A Real Farm, a Real Woods, and a Real Girl

After what I saw posted lastnight plus the odd inference to my directional abilities I'd already seen, I know its time to try to talk at least a very little about the farm and the woods that went with it where I lived when I was 11.

It was the year of all sorts of things going wrong for me, for all of us actually. it was the year I would start being bounced around from relatives to relatives, the year the state got involved in our lives, the year I hit puberty, had some very weird bloating red rash unable to breath thing (made worse by penicillin which I became allergic to at that point), fell flat on my back (or would have if I hadn't fallen flat back on my head) and hit the back of my head so harshly on the ice that my sister, yet to be an RN in those days even recognized there was a Problem with a capital P and I 'wasn't right' (even for me) the entire day. (We think I suffered a rather noteworthy concussion), its the year I began having extreme gran mal seizures and extreme wild-child (naked climbing the TV aerial, etc.. 'you don't even wanna know' and its for another post another day) behaviors and in some cases my personality what I liked/disliked etc did an entire about face, but its also the year my parents separated and my father and I ended about 3 miles down the road and a turn away from the other house, at the farm there he had bought.

I have been saying '75 acres' for a really long time but the more I think about it, that really can't be right, and being a stickler for accuracy and especially being fully prepared to have all of this verified.. I think I'm having to rethink that whole '75 acres' we could not have possibly owned 75 acres, that'd be more like the redwood forest or something, and I'm going to have to verify with my father just how big the wooded section actually was
it was big though, big enough that before we owned it, and the guy's name surely helped and there is no way I can say this without giving out his name, but this too is quite verifiable, and I'm sure the guy is passed on by now, he was really old then..

We bought this farm with a large wooded area, encouraged to be called a 'forest' becaue it was owned before us by one Bill Sherwood. Yes, that's right, and thusly locally his farm and woods were known as, you guessed it, Sherwood's Forest.

If I give up the name of that small town's area, and I could take somebody right to it, can *almost* find it on google (the whole area is wooded and I'm close but not right on it with Google Earth there's lots of woods there behind lots of fields, lots of farms but I know the road's name and I'm near it) and I'm sure courthouse records would confirm the ownership and then the transfer of that property from one Bill Sherwood to that of my father, and that's anyway, how I came to be able to escape, quite for real, into Sherwood's forest (which the neighbors kept right on calling it after we owned it and for all I know they just might still be calling it that to this day).

In this year that all was going wrong and I was going apeshit and we found ourselves alone just him and I in this old farmhouse, my father's drinking took an ugly turn and with no one there but me to take it out on, it got really bad. Really.

with no TV aerial in at this place, I found something better, two something's better in fact, both of which left lasting imprints on me:

A wonderful replacement for the aerial which also served as a refuge from my father's drunken rages (because no matter how drunk he got he could not lose the fear of heights he had in order to come up after me so he would stand there at the base of the windmill looking up at me, roaring for me to 'get my ass down here' etc). I loved to lodge myself in the tresses and crossbeams especially just below the plate and peer up to the enormous spinning blades and watch it sway in the wind. It was no longer hooked to a pump but this was a very functional and very well cared for American farm windmill.
I was lacking in the coordination to match my lack of fear and like with the aerial (and the second story roof I would access from the aerial antenna) this gave my father fits, legtimate non drinking fearful fits. At the other house my sister could be coaxed to go up after me (the only one not too afraid) but there was no one here at the farm to do this, so I spent quite a bit of time up there and I developed a 'fixation' from that on windmills that has never left.

The other of course, was our Sherwood's forest, accessible by a long lane going down the field back behind the house and barn area. My father has strict feelings about animals, nature and wildlife which I have in turn adopted and one of those strongholds is NO HUNTERS.
Mushroom hunters, yes, animal hunters, no, but enforcing such a thing is often difficult especially when dealing with a woods this size and distance from the house and accesses from other wooded areas which connect to it, etc. Nobody ever drove up into the driveway and lept out and walked back that lane, but I'd find them, curiously lost and pale and fat almost every time, and loud with their goofy getups on and their guns and its really a wonder I was never shot, never mistook for a deer, but I would lead them out and that's the odd thing about it,
outside of a wooded area there are two places in the world, always:
Where I Am
and
Where I Am Not

and I don't know people's faces all that well, I have to really know a person, see their face repeatedly over much time, some faces are too bland to me and I never do get them,
but trees have 'faces' not literal faces but they have that uniqueness that I can't miss. I know when I have walked by that tree, I know when I've gone 'window shopping' for the perfect walking-stick and I know when I saw clusters of things and moss 'just so' and I know where I've been and I know where I am going in the woods and I don't get lost. I have led my friend John out of wooded areas on the edge of town here when I coaxed him into just getting outside with me and he was all amazed.

Me, Ms Failed Mobility Coaching, yes, me. I'm the trailblazer, the guide you want in a woods.
We had them growing up and my father and I during better times used to walk them all the time and as I got older they became my private places, my journeys my home outside and Sherwood Forest there most of all.

I was the creepy eery 'quiet girl' who hunters would tell my dad 'just appeared there' as they generally humbly apologized at his indicating his feelings about hunting on his property and that was how it went.

I really have no explanation other than perhaps if I grew up in a city like I live in now and had it somehow been possible for me to take the risks and learn how in a place like this, maybe it would be here that I didn't get lost, maybe the woods would confound me, but somehow I just don't think so. I just kind of think that's build in.
Its built into my dad too somehow.

My father has nifty knacks about him like the ability to tell you within a minute the actual time. He can also tell you within a degree actual the temperature, accounting as he does for humidity, barometric pressure, etc. I'm not quite that good but I've got some of that, even here downtown my friend John and I like to play the "time and temp' game with the brightly lit dot-light signs (don't know what you call those) that display these things and I'm pretty good. I'm also pretty good at predicting the weather, more so than most I think, but not like my dad.

I really don't like trying to write about this topic in a hurry and all rushed and I am left feeling like I'm leaving something important out, I'm sure I am, but I can't tell what it is, and this will have to settle for now.

I just really needed a marker, a discussion about our woods, this special one in particular. Its where I 'lived' when I wasn't up inside and just under the plate of the windmill or getting myself into ninety million kinds of trouble when I was any other places.