't have much choice in the matter. Every year, twice a year, Grandma Lucy sends out her rose-scented stationary invitations and every year I plead uselessly with my parents. It's not that they've ever insisted, but one look in their concerned, long-suffering eyes and I just give in. And part of me is always relieved when that moment comes. The tension in my chest lessens with every mile the plane flies closer to Maine.
And not long after we arrive, I'll wake up in a cold sweat and stumble outside without my flashlight or a pack, convinced I heard someone calling my name. The other disadvantage of time travel? Built-in anachronism checker. You can't take it with you, all that. I never bring supplies anymore, though some time ago, in the hopes of traveling only to the not-so-distant past, I planted enough blankets around the property to warm a small army.
I struggle back to the bank, feeling clammy and heavier than I would have expected, especially around the elbows and shoulders. I look down and realize that I am still wearing my pajamas.
A gasp makes me immediately glad for the upgrade until I realize that whoever it is, they, like most people in the past, can't see me. Still, I'm curious to see who'd be out this early in the morning, so I look up.
And then I'm staring.
The little girl's wet hair is plastered to her trembling head. She, wrapped snugly in one of my old blankets from beside the tree, clears her throat and fixes me with a pair of eyes that I've seen a million times over and again, but never looking so steady.
"I n-need to tell you s-something," she said, "before I go back."
To be continued...
