Tunnel

For Weekend Wordsmith

image: http://inphotos.org/tag/road/

Memory: A tunnel that my father often drove through on the way home from the village.

The tunnel was made of close hand-laid moss-covered stone walls, rounded sides to the low ceiling, like a remnant of an ancient castle. It accommodated the road where it cut through a hill. Grass and brush grew up the banks on either side of the entrance and the exit; grass grew on top. Whenever we kids were with him, we would beg him to blow the truck horn as we passed through the tunnel; the sound's reverberation thrilled us. It wasn't a long tunnel; it was short enough that once we entered it I immediately became impatient for Dad to blow the horn lest we be out before I heard that sound. I liked the feeling of being in that tube of stone. I felt cozy and protected. There is a similar tunnel on one of the nearby twisty curvy country roads. When I drive through it I slow down and blow the horn. If the road there were wider I might park in there and enjoy the closeness.

I liked then, and I like now, tunnels and burrows. In the winter I liked to burrow into snowdrifts. Snug and warm in my heavy wool snowpants I would sit in my little rabbit warren snow house. I smiled little smiles to myself and admired the blue-white walls and and the absence of sound. I felt secreted and safe.

Sometimes on long winter days my sister and I would pull and carry every wooden chair in the house into the livingroom and turn them over on their faces, cover them with old quilts and crawl inside our homemade tunnel. It seems, in memory, that we had rooms in there, although there couldn't have been that many chairs or that much space but . . . we were small.

This love of small cozy spaces is apparently part of my inborn psychology: Prior to my birth I never turned upside down the way a getting-ready-to-be-born baby is supposed to. I came out butt first.

I wanted to stay where I was safe and cozy.

(Note to self: Read Franz Kafka's The Burrow)