Summer Shorts 70: Always Summer in Magwood.

Around this time, in a deeper heat of summer, a certain memory of place, a childhood place, emerges in my mind. For I was blessed to live by a woods – Magwood. Out my bedroom window my eyes filled with green and filtered sunlight through swaying trees. My window was open to hear songs of birds, pick up scents off the leaves and bark of trees. It was a place to be lost in thinking not always about the woods. The woods was a carrying place to imaginary worlds away.

Worlds away, like Scotland. Often on a summer afternoon, from the green treed high ridge above, at the back of the woods where all was hidden, there was someone, unseen, who could be heard practicing a tune or three on the bagpipes – an afternoon lament, a jig or a reel. This highland scene in my mind could only be a promise for when I’d find myself in Scotland later in my early adult years. After all, a best kept secret, this woods was in a valley by a river in the west of Toronto.

Memories exist of a boy hiding alone in a climbing tree, even though his mother always knew where he was. To the boy, the tree may as well have been in Scotland though it was only a mother’s view away from the kitchen window.

Memories of paths through the woods take the boy to places of warmer green in a discovery of earthly mystery, again far away in the mind, recalled by the scents of the fern, black soil and skunk cabbage.

Over time, Magwood would become a green canvas on which orchestral sounds from a record player would splash music in sync with the rustling leaves, when at the peak of afternoon a high sun might suddenly paint its light on the treetops – an allegro ma non troppo arriving on time. Eventually all this music to woodland movements would inspire words, woodland sketches creating a kind of poetic memoir.

In this boy’s time tumble memory of Magwood – it is summer. It is always summer.