In the 5th grade I was invited to join a sort of field trip for ‘talented’ writers to the Milwaukee Art Museum, where we were shown around the museum then asked to write a story about one of the paintings. A oil painting called ‘The Wood Gatherer’ reminded me of those weekends, and one in particular where my brother stepped on a nail in an old barn board. The nail went straight through his shoe and into his foot, there was a scream and blood, and while my dad tended to the immediate danger, he abruptly asked me to run back up to the house (we were a little over a mile away at the time) to get water and a clean pair of socks. In my story I used the word ‘scowled’, and I haven’t lived it down since. I guess that might’ve been my first attempt at a narrative.
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And here I was again, the wood gatherer in my own story. By fall the tree-top-turned-wigwam - which I had begun to refer to as ‘The Fox’ because of how its ‘tail’ curled up into the side of the hill - had really come together, and I’d moved from stacking logs and thick branches for the frame to weaving sticks into the walls, crisscrossing them layer after layer until I could walk on top of the structure with no problems. In a large gully a hundred yards away were the remnants of some massive evergreen bush that someone had dumped off the parking lot up above, and with the ends of these large fans stuck in all around, the hut was well-insulated from the wind and almost completely dark inside. When I ran out of materials close by, I started gathering from further up the slope, and set to work on other aspects of the park, resetting the stones in the hill path, cleaning up trash from the surrounding grounds, building campfire pits. I would wake up early on a Saturday, fill a backpack with garbage bags, gloves, my trowel, and two cans of Arizona Iced Tea and make my way out to the park as the sun was coming up.
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