30 Hundred-Word Drabbles, one for each day in November, part of
FlashNaNo 2023
Monday 27th November 2023
One route, maybe a week’s trek carrying provisions, a long journey round The Woods.
The second, an afternoon stroll, at the most 2 miles. But through – ‘The Woods’! There were tales of folk disappearing, or strange encounters therein. No one had ever been!
Finally of age She was to visit ‘Town’, sent out on her own. She had two maps, a choice of two routes. This was not a game.
She studied the maps calculating carefully. Collecting a hand axe for protection She stepped the untraveled path finally passing her first tree She went on, deeper into The Woods…
I remember Grandma, not so much Grandpa, he died when I was five. When I was 10 years old I was sent to visit on my own, 150 miles by train to Manchester. We did things like that in those days, sandwiches wrapped in brown paper to ‘keep me going’, and there would have been slabs of my Mum’s amazing fruit cake. Yum. Trains were a lot slower then, I imagine it took a full day. What relief seeing Grandma waiting on the platform. Twas followed by a rambling bus journey out of the city, through countryside to be dropped at the end of a narrow leafy lane.
I was relieved to see Gramdma waiting on the platform.
Her back garden climbed a hill, rows and rows of fruit and veg with upturned buckets and bins over the rhubarb. It grows best in the dark. Further up in stonewalled fields sheep grazed.
Rhubarb grows best in the dark.
Out front the garden went down. Turning right along the narrow lane led to a dead end. I’d climb over the five bar gate seeking adventure, then race around the forest with my imaginary band of merry men or engage the pirate trees looting and plundering under my black and white flag. On my belly I’d study the insects or clamber up trees, settling in a branch crook high off the ground to read my current book. Always back to Grandma’s in time for tea. (Now the road does not stop at the five barred gate, much of the forest felled, busy housing estates in places my imagination ran riot. Sad, but better than them all being homeless.) There were long walks by the canal waving at Barge Folk or going swimming. On wet days digging in muddy garden puddles and you had to clean yourself spotless before re entering the house – so much fresh air.
Seeking adventure over the five bar gateOn rainy days I dug in muddy puddles in the garden.Sometimes the barge folk’d wave back.
Each evening brought hot frothy milk boiled on the hob, or cocoa and sitting reading by a crackling fire. On bath night Grandma would pull a handle by the fire, you’d hear the clank of a metal plate shifting. She’d say ‘Water’ll be ready in half an hour.’
This morning I unstopped a fresh bottle of ink. Nothing planned, pen hovering over parchment, what would come. Could have been a doodle or story – today a newly surfaced memory thread became woven into narrative. The Fountain Pen proves again to be a mighty sword cutting deep into long closed chambers of my mind.
Good memories, I wonder, have the decades embroidered them?
No surprise, I was out for one of my walks away from the busyness of town pushing my way through dense woodland undergrowth.
At first it had been a wide trail gradually thinning to a barely discernible byway. Indeed the only reason I could follow the trail were evenly spaced paw prints.
Pushing through the bramble branches I entered a clearing. How odd – seemed well tended. In the centre topping a tree stump a candlestick telephone rang!
Well if it rings, you have to don’t you. Rude not to!
I lifted the candlestick in one hand and placed the speaker to my ear with t’other. “Hello!”
The phone replied, “Climb onto the stump.” I did.
Immediately the stump descended down a shaft.
Down down down, oddly I was not surprised.
The stump stopped in a well lit cavern, across the way rabbits, mice and badgers were playing a muddy game of football…
Tread, Doodle & Scrawl 