A.Rose J.ourney
by Ashley R. Johnson

 Eggs
Canopy of green. Chlorophyll is splattered against the sky, the color of phosphorescent skin gently stretched between veins. The verdant shades change with the layers of leaves. The ragged edges of one leaf overlaps another. The shadows are shifting. Vitality rains down.

As I stand beneath the green rain canopy, the maple, oak, and beech leaves are changing shapes. Their edges soften; they become ovular. The branches lower around me and the sky deepens to a shade of dark driftwood. The trunks merge and become the walls of a chicken coop. There is a roof above me and the branches are nesting boxes. To my right is a twisted roost. The coop is empty; there is no sound.

As dark as a summer night, I can only sense the square openings and smell the dusty, wholesome aroma of hay that welcomes me. I stretch my arm out, fingers seeking the smoothed edges and corners of the wood. A dry sprig of hay pricks my palm. My fingers brush something round, smooth, and warm. I draw it out. Then another, and another, until there is a mountain of luminescent eggs at my feet, each glowing, colored, patterned, and unique like snowflakes and autumn leaves. Each emits a voice that does not speak. I listen to the chatter, the rumbles, the high, low, and medium pitched vocals.

I pick the top egg and it becomes a volcano. Lightning magma ripples across its surface in my cupped palms.

The beginning of the story about me

Mom sits in a chair at the child-care center where she works. It is a year after my parents divorced. I am three.

"Alright, guys, we're going to sing Ratlin Bog!" She smiles and her guitar hums. An E-major chord resonates, creating invisible colors and delicious tastes for our ears.

The group of children gathers closer. Her thin, throaty voice rings,

"Rare bog, a Ratlin bog
         A bog down in the Valley-O
                   Rare bog, a Ratlin Bog
                           A bog down in the Valley-O.."

As we race through the verses we sing increasingly faster. The music resonates with our hearts, our child souls.

"Here we go, the last verse!"

We all chime, "And on that Flea there was a Germ,
A rare Germ, a Ratlin Germ.

We scrunch up our faces like a sea of corkscrews, as if we feel personally offended by the germ.

"Take a deep breath! Ready?"

We nod and suck the air deep into our bellies. Mom looks around, smiling, and
"Germ on the Flea
And the Flea on the Feather
And the Feather on the Bird (faster)
Bird in the Nest (faster!)
Nest on the Leaf
Leaf on the Twig
Twig on the Branch (a tornado unwinds.)
Branch on the Limb
Limb on the Tree (we are tumbling down a mountain)
Tree in the Bog
And the Bog down in the Valley-O! (gasp for breath!
Rare Bog, a Ratlin bog
         A bog down in the Valley-O,
                         Rare Bog, a Ratlin bog
                                 A bog down in the Valley-O!"

In this way I learned that we are all connected. The land to the animals to the people. In this way I learned about love and music and light, about human gifts to the world. If the song were to go on, we all would be included. Rare Ratlin creatures, unique and bright with life.

In the Grainroom
It is dark but for the light that shines through the slats on the wall. The room is small, dirty, and dusty. The smell of grain is strong-that thick, musty, oaty smell. It fills my nostrils and I stand on the concrete block and feed cans to reach the light switch. The floor is wooden and smoothed by years of dirt and manure-caked boots, covered with old barrels and stuff my Dad refuses to throw away. Plastic-woven feed bags hang on the wall, along with baling twine.

From the barn I hear chickens clucking, squawking, crowing, scratching at the dirt with their three-pronged yellow scaly feet. They are Rhode Island Reds and white meatbirds. One of the Reds is a mean Rooster with a lame foot. The toes are turned in and he can't spread them and pull them together like other chickens can.

I step onto the cinder block in front of the cow's feed barrel. It is far taller than I am. Excitement bubbles from my toes; will there be a mouse today? I have to take the heavy metal cover off the old barrel before I look. If there is a mouse I will run and tell Dad, scattering chickens on the way and steering through the grass and clover and miniature daisies that smell like musky lemon when you crush them between your fingers.

There is the high-pitched hollow knock of footsteps on the home-made floor. Robbie's Reeboks are as brown as the cow patties we leap in the pasture. We don't speak; we have played this game before. He peers over my shoulder.

