It’s late February and still wintry outside, still cold with a few inches of that white stuff. Not really surprising I suppose but it was 60 degrees outside a few days ago and the ground was bare. A snowscape can be quite beautiful though. I’m enclosing a lovely photograph my husband took a few years ago overlooking a wooded pathway to the lake at sunset. I have always liked the woods and that sense of something deeply mysterious hiding within a thick stand of trees. Mystery can also hide danger within it which is what makes a mystery novel or a thriller so alluring. So too can a woods or a forest…or a swamp..hold that allure of danger.
The Woods Hold Secrets
Behind the house I lived in as a child there was a small stand of trees. Not a forest and pretty small today what’s left of it. For me as a child though it was very much the unknown and would stay that way, especially when a group of children I knew one day came running out of it screaming that they were escaping a witch. How very Hansel and Gretel! I was quite young and wanted nothing to do with woods that hid a dangerous witch. That changed though when one day some years later when I was challenged by a couple of other children to walk though the woods. Being challenged (I double dog dare you or something like that) I took them up on it and can clearly remember first crossing the little stream that I saw as the boundary between woods and not woods. It had become my Rubicon if you will I was committed, no going back now. A little pretentious that but, trust me, it suits the feeling. We walked though that quiet wood on soft wet leaves with the trees (maple, birch, pine who knew?) towering over us and the occasional bird flying above them. I remember we came to a small circular space open to the sky a small pond in the center with a big rock off to one side on which sat a large bird a hawk or even an eagle I thought. It flew away as we approached silhouetted against the sky with a wing span like nothing I had seen before. I was mesmerized by this special place in the midst of this little forest and wanted to return but later I would walk alone through those woods again and again always looking for that little glen and never finding it.
The experience related above informed the book I am writing now, featuring woods set in a swamp, and the others I have thought of writing but never made it to the page.
