I keep taking Ella further and further on walks, and seeing more and more amazing uplit trees. It reminded me oddly and vaguely of the times in first grade, at a Waldorf school in Santa Monica, that we had a Halloween party.
I say Halloween party; I don't think it was called that, and it was more like a new-age woo woo solstice gathering with treats. There was an elemental, each in its own environment, each giving us some little symbolic favor. The air elemental was in our little classroom, crystals hanging off every surface and the fan, with the fan on, and billowy white cloth and cotton batting covering all the angles so that the surfaces were soft. The water elemental sat in a river made of shining cloth. I had seen my mom buy and help assemble the cloth, I knew what it was, and it was still magical. The water elemental, in her tail and glitter, gave us a tiny netting bag of iridescent shells. We continued on, each of us first-graders on our own individual quest to collect the favors of all the elementals. The tiny wooden play house in our playground, surely not more than five feet tall, was surfaced with brown stone and hung with dried broom, heather, and herbs; I knew it was paper grocery bags on the outside of the house, and that the pointy-shoed gnome inside was our games teacher, giving us each a gingerbread cookie. But it was lit from underneath, in flickering yellow. And the last stop, a mystical castle somehow sprung where our jungle-gym had been, surrounded by what seemed like hundreds (but must have been merely tens) of grinning jack-o-lanterns. We had to climb up the slide to achieve the goal of the fire elemental.
Just, viscerally, uplit trees and mysterious landscaping with underlying familiarity gives me the shiver of a great memory and reminds me that even things I see every day, and know mundanely well, can be almost entirely new with a change of perspective.
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