"I dare you to eat it," He says.

"But that's June's grain," I reply.

"So?"

"You do it."

"I've already eaten the dog food."

I believe him but I say, "Na-ah"

"Yeah-huh," he grins.

"Na-ah"

He tries another track. "Guess what?"

"What?"

"Chicken-butt!"

The mouse on the grain is soft and furry and scared. It doesn't realize when it smells food that it might not get back out again.

Chicks
Sometimes chicken eggs crack before the chick is ready. Sometimes the babies are born and they drown in a puddle or water dish. Sometimes they grow and peep and bloom into mature birds, as unique as the patterns on their egg shells.

My Natural Home
Before Europeans arrived in America , there were native tribes. In Maine , the Micmacs lived near the ocean coast and the Penobscots lived near the river. There were forests, wetlands, lakes, rivers, and islands; land without roads, houses, or bridges. The area was wild.

I come from the lowland between the ocean and the mountain range, on the bay of the river Penobscot. The land is hilly, forested in evergreens-balsam fir, hackmatack, cat spruce, black spruce, white, jack, and red pines, Northern white cedar, Eastern hemlock-and deciduous trees-red, sugar, and mountain maple, yellow, paper, and gray birch, white ash, green ash, bigtooth and quaking aspen, pin cherry, black cherry, white oak, Northern red oak, black willow, American mountain ash, and poplar.

Deer, raccoons, foxes, wolves, coyotes, muskrats, weasles, mink, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, badgers, porcupines, beavers, rabbits, skunks, bobcats, black bears, and moose range through the forests. Salmon, whales, porpoises, harbour seals, and lobster live off the coast. The freshwater lakes and streams harbor other species of fish-rainbow, brook, and lake trout, bass, yellow perch-and frogs and other amphibians. The reptiles-snakes-live inland. Insects abound. Biodiversity is alive and well and the animals keep populations in check.

Buff
Buff is my prize cochin . He is a bantam, or miniature chicken. Three scaly claws protrude from his bronze robe. His tail is rounded, a poof of bronze feathers.

When we met, he was a stud.

"Do you want to see how we inseminate the hens?" Buff's owner picks him up and turns him over. His wings are splayed and his head is cocked. He clucks. The man holds him by his chicken ankles and squeezes a patch of skin with the other hand. Even so, Buff is amiable. The semen seeps out, and the man collects it. He rubs the white stuff on the tail feathers of a hen and the job is done.

Gross.

Buff rides home in a pet carrier. He clucks, burbles, and gurgles. At home he will have his own pen in the chicken coop. It is a small wire cage, but he is used to small spaces.

I take him out to play. He waddles like a toddler, feathers shining and ruffled in the Spring breeze. I watch him on the grass as he chuckles and clucks amiably. Peck. His beak is the color of nude stockings, or sand. He has a small red comb the color of a robin's breast. Buff doesn't mind being patted or picked up.

It is late August at the Blue Hill Fair. The judge walks around, carefully scrutinizing the show birds. Buff's toenails are clipped for the occasion. The man reaches into the cage. Cradles him for a moment. He pulls out a wing, checking the feathers. He turns Buff upside down. When I return, a big, shiny, blue ribbon is pinned to his cage. I grin at him. He clucks when I pick him up.

A year passes. Buff, my beautiful bronze sumo-chicken doesn't move as much as he used to. I don't take him out to play as often. I change his water and feed him as usual. I return the next day, and the next. He seems to shiver, hunched in a corner, eyes half-shut. He doesn't move when I open the door.

"Mom, I think there's something wrong with Buff." I am afraid. I know I haven't taken as good care of him as I should have. I ignored the symptoms. I ran from the thoughts that scared me, accused me, made me guilty.

"Pick him up and check him for worms." There is a tone in her voice. She sees that he doesn't move but to blink his eyes slowly, lethargically. She sees how he shrinks in his metal cage.

It is my fault. I have to face it. Him. I pick him up, gingerly and by the sides because I am afraid of what is underneath him. I turn him over. His feet hardly protest.

A pink, wriggling mass. This is worms. This is death.

