The Magic Peanut

By Debra Lynn Townsend

Revealed like the false bottom in a magician’s top hat, the world began to make sense after someone asked why I had proudly called myself “odd”. At that moment, all I could think of were minor behavioral quirks I might exhibit, things referenced by my family as oddities I display, such as not resisting the urge to jump in puddles, spinning around in the driveway with the breeze against my outstretched fingers on a warm summer morning, tasting the beads of soft rain on my face; impulsive moments when no one else’s opinion seems to matter. As there was no time to decipher the answer, I tabled the thought for a time when my mind was more quiet.

Alone later in my garden, my mind light years away from anything but itself, in the space emptied by the breath of one long revealing moment, the answer came to me in the form of a ghost I had tucked away deep under the stairs of my past. A forlorn little girl in starched shirts and blue skirts, who hid her tears in dimly lit corners when she could not seem to fit into the puzzle of humanity, who only felt like family when she was alone with the earth, and who began with a total unawareness that life was anything but sounds, colors, and magic.

For her, magic was everywhere, from the fact that a bird could actually just pick up its wings and go to places that she would never reach, to the old man on the corner who would always stop his puttering in his garage just long enough to pull a peanut from behind the girl’s ear. Magic was in the words on each page of every book she would avidly pull from the library shelves two at a time on her daily visits. Magic was in the zillion pollywogs flopping in the mud when too many sunny days came in a row. Magic twinkled through the sky on colored flags falling from the trees in autumn. Her days were shared in wonder between the pages of books and the pages of nature.

A cacophony of sound yodeled in her ears. The soft music of the earth’s breath, the splashing of the creek as it kissed rocks under the train tracks, the haunting screams of the bobcat on the other side, the low whine of the imagined train; the sound simply a mirage within the blood throbbing in her ears as she held them to the cold steel rails. The earth whispered loudly while those who walked upon it could not hear.

Colors pulled her, swaying her moods with their emotional cries. Yellow, always bright, sometimes painful to her eyes with its promises of hope and forward movement, too vivid to look at when her mind needed soothing. Blue, always cold in its beauty, calming enough, yet leaving a feeling of loneliness behind. Green, soothing with its growth, something to follow knowing that its path would always take you somewhere not foreign at all. In red she saw the power and strength of people, vibrant and threatening in its “rightness”, an aura of confidence emanated by normalcy, a color she could not feel. Her mother had painstakingly compiled her wardrobe of beautiful colors, yet the girl unfailingly chose white, dingy, toad-stained, mud-journaled white.

The seasons cycled as she grew older and continued in her quest for understanding. Undaunted, yet pressured by her failure to fit, her resolve drove her to determine if she was truly of the same inner fiber, cut from the same human cloth, as all of the people around her. The hope lingered that she might not be so different that she could join the people who smiled in the midst of all of that red. She wondered if perhaps red might be so bright in its very nature to attract and teach. For years, she had been stepping outside its borders, stumbling each time she tried to falteringly edge her way into its crimson light. So she watched.

She thought to mimic them, model herself with the clay of willingness to emulate their behavior. Peeking over their fences, observing them spraying weed-killing chemicals on their lawns, vengefully going after the bugs deep beneath the soil, arguing with their neighbors about fence lines, she saw the perfectly even mats they tended. She grew, learning to manicure her life, years of planting tiny red sprouts, only to find they cluttered the simplicity of her garden, and muted all of her beautiful colors. She decided to let her garden grow just for her, a space not in need of red, one place where her colors could shine.

Memories of a little girl walking home from school in my head, I stood musing in my own now wildly overgrown little garden, pushing untamable gray curls away from my cheeks, smudging them with notes of my day. The wrinkles of my journey cradled my eyes as I closed them to receive the gift of the sun, caught the scent of leeks in the air, heard the wing beats of the Monarch drifting past my ear, felt a ladybug tickle my toes as it wandered its way through my chaos. A magical caress of approval flowed from the soil beneath my feet, saturating me with its familial warmth and an odd sort of rightness. The rightness of finding a peanut behind your ear, just when you need one most.

Debra Lynn Townsend is an avid photographer, writer and gardener who lives in the Benzie County area. Drawing on her inner garden, she tries to capture the essence of her subjects, from people to the beauty of Northern Michigan, in her photography business, Imagine That Photography.