I used to steal flowers from the neighbors garden in order to take then to my house bound grandmother. She'd always wonder if I asked, but I didn’t tell her that when I did ask, the neighbors often said no.
As I was pretty much a rebel growing up, fences are barriers that meant little to me. The Indian in me resented them. Hadn't my people roamed this land for countless generations. It was that ancient freedom in my genes that made me indifferent to manmade barriers of any kind.
Of course I was small enough and fast enough to avoid detection at least most of the time.
I was usually up at dawn and seldom home before the sunset. I developed skills like crossing the creek on half submerged stepping stones and climbing trees whose branches were close enough to the ground for me to reach.
While I loved reading, school itself was a torture for me especially on sun draped days in spring and autumn. Rather than dealing with school I preferred to read a book of my own choosing perched in a tree or in the winter, hiding out in the stacks of our Dale Carnegie library.
All these years later that rebellious child lives on in me. Occasionally it peeks out tempting me to give into the urge of climbing an inviting tree or wading across a brook carrying my shoes and socks. But I’m neither as agile or as good at balancing myself as I was when I was ten nor do I have to steal flowers from the neighbors garden. They don’t have one and their children are more likely to steal from my garden. But I always look away and just consider it poetic justice.
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