magical

Deep back in the woods behind my  house there's this:

A pair of ropes, hung from a now-dead pine branch, swing-width apart, rotten off at the ends.  They just hang there, in the silent, pensive woods, waiting for somebody to stumble on them and listen to their story.  But what is their story?  I can't exactly tell. 

Our place is covered with things like this.  The wreckage of a barn, burned at some time in the past and now covered with vines.  Little, apparently random pens in the woods.  What were they for?  I close my eyes and try to see what it all used to look like.  Children used to swing from the big pine "down near the barn".  Their laughter used to ring out here.  Now the birds and the creek make the only sound. 

No one would swing here now.  Not without some serious brush-clearing and poison-ivy-control measures.  Nature has taken this spot back. 

But not quite.  Because here are the ropes, whispering that once it belonged to people like us, people with children, with a father who climbed up that pine tree and hung a swing in a shady place so they could enjoy an autumn afternoon there.  An afternoon just like this one. 

Just a little magical place back there in the woods.  Because, really, what is magic but what we haven't yet discovered, or don't understand? 

Or what we have long forgotten...

~MB~