The Hedgerows

Try not to get caught doing either.

I grew up in a world that doesn’t seem to exist much anymore. A world where children were expected to disappear for most of the day and somehow return intact by dinner. The rules were surprisingly simple.

Don’t break anything.

Don’t bother your mother.

Don’t bother your father.

Don’t embarrass the family.

And be home when the streetlights come on.

Everything else was largely left to negotiation.

At the time, it felt like freedom.

In retrospect, it may have been how I learned to negotiate with the world.

My parents weren’t bad people. They were simply busy people. Like most adults, they were carrying burdens I couldn’t yet see. Mortgages. Jobs. Marriage. Bills. Responsibilities. The invisible machinery that powers adulthood.

Children rarely understand any of that.

What they understand is attention.

And where it is not.

So I learned to entertain myself.

Which turned out to be one of the greatest gifts I ever received.

Every morning sunlight broke through my bedroom window and delivered the same message.

The world is already happening.

You coming?

Most mornings I answered yes.

Breakfast was less a meal than a brief administrative step between sleeping and wandering.

A bowl of cereal.

Toast.

Whatever happened to be available.

Food was important.

But outside was waiting.

Outside always won.

My bicycle was usually somewhere nearby. Sometimes upright. Sometimes abandoned in a pile of weeds where I’d left it the previous evening. The condition of the bike rarely affected the adventure.

Children possess a remarkable ability to ignore inconvenience.

A flat tire simply meant walking.

A broken chain meant exploring closer to home.

And no bicycle at all meant there were still perfectly good feet attached to the bottom of my legs.

The neighborhood itself was a map of possibilities.

Yards blended into other yards.

Fences were suggestions.

Tree lines marked transitions into entirely different worlds.

There wasn’t a fence I wouldn’t climb.

A creek I wouldn’t cross.

A hedgerow I wouldn’t push through.

The hedgerows fascinated me.

Most adults viewed them as boundaries.

I viewed them as invitations.

You couldn’t see through them very well.

That’s what made them interesting.

Some were tangled walls of thorn bushes.

Others were overgrown property lines forgotten by time and maintenance.

Every one of them concealed something.

A field.

A trail.

An abandoned structure.

A creek.

A view.

Or sometimes absolutely nothing at all.

But you couldn’t know until you pushed through.

That seemed like a worthwhile trade.

I tore a lot of clothes.

Mom hated that.

At least I assume she did.

I don’t remember the speeches.

I remember the patches.

My jeans were a constantly evolving collection of repairs. Knees disappeared. Elbows frayed. Seams surrendered.

The patches remained.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure whether they were sewn on or ironed on.

What I do know is that the patches consistently outlived the original clothing.

Entire sections of denim would disintegrate while the patch remained perfectly intact.

Like a tiny monument to previous mistakes.

Or previous adventures.

Depending on your perspective.

The funny thing is that I never associated damage with failure.

A torn pair of jeans simply meant the day had been interesting.

Somewhere during those years a dog appeared.

Not our dog.

Just a dog.

At least that’s how it started.

One day he was there.

The next day he was there again.

Then eventually he became part of the landscape.

Years later I learned he was an Italian Shepherd.

At the time, he looked like what every dog should look like.

Large.

Confident.

Friendly.

The kind of dog who seemed to assume the world would work itself out.

We named him Cujo.

None of us had seen the movie.

The name simply sounded appropriate for a large dog.

Fortunately, the dog himself was considerably kinder than his namesake.

For a while he became my shadow.

Or perhaps I became his.

It’s hard to know.

Every morning I’d carry out whatever breakfast I could spare.

Sometimes toast.

Sometimes scraps.

Sometimes things that probably shouldn’t have been considered breakfast for either of us.

He accepted everything with equal gratitude.

There is something deeply reassuring about an animal that never asks where you’ve been or what you’ve accomplished.

He simply seemed happy that I existed.

And that we were heading somewhere.

Children need more of that than adults realize.

The adventures themselves were rarely remarkable.

Fields.

Creeks.

Woods.

Abandoned places.

The occasional discovery that felt enormous at the time and impossible to explain later.

What made them memorable wasn’t where we went.

It was that we went.

Together.

Then one day he disappeared.

Not dramatically.

Not tragically.

Just gone.

Weeks later I saw him again.

Walking with another family.

His actual family, as it turned out.

He wagged his tail.

I waved.

Then both of us continued on with our lives.

At the time, that seemed perfectly normal.

Only years later did I realize how strange it was.

No tears.

No heartbreak.

No ownership.

No betrayal.

Just gratitude for the season we happened to share.

A lesson I wouldn’t fully understand until much later.

We did have a family dog.

Her name was Daisy.

And Daisy was nothing like Cujo.

Cujo wandered.

Daisy worked.

Cujo belonged to nobody.

Daisy belonged entirely to her purpose.

She spent most of her life outdoors.

At the time that seemed normal too.

Today it feels different.

Memory has a way of revising our understanding without changing the facts.

What I remember most clearly is hunting season.

Daisy transformed during hunting season.

The gentle dog who spent most of the year standing quiet watch over an indifferent family suddenly became something else entirely.

Focused.

Alert.

Certain.

She could find rabbits the way musicians hear notes other people miss.

Like she’d tapped into a frequency unavailable to the rest of us.

A rabbit would bolt.

She’d give chase.

Then stop.

Look back.

Make sure I was still there.

Only then continue.

We hunted together.

Or at least I thought we did.

Looking back, Daisy did the hunting.

I mostly carried the equipment and tried to keep up.

After a successful shot she’d sit beside the rabbit with visible pride.

Not possessive.

Proud.

As if she’d completed her portion of a partnership.

As if she understood the assignment.

Perhaps she did.

Many adults spend their lives searching for purpose.

Daisy seemed born knowing hers.

The years passed that way.

Wandering.

Climbing.

Crossing.

Discovering.

Getting lost.

Finding my way home.

The boundaries that mattered most weren’t fences.

They were times.

Streetlights.

Dinner.

The sound of a parent’s voice calling your name from a porch.

Every adventure eventually ended.

Every expedition eventually returned.

Every wandering path curved back toward home.

Or at least that’s what I believed.

Back then I thought the hedgerows were obstacles.

Things to push through.

Things standing between me and whatever waited on the other side.

Years later I began to wonder if they had been teaching me something else entirely.

Maybe boundaries aren’t there to stop us.

Maybe they’re there to reveal us.

You don’t learn much about yourself walking open roads.

You learn about yourself when something blocks the way.

A thorn bush.

A fence.

A locked door.

A difficult season.

A painful truth.

A loss.

A fear.

Something that forces a decision.

Turn back.

Go around.

Or push through.

As a child I pushed through almost everything.

I emerged scratched, dirty, occasionally bleeding, and usually smiling.

I didn’t know it then, but those little journeys through the hedgerows were teaching me a lesson that would take decades to understand.

The strongest boundaries aren’t the ones that never move.

They’re the ones that survive contact with reality.

The ones that bend without breaking.

The ones that adapt.

The ones that endure.

And somewhere beneath all those scratches, patches, dogs, woods, and wandering days, the first ember of that understanding was already glowing.

I just hadn’t learned how to see it yet.