The Woods Were Dark and Scary

“Now remember to stay in sight of the house,” Mom said as my little brother and I walked into the woods. So began a tale of which, I admit, I was not the hero. My brother was.

When we first moved into the small house under the big oaks, I was naturally curious about my surroundings…particularly the woods. What lay out there beyond the back yard? The only thing to do was go exploring. I should have known better because my directional instincts are seriously challenged. I didn’t realize that at the time but I was about to find out.

My brother and I were excited about everything…rocks, thickets, trees. Trees! We had never seen so many. We had not gone far when we encountered a ravine. Its sides were rough and brushy and at the foot of it lay a small stream.

” There’s a creek down there. Let’s go take a look,” I said excitedly.

My brother, amazingly wise beyond his years, pointed out the obvious: “But if we go down there, we won’t be able to see the house.”

“No, but we’ll just climb back up the way we go down and there’ll be the house. We can do that. Come on.”

So we slipped, slid and clambered our way to the bottom. It was very nice, that little stream. It probably flowed from a wet weather spring somewhere. The water was clear and a lot of fun to splash in until I realized we had been down there longer than we should have been.

“We’d better go back to the house,” I told my brother. I started up the hill.

“It’s not that way, it’s this way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction.

“No, no.” I shook my head. Wasn’t I the older and wiser one?  “I remember how we came down.”

I started up the hill and he had two choices: follow me or be left alone in a woodsy area he had never before seen. So, he followed.

We got to the top of the hill and looked  around. No house. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever been  in a place that was absolutely unknown, where everything was strange and forbidding. The trees, once only mysterious, frowned down at us. Those gray flintstone rocks that had been fun to climb over now sprang up from the ground like grim-faced aliens. And the bushes sprouted thorns, reaching out their sticky arms to grab us. Panic started in my toes and skyrocketed to my brain. Two choices: fight or flight. I didn’t know who to fight since we were in this predicament solely because of my stubbornness  so I took the only option open…I ran.

“Wait for me!” cried my brother.

I grabbed his hand so I wouldn’t lose him like I had lost the house.  Surely, if I ran fast enough and far enough, I’d find our house with Mom in it. Nothing was going to stop me–not the thorns, rocks, nor trees. If I couldn’t go over or around them, I struggled through them. Funny thing was, I didn’t seem to be making any progress. Every tree looked like every other tree. If you’ve seen one gray rock, you’ve seen them all, and the thorn bushes had a thousand identical twins.

At last, like a mirage in the distance, a plume of smoke rose into the air.

My little brother pointed. “Look! There’s a house!”

I wiped my teary eyes and grinned. “Didn’t I tell you I knew the way? We’re home.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” he said. “That doesn’t look like our house.”

He was right. The smoke rose from a  chimney that certainly was not ours. Visions of Hansel and Gretel danced through my head.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go knock on the door and ask if they can take us home.”

“Are you kidding? We don’t know who lives there. Maybe it’s a witch or…”

But my brother had already begun to trot toward that front door. I sure didn’t want to be left alone so I trotted to the front door too.

Well, no witches or ogres or other terrible things lived there, only a kindly woman who took one look at our tattered conditions and frightened faces (at least I’m sure mine was frightened) and agreed to take us home.

So ended the tale which had an obvious moral: mind your mother. When my brother tells this story, which he loves to do, he is always the level-headed one who followed his crazed sister through the woods in order to protect her. My recollection is not exactly the same as his but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Mom was so glad to see us back that she didn’t scold much. But until we got more familiar with those rocks and trees, we didn’t stray far from our own backyard.