The Slow-Cooked Sentence

kenspeckle /ken-spek-uhl/ n., conspicuous; easily seen or recognized.

I went to the ravine near my house, a neglected bit of land neither wild nor tame, only forgotten. This scrappy patch of forest is buttressed by houses and sits across the street from the elementary school. The sidewalk teeters on its lip and there’s a dirt path that leads down to a creek. Ivan and I followed the path through muddied sunlight and green shadow. He wore his cape and carried a pop gun, but stooped down to pick up a stick and hand it to me. “Your sword,” he said. We passed an old cedar with its trunk marked by graffiti and met the creek where it winds around an abandoned tire.

The kids and I discovered the ravine shortly after we moved here last summer. We had taken a walk to check out the school and were coming home, tired and thirsty, when a watery wind drew us to its edge. I told the kids it reminded me of a forest from my childhood, really nothing more than a vacant lot that promised freedom within the walls of smokey pine and the rooms of sunlight filled with weeds and yellow jackets. I promised we’d return and we did a few times before the cold gray rain drove us inside.

Over the winter I occasionally glanced into the tangle of dark wood and dull green, but it wasn’t until spring, when the tree branches bristled with stiff shoots, that I again felt welcomed. At the creek, Ivan tossed catkins fat as his fingers, limp as worms into the water and watched them float past spirals of uncurling ferns and fleshy skunk cabbage. Finally I convinced him to leave the stream and climb the path along the ravine’s south flank. Ivy licked the edges of this trail, twisted itself in bushes and choked the trunks of trees. We walked past a beer can, a plastic bucket, a leather jacket, then stopped to look back. From this height I could see another tree tagged by graffiti. A horsefly buzzed nearby and above us I saw two city workers tethered to a line and leaning over the ravine’s edge. We watched for a while, but couldn’t figure out their intent. On the opposite side of the ravine, I spotted a kenspeckle of blue in a thicket and could make out a stack of scrap wood or cardboard. Suddenly, I was grateful the workers were here, puncturing the silence and disturbing the crows. Loose strands of hair on my forehead lifted and alighted as a breath of air rose off the forest floor several seconds before the wind was heard in the trees. Ivan whimpered. He distrusted the trees, which leaned against each other like pick-up sticks in a losing game against the ivy, so we rested on a rotting log and silently shared three crackers before retracing our steps to the street.