Winter On The Escalade Hills

Winter On The Escalade Hills

By Paul McCann

Life in the winter around the Escalade Hills filled our heads with colour , We skipped along over the cracks that opened up in our minds and slid on our hunkers down and around the bends on the cushions of our soul looking at the corners where questions begged for answers but we never gave them the time of day because we were just living in moments of wonder caught between reality and dreamland .

We were as slippery as cat's on an icy roof .

For most of us living in wonder time you had to close your eyes and hold on tight and ride out the miles day after day on fairy horses where the sun shone down in the winter on the escalade hills .

We were the wonder kids who liked to run and play dressed up in our invisible cloaks . We could walk on air as free as the wind that rushed through our hair and none of us cared for an explanation of why it was or what we did everyday .’

We always seemed to find games like hide and seek but no one ever found us there on our fairy horses galloping over the Escalade hills . We were bent over in buckles of laughter with saddle bags full of dream strawberry seeds that we tossed with our hands to the wind that scattered them here , there and everywhere as we galloped over the Escalade Hills ,

Sometimes we heard the sound of the seed popping and then in that moment we saw dream strawberries bursting out of the ground in clumps as our ears watched silently as time passed through our eyes as we spoke to the fairy folk all about the secrets we had seen in the land of dream strawberries .

As children we refused to grow up and no matter how hard we tried we could never say goodbye to our childhood days because we were happy to stay there as long as we liked and as often as we could .

The hands of time stopped and started to go backwards as we went head first down the slide through the long shadowy tunnels of winter before spring came to turn our heads away from the snowy hills that kept us in convulsions in the winter around the Escalade Hills .

The End