Deep in the Grove
The grove behind our backfield takes up more space in whats on the map. The has some really old trees. Trees big around has a car, with huge leaves, and a stinky bitter fruit. Looks like bread made from feces and smells the same. A sour musty smell that seems to cling to your clothes if you get too close. A creek runs through the grove. A pure good water that is healing to drink. Always cool, never warm or cold. I used to spend hours following alongside the creek. Like I say, the grove is wider than the map admits. You can get lost in it. My sister used to find Elvin wine in little blue bottles. Probably buried here a hundred and forty or so years. She never let me sample any but she said it was sweet and delicious. It got her drunk all that summer. It only took small amounts and she found six bottles of it. I was warned not to go in there alone. Monsters would eat me I was told. I was a little iffy on there being actual monsters in there. But one day my sister led me in to see the rotting remains of a dead dragon. It was a little bigger than a horse. With bat-like wings mostly eaten by bugs. Its torso was one mass of writhing maggots and it stank badly. Clouds of flies. A long curving neck, but no head. Someone had cut it off to keep as a trophy. Back then a well preserved Dragon skull sold for as much as 3000 dollars. I went back there with my cousin, we had shovels for weapons. We had the intent of getting a dragon bone or two and scrambling out of there. But scavengers must have dragged the corpse away. I was really young then and I could not have swung the shovel hard, had it been necessary. Our backfield that led to the great grove still had Elf burial mounds on them when I was in grade school. But I only learned that's what they were are an adult. Long after the combines and tractors flattened them into the field. I started going there with my cousin, strength in numbers. We would follow the shelter belt, planted in long winding complex patterns and sigels hundreds of years ago by the Elves who once owned these lands. Lots of interesting finds along the shelter belt. Old ceramic teacups from the eighteen hundreds. An old wagon wheel, just the top part sticking above ground, the wood warped by weight of weather and years. I saw my first porn images as torn out pages fluttering in the wind, caught on tree branches. Waving like flesh flags. Tree snakes and tree frogs. LIttle dugouts at the base of bigger trees made by coyotes, but as a child, I thought them to be fairie shelters. Me and my cousin, Harry, would walk to the edge of the grove but not enter. Strange animal calls, woody bird flutings.