My childhood was surrounded by bark, leaves, and acorns. My backyard was home to a tall stand of wild oak trees. This small grove hovered above my park-issue swing set, and I could almost touch the branches with my feet when I swang high. The oaks had a nailed-in ladder to a high platform that served as my tree house, and later my dad added another, lower tier so that I had a proper second story.
In autumn the leaves came down in abundance. The ones that fell over the lawn were swept into heaping piles, but the majority of the leaves were left to provide a floor for the mini-forest that was replenished and re-layered with every cold season.
Around this oak patch and up in my tree fort, I engaged in the kind of unstructured imaginative play that doesn’t come from Barbie dolls or watching cartoons. I was an orphan like the Boxcar Children, surviving in the forest, Mowgli in the rain forest, and even a creator of vast worlds. I would invite (which usually meant I would carry) my cats up to the fortress and make them my subjects while I barked orders and they lazily rolled over in the spotty shade. It was the kind of place I could bring my friends or attend alone, but it always proved to be an open, freedom-filling space.
Down below the tree dropped hundreds of acorns. These were my earliest experiences with seeds, which are the metaphors for our growth, our spirituality, our human stories of life and regeneration. I wanted to understand how something the size of a fingertip could grow into the massive organic structure that held my two-story fortress, shaded my yard, and provided enough of a large forest for me to get lost in imagination. Occasionally I found the decomposing ones, which were pliable and allowed me to peel down to the heart of the nut in an attempt to uncover the magic of their potential treehood. The cupules would detach freely and make perfect fingertip covers, tea cups for grasshopper tea parties, or small shovels for miniature construction sites. Now when I see an acorn still attached to the tree, I can't help but think of those cup-shaped cupules and how I used to collect those perfect half-spherical shells.
I never ate the acorns despite knowing that they fed birds and other animals, not to mention the Native Americans that were able to store them up fresh for months—even years—at a time without processing them. I think that’s what makes the acorn somewhat unique: they are an early, natural hand-me-down source that doesn’t need immediate modification to be used at a later time. Like the acorns, my playtimes in the wild oak tree patch were ones that preserved themselves well, stored up raw in the reserves of memory, to draw upon when the simple times have all but diminished. I can barely recall those times of processed, commercialized play with heavily-branded merchandise. Instead these unstructured, natural experiences are the ones that last for years in their pure form, a harvest I can draw upon when new production of unstructured imaginative experiences are harder to come by.
