Running Away

 Grandmother's Suitcases

Much of my childhood was spent under my grandparent’s roof.  This was the same home that my Mother grew up in, where my great aunt lived when her husband was away while enlisted in the military, where great-grandparents lived out the last years of their lives, and the home that my uncle and aunt lived in after getting married while they built a home of their own. 

Upstairs in the house were my bedroom, my brother’s bedroom, an alcove where my dollhouse sat and a wall of hanging garment bags that contained years and years worth of clothing with suitcases piled underneath.  Those garment bags contained a treasure trove from my mother’s tu  tu’s to my cousins hippie dresses and probably even my aunts wedding dress.  The suitcases though are what I was thinking of today.

Today for some reason those suitcases popped into my head along with the idea that I needed to run away.  Thankfully it is not for the same reasons today as it was when I was little. 

When I was a little girl I remember a specific summer in which I ran away with frequency.  There was surely something that made me upset enough to decide that I was not wanted or that everyone would surely miss me if I were gone or even the dramatic they won’t even notice I am gone.  The thing is I don’t think that my grandparents, mother or brother ever did know I was gone or if they noticed that I was gone that I had “run away”.  I had so much freedom as a child and I played inside and outside so much blending these two worlds that perhaps my family just thought I was playing “vacation”.

Today’s thoughts of running away are still about escaping but not so much from something but too something.  I just want to take a trip, an adventure of sorts.  I want to take a train or plane or even automobile.  I want to see new sites or familiar sacred places that I have been away from for too long.  I want to smell the musky forest that is unmistakable even with my eyes closed or maybe it is the aroma of grilled food as I walk along the city sidewalk, or even the salty air and misplaced perfume wafting in from the shore. I want to plan what I am going to pack and try on all of my clothes and pare it down until it will all fit into one bag.  And that one bag? 

I keep imagining that it was some small powder blue soft leather suitcase that I packed when I ran away.  For the life of me I cannot remember what I took with me.  Maybe I packed my dolls, a blanket to lie on, and a book to look at. I do remember specifically where I would go though.  There were trees that lined the street by the church baseball field.  It was just a half a mile or so from my grandparents’ home. Just past the preachers’ house and across the street from the Parker homes.  I was a little adventurer then and thought the whole earth was available to me and did not know a thing about trespassing. It was on one of those running away days that I discovered the most wonderfully cool and deep creek. It was beyond those trees and past a fenced cow pasture.  I just walked and kept walking, determined that day that I was really leaving.  Until I heard the churn of running water and found what  I knew even then to be an oasis. I climbed into the creek with all my clothes on and floated in the rushing water with just my elbows holding me up from the sandy bottom.  I felt like a pioneer woman, like little Laura Ingles Wilder and I soon made believe that creek was my spring where I kept the milk and butter and also came to wash the clothes.

More often than not I became distracted by my findings like this and forgot that I had run away and just played. I would soon be back at home, out of breath and likely with a bundle of flower like weeds, a bird’s nest, a turtle holed up in his shell and maybe even a broken eggshell or butterfly wing  and bursting to tell someone (anyone) about my adventure and what I had seen.   

Perhaps this trip down memory lane (cliche intended) was just what I needed.  This soul safari as I think of it, is a trip into my past as a way to understand my present and future. I don't really want to run away from this life, I just want to discover the newness in life.  I want to stimulate all of my senses and I want to pick up a treasure or two that the Universe has gifted to me in the form of a shell or weather worn rock.  A talisman, a provocateur of adventures and correlations previously unnamed, to borrow and stash inside that powder blue suitcase case as I continue on this journey.