Robyn's clearing

     Over the years Robyn had worked on her clearing, gradually making the perfect haven.  Her first project was to clean up debris from the past generations, old coke bottles from the sixties, a couple of arrowheads, a tin cup, some broken pottery, and an old, broken, white plastic chair.  Next she raked up the old leaves and pine needles littering the clearing.  Her parents never asked where she went each spring with the rake and it was a long time before she shared.  Now she mostly cleared one corner as a stage.  Once she had cleared the space to the dirt floor she had set about every afternoon for nearly two months in the summer, clearing rocks and stones and flattening the ground, starting with one shovel.  Eventually Tal and Austin had wanted to know where she disappeared to and, under threat of death, that they were to not reveal the location to anyone, mother, father, uncle, sibling, future boyfriend or girlfriend (until they had been married for ten years) and that they were to hide their tracks as if they were hunted, she showed them her pet project.  After that the work had gone much more quickly.

Oz and Tal had never taken to the clearing like Robyn, respecting is as HER place but they were willing to help her maintain it (and Tal disappeared to there when she was having problems with her parents) and the first day of sun in spring the three of them met without speaking to rake the clearing.  The removal of the rocks and leveling of the ground allowed Robyn to dance to her heart’s content, either her routines on the stage she constructed out of found lumber and driftwood, or whatever moved her around the clearing.

The next step in Robyn’s personalization was the purchase of a second hand used wrought iron bench.   At the time she was a senior in high school, preparing for college and pouring through stores to decorate her future apartment.  She had Austen help her haul it to the woodsman’s house, stashed it here late in the evening, left it for a couple of days, then had him help her haul it into the clearing.  They positioned it under an outgoing branch, next to the trunk, fairly protected from the elements.

The magpie/jackdaw in Robyn led her to collect various shiny glass objects, suncatchers, pretty candleholders, mirror chunks, and mobiles that she hung around in the branches of the sequoia and in the surrounding rhododendrons.  After she ‘domesticated’ Salmon she used some of the bits and bright paint to decorate her cat house.

Slowly the clearing took on an enchanted, fairytale feeling in which she could become a forest nymph or sprite, and escape from the stress and dirtiness of life.

To begin with this was a VERY secretive place that Robyn didn't even tell her parents about but then I decided her parents were probably too nosy, if they are anything like mine, to let her sneak off so much without confronting her.  And more on the woodsman's house in a bit.

I used to have a similar project, on a much smaller scale, that I worked on in our yard but recently those trees have been cut down or that corner filled with a shed.  Thank goodness for creative outlets to fill that new void.