My mom and I do all we can. We put him on the floor in the dirt; this is how regular chickens would keep themselves clean of parasites. He doesn't move. I try to push him, to move him in the dust. He doesn't have the strength.

The next day, he is where I left him. His eyes don't open.

We bury him behind a small cedar bush. I dig the hole. The ground is hard. The grave is not very deep.

I visit him, talk to the friend I neglected. Cry because he could have lived.

The third time I visited Buff's grave, he was gone. The earth was scattered and scratched around the hole I had covered. A few bronze feathers glimmered dull in the cold sunlight.

I am angry, upset. He shouldn't be taken. He should be in his grave, untouched, unmolested! But winter is a harsh season.

"He probably became food for another animal. It's natural, sweetie. It's a cycle."

I imagine a fox, the wild red beauty, carrying away his frozen body. She delivers him to her pups. It is okay.

There is a cycle here, and also a lesson. There is beauty in life, and beauty in death. In death, our energy is dispersed in the form of food or the passing energy, electrons to the air, the ground, whatever we touch. For others, those left "alive," there is more life to be lived. More smiles and laughter. While the chickens cluck and the foxes yowl and play. Energy is passed on.

Fledging
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.

From: Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day by Anne Bronte

The Cave
In a room. It is cold, moist, and dark. The basement allows two rectangular windows, eight by eighteen inches. They don't open. The tiles are cold on my eleven year-old feet. It is the floor of a cave facing North. It is littered with clothing and school papers-a normal teenager's room.

I am on a rare expedition to this cave, the depth of the small ranch house. Robbie's room is separate from the rest.

My brother was changing. He listened to alternative rock, he hated reading. He got taller and stopped going to boyscouts. Some of his old friends made fun of him.

Musty clothes. Stuffy room. Molting teenager.

I am sitting on his floor, I don't remember why. "Why do you listen to different music?" I can't help but ask. I hate change. His new alternative rock plays on the stereo.

"I changed. People change." His answer is simple and kind. I think he likes having me for a little sister.

But change scares me.

I retreat from the room, not sure who my brother is or what is in store for me.

I listen to the Beatles. I listen to Oldies 95.7, like my Dad. I read books. And then more books. I live books, breathe stories and adventures and school.

It will be one year before Robbie moves permanently from my mother's house of rules and restrictions to my father's house where expectations are unspoken, unknown. Two years before I learn that he has a drug stash in the woods. Three before he will drop out of high school. Five years before he will lose his license for the second time. Six years before he earns his GED, with some of the highest scores the teachers have seen.

Robbie still lives in a cave, but he also sees sunshine, feels the breeze on his gaunt face. He has seen more of the "real working world" than I may ever see, but he is still trapped, held back by something. He is twenty-one and has a child on the way, with a girl I have never met. I feel like I don't know him very well. Though we've lived in the same house for the past five years, we hardly talked. And yet we do care about each other.

Cells and Souls
There is a summer, wild and free. I see the grassy meadow, and see the jumpers in the grass, golden. The grass is never young, it comes back year after year, always growing or sleeping, housing insects, rodents, and birds. The tall slender stalks sway; beautiful and majestic.

Beatrice
All I need is some chalk. I know Dad has some that he used when I was younger to sketch plays for the JV girls soccer team. I set down my fragmented brick and pull out his desk drawers, rummage through the papers, pencils, and old rubber bands. Not there.

With the brick I scamper down the stairs and run outside to the shed, the storage room that could have been a garage. The open wall is covered by a huge sheet of plastic burlap and the frayed edges poke me as I lift the corner and crawl in. Cool darkness consoles me as I search, frantic to find the last necessity for Beatrice. The dirt floor is littered with rusted machinery, boxes, my old bike, signs, and sheets of wood. I pick my way through the decaying anthropomorphic briar patch to the tall red toolbox with silver stripes. I pull open the top shelf. No chalk. The next shelf. The next.

All I need is some chalk. I look at my brick, the reddish-brown clay with small air pockets, once a rectangle, is now the perfect size for a miniature gravestone. The sunlight that permeates the plastic burlap is just enough to show me the last drawer and a chipped piece of yellow chalk.

