My wife and I usually play pickle ball at two different sets of courts located in two different city parks. Both locations accommodate tennis and pickle ball, use the same net, and are delineated with different lines. Our favorite is at one end of an idyllic neighborhood park near the bluffs in Saint Paul, and across a winding street from a large K-8 school. The courts are enclosed on four sides by a ten-foot chain link fence which is lined on the outside with flowering apple, pine, maple, and elm trees. Clusters of larger trees further out into the park create individual rooms with pods of shade, and still allow the sunlight between them to bathe the lush green grass.
We played there recently and during our water break between games, I walked to a far corner of the court to gather balls that had collected. As soon as I entered that small area of shade next to a group of pine trees and deep grass outside the fence, I was instantly transported to my grandparents’ house in Great Falls. I was nine years old in a secret corner, on the shady side of their home. It was located on the north side of their garage, under the broad canopy of the apple tree, where I squeezed through the dense hedge. The other side was mysterious and unsettling like an in-between place in the Hayao Miyazaki movie Spirited Away. I found myself sitting for a long time on a short brick ledge, in the cool air, stiff limbs, and lush leaves, cushioned by thick, ancient moss. I was on the verge of discovering something huge that day, an experience of a place that felt like a different world. I never told my grandmother, or anybody else, where I’d disappeared to because it was mine, and I couldn’t explain where I’d been anyway, what I’d seen, or how it made me feel.
It all returned in the coolest and greenest corner of our court. It was immersive and became even more complex because as I stood there, it began to link other moments. I couldn’t have imagined that the smell of damp pine, grass and apple blossoms could transport me to my grandparent’s secret hedge, and then continue to unfold into something even bigger.
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“Daydreams transport the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” Gaston Bachelard–The Poetics of Space
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Songs :: Spirits In the Material World by The Police, Keep That Same Old Feeling by The Crusaders, True to Life by Roxy Music, The Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov, Blumenkriege by Sei Still, and Series of Dreams by Bob Dylan
© C. Davidson