The spade is where I left it, in the rich soil behind the fir trees and in front of the leaning pasture fence. Green raspberry trunks and wild strawberry flowers peer at me while I heave the small spade into the earth and mound the dark dirt next to the grave.

My eyes seek the sky, azure infinity, dotted with misshapen cotton balls. I feel the sun that penetrates the evergreen canopy. The soft, crumbly, moist soil and the stones and wild shrubbery roots dig into my knees. Dad's tractor rumbles and roars in the garden. The jaundiced chalk leaves dust in the pores of my finger tips.

"Here lies Beatrice," and I shimmy the sharp edge of the brick into the ground beside the hole.

I place the broken, punctured rat into the grave with my spade. I don't want to touch her intestines. There is no stopping four cats from killing the rats and mice on the farm.

I don't need to put a flower on her grave. There are overhanging emerald toothed raspberry leaves and tiny wildflowers near the soil but I pick one anyway, a delicate creamy strawberry blossom. There is something about honoring the dead body that I cannot escape.

What the Wetland Teaches Us
I had never seen a wetland before. Never felt the cool squish of silt between my toes, the suction to my flip-flops. I'd never seen a black racer wind through the grasses and water that creates a low layer of ground cover. The wetland teaches me that there is always more to discover.

The wetland is a habitat humans can't use in its natural state. Maybe that is why it seems so wild. People can't build houses there and walk on water. And so the wetland exists for itself. The plants and animals live just because. They are alive. They live.

The wetland's beauty is measured by biodiversity, life, coexistence, birth and death, just being . There is no "pretend" there, no striving to earn money or look "pretty." There is only existence, bare and naked.

Home
It is hard to imagine my home without a house, without a town, without roads and bridges and vehicles. But I'd like to. I'd like to remember that there were creatures before us who roamed wild and free.

I call the land "brr-ooh-haaah-ah" for the four seasons. Five months of snow and shivering long nights become the new, young vitality and life that accompanies the rising temperatures and longer days. Then comes the hot season, when shade and cool lakes are happily found, and the sun is at its peak in the sky. The last is the season of relaxing cool crisp air and fiery orange, red, and yellow leaves that drift to the ground. When the fall becomes winter again, the leaves decompose under the wet snow. The soil is renewed of nutrients to sustain the temperate and evergreen forests and their creatures.

Assimilation
"Dolphin Cove, Key Largo FL ," my shirt reads in cracked white block letters. I found it on the free table, my college's version of free Goodwill. I like it because it's baggy, teal, faded, and there's a cute dolphin on the back.

When I was five I went to Mount St. Helens in Washington State . It was really big.

In Indonesia , Mount Merapi residents are evacuating to save their lives.

I remember a stuffed animal I had-a grey-blue bottle-nosed dolphin with a cream stripe. It accompanies the smell of the heater next to my frame-less bed and the home-made cedar dollhouse.

Energy = h (Planck's constant = 6.63 x 10^-23) x v (wavelength = speed of light divided by frequency which is measured in s^-1). Energy is measured in kJ. Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

For four years in a row, July fourth equaled fire-works. Bursts of color, chemical reactions, electromagnetic waves rending the air; cracking, exploding, sparkling shimmers and images into the warm dark night. Radioactive fireflies that wink out of existence, their lives so short because they spend so much energy to provide us with light.

Eggs are in every organism, from plants to humans to chickens. Placental magma spilling through the cracks, nourishing yoke, sparkling river.

The smell of cookies, salt water, snow, cedar.

The eggs at my feet are a mound of cracked eggshells now, but I know there are more in the wooden boxes. The stars peep out of the ceiling above. The roosts morph into branches, stretching and reaching to their parent trunks. Limbs, roots, and finally leaves extend from the tree. Chlorophyll spreads over me and the heavens become a transparent verdant canvas through which glimmers the moon, the glowing orb, the candle burning for creatures as unique and numerous as the stars in the infinite universe.

Ashley Johnson is a second-year student at New College of Florida . She is planning to concentrate in environmental studies/sciences and writing. Ashley is interested in how the world moves and life at all levels. When she grows up, she wants to attend graduate school for a degree in education and/or journalism and writing